PEBBLE BEACH, Calif. — Dottie Pepper certainly wasn’t the first to say it, but her words on the CBS broadcast at Torrey Pines resonated as players finished the final round Saturday in five hours and 31 minutes. The remarks and the exhaustion in her voice carried weight. Viewers felt seen.
“I think we’re starting to need a new word to talk about this pace-of-play issue, and it’s ‘respect’ — for your fellow competitors, for the fans, for broadcasts, for all of it. It’s just got to get better,” Pepper said, walking as a roving commentator during the Farmers Insurance Open in her familiar role.
There always seems to be an inflection point each professional golf season, during which the slow play problem dominates the discourse on the PGA Tour. The issue isn’t a new one. It’s an age-old problem in the pro game. Everyone knows it: Golf can crawl.
But at a time when the professional game is already in flux in many ways, a different force is emerging behind the debate. There’s a new tension — one between the player and the viewer — that’s adding a layer to the slow play discussion. But perhaps that tension can make the solution to the problem clearer than ever.
Golf audiences are watching TGL’s shot-clock tick down from 40 to zero on Monday and Tuesday nights in prime time, with a pulsing heartbeat sound adding to the effect. That same viewer then turns on their TV on Sunday to tournament leaders teeing off at 2 p.m., and their 7 p.m. dinner reservation is suddenly in jeopardy.
When Rickie Fowler, Xander Schauffele and Matt Fitzpatrick — three-quarters of New York Golf Club — were asked about which element of TGL they’d like to see implemented in pro golf, they practically recited the words “shot clock” in unison. They’re not alone. Players are largely unsatisfied with the pace on tour.
But at the same time, PGA Tour pros are realists. They’re aware of the intricacies of playing at an elite level, and they’re quick to come to its defense. Playing in 40 mph winds on a nearly 8,000-yard Torrey Pines and walking off the course to see golf fans criticizing slow play elicits an instinctual reaction.
“They want golf to be as hard as possible for us, but then they want us to play as quick as we can. I don’t think you can have both,” Shane Lowry said in between shots on the driving range ahead of this week’s AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.
Players want things to start moving, but they also want PGA Tour fans to know there’s more to this issue than “hurry up and play faster.” Yardages are being pushed to their limits to mitigate distance gains on tour, making long courses with firm and fast conditions, and smaller greens a necessity for higher scores. Threesomes and split-tees on Sundays are required during the winter with limited daylight. PGA Tour players are hitting shots for their livelihoods. They’re trained to emphasize their pre-shot routines to feel committed to every shot. All of these factors individually, let alone the combination of all of them at once, will slow down pro golf. So, what’s the solution? The MLB implemented a pitch clock in 2023. Can TGL, which has a 40-second shot clock that mirrors the USGA policy on pace of play, inspire golf to do the same?
“The people that are comparing TGL and the shot clocks, that’s ridiculous,” Justin Thomas says. “There’s no component to TGL that requires the same amount of thought. When you’re literally looking at a screen, you have the distance; you don’t have to walk any yardages. Yeah, it’s important and we want to win, but (the PGA Tour) is our job. I hate the comparison in that aspect. I do think something needs to get a little bit better, but it’s also a very hard thing to do.”
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Shot clock aside, the colossal project of addressing slow play in a real way seems to be underway with a new sense of urgency, and it’s coming from within the PGA Tour. The tour’s newest research effort — dubbed “Fan Forward” — points to a faster pace of play as one of the two changes fans are demanding, the other being broadcast enhancements. Tour leadership shared the initial results of that research, as well as ongoing experimentation for how to approach the pace problem, with the media Wednesday at Pebble Beach.
A few key points stood out: The tour will begin testing how the use of rangefinders can affect pace of play on the PGA Tour in 2025, at a few specific events — April’s Zurich Classic was thrown out as a possibility. The idea is that players who are out of position might be able to use distance measuring devices to get back into the flow of the hole quicker, rather than creating a backup on the course.
There’s also an active discussion around the possibility of disclosing each player’s average stroke time and increasing transparency around slow play fines — public shaming, if you will.
“Traditionally, that’s not been something we’ve done, but that’s something that we’re going to take a hard look at,” PGA Tour chief competitions officer Tyler Dennis said.
It’s something, tour officials noted, not uncommon with other pro sports, but golfers have enjoyed secrecy around fines. A committee of three players — Sam Burns, Jhonattan Vegas and Adam Schenk — has been assigned to tackle the slow play issue.
Rangefinders could be part of the solution to speeding up play. (Patrick Smith / Getty Images)The idea is that those potential developments could work in concert with a change that’s already set to take effect in 2026: Field sizes on the PGA Tour will shrink across the board, in the hopes that on-course traffic will lessen. The PGA Tour is adamant that players are buying in to progress on the slow play front like they’ve never seen before.
“There are players whose routines are longer than they need to be,” Gary Young, SVP of rules and competition, says. “We’re at the point in time where guys are admitting that.”
Said Wyndham Clark: “I wouldn’t be opposed to a shot clock; I’m a fast player. I would love if the tour did forward thinking instead of some reactive thinking and said, ‘You know what, let’s try to be the best we can in the next 10, 20 years, and let’s do something unique and new and try to really bring that fan engagement back to professional golf.’”
In practice, though, that underlying tension is still there. We’re dealing with professional athletes in an individual sport that requires a certain level of selfishness. They’ll always have their best interests in mind. The idea of a disconnect existing between fans and players on slow play — with the added insight that the tour is actively investigating how to approach this — just makes a potential fix abundantly clear. Player behavior is only going to change so much on its own accord. The PGA Tour has to put its foot down.
“When you get on the clock or you get behind, all of a sudden those players start speeding up and getting quicker,” Thomas says. “It’s like, obviously you can do it.”
When Lowry plays competitively on the Europe-based DP World Tour, he notices a stark difference: Rules officials are much more likely to put groups on the clock. If play is just as slow, if not slower, on the PGA Tour, why don’t the same rules apply?
“They probably don’t want to piss the players off,” the Irishman says.
The PGA Tour has a decision to make: Force players to speed up with some tough love or leave its fans and their consistent complaints in the dust. All signs point to a choice being imminent.
(Illustration: Demetrius Robinson / The Athletic; Photos: Brian Rothmuller / Icon Sportswire, Ryan Lochhead / PGA of America, Cliff Hawkins and Carmen Mandato / TGL Golf, Andrew Redington / Getty Images, Trinity Machan / Icon Sportswire)