The United States Golf Association’s “While We’re Young” ads were well done. However, there also are a bit of a joke.
How can the USGA tell the rest of the golf world to speed up play when the players at the U.S. Open moved slower than Chicago traffic in rush hour?
The final group (Phil Mickelson, Luke Donald, Bill Horschel) on Saturday took nearly 5 hours, 30 minute to complete their round. I know it’s the U.S. Open; it was threesomes; and the conditions were brutally hard.
But 5 hours, 30 minutes? It took them 2:50 to play the front 9. Ridiculous. Hey, it’s not as if the three players were scrambling to break 100.
I only wish Rodney Dangerfield were there to yell, “While we’re young.”
John Huggan wrote at GolfDigest.com:
On a course where they had thousands of ball-spotters on hand, three world-class golfers took an average of almost 20 minutes to complete every hole. To all of which there is only one conclusion: at least in terms of encouraging a reasonable pace of play, something is wrong with the way Merion has been set up and, by extension, the USGA’s warped view of how golf should be played. The message emanating from Far Hills, New Jersey is not “While We’re Young,” but “Do as we say, not do as we do.”
Later, Huggan added:
Throw in the fact that no professional on the PGA Tour has been penalized for slow play since Tim Finchem took over as executive director and it is clear that there is little or no enthusiasm for addressing this long-running (make that “long-crawling”) problem. So pardon me if I view this latest initiative with an appropriate amount of cynicism.
For some reason, the TV networks allow the slow-play parade to occur during big tournaments because it continues to fester. If they are complaining to Finchem and the USGA, they aren’t doing it loud enough.
In my view, slow golf makes for bad golf on TV. How many movies have you seen that would have been good at two hours, but were terrible at three hours?
Rounds that last 5 hours, 30 minutes become tedious affairs. The hardcore fans will tune in, but I am sure the networks lose casual fans who become bored by the lack of activity.
Publicly, network executives continue to say they don’t have an issue with pace of pro on the pro tours. Privately, though, I have heard they are lobbying top golf officials about the need to pick things up.
I’d like to say it will get done sooner than later, but as we’ve seen, nothing moves fast these days at the top tiers of golf.
