Professional golf’s slooooowwwwww play problem
Fans want pro golf to move faster, but for the PGA Tour and LPGA Tour, there’s no quick fix.
June 28, 2025 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
By
Gene Wang and
Rick Maese
At the Women’s PGA Championship last week, the heat index reached triple digits, wind gusts blew at more than 30 mph — and some rounds lasted an outlandish six hours. It left the best players in the world fuming and flummoxed and again spotlighted the problem of slow play in golf, an issue that has plagued both the men’s and women’s tours in recent years.
The glacial pace of play on a wicked layout at Field Ranch East at PGA Frisco near Dallas was a talking point throughout the weekend, in some ways overshadowing Minjee Lee’s third major championship, and the conversation continued during tournament recaps on the “Golf Channel” and other outlets. The unflattering coverage had analysts blasting an overly penal course setup that yielded endless rounds in what was supposed to be a showcase event for the sport.
“We played [as a twosome] in like six hours. That’s just a little ridiculous, but what can you do?” world No. 1 Nelly Korda, one of the LPGA Tour’s fastest players, said after a round that required more than three hours to play the front nine. “We’ve had lots of situations in the past, like, year where we’ve had to wait a long time, so unfortunately kind of used to it, which you don’t want to be used to it, especially in a two-ball Saturday of a major.”
Interminable stoppages during the third of five major women’s championships came less than three weeks after concerns over slow play compelled officials at the U.S. Women’s Open to move up final round tee times by an hour to ensure the final groups would not outlast the allotted broadcast window
as they had the previous day.
The men’s game has dealt with similar problems. PGA Tour players have grumbled about pace of play for years, and fans have taken notice. Last year, the tour launched a Fan Forward initiative, surveying 50,000 golf enthusiasts, and identified slow play as an urgent issue.
The tour didn’t wait until the lull between seasons to tinker with new initiatives and started testing some measures this year. Officials report golf rounds this season on tour are about five minutes faster than last year.
Still, at the men’s U.S. Open two weeks ago, a star-studded group comprising world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, two-time major winner Collin Morikawa and world No. 10 Viktor Hovland
needed 71 minutes to play the first three holes during the second round at unforgiving Oakmont Country Club near Pittsburgh.
“It’s important to say that we don’t have a target number or something. That’s not the focus,” said Tyler Dennis, the PGA Tour’s chief competitions officer. “… This was one of the very most important things to fans, so it’s worth the effort. We’ve had all the data. We have a lot of smart people thinking about it, but there’s no one thing you’re going to put your finger on and go, ‘Wow, that’s the panacea for this.’ It’s a very multidimensional thing.”
Under the PGA Tour’s policy, the first player to shoot has 50 seconds. The other players have 40 seconds. If a player exceeds that time, the tournament official issues a warning. An ensuing infraction would then result in a one-stroke penalty. No PGA Tour player has been penalized for slow play this year, and none has faced any penalty since 2017.
The tour has been closely monitoring revised pace of play rules on its Latin American tour and on the Korn Ferry Tour, one step down from the PGA Tour. Under the new rules, players are assessed a one-stroke penalty for a “bad time” infraction, two strokes for a second offense and disqualification for a third.
The Korn Ferry started testing the policy in April and through eight events had one “bad time” infraction. In those same events last season, there were 10 such offenses, though without the steep penalty, and PGA Tour officials said the revised policy is acting as an immediate deterrent.
“There’s no doubt about it that the warnings themselves, when a referee goes out to warn a group, it’s carrying a lot more weight‚” said Gary Young, the PGA Tour’s senior vice president of rules and competitions. “... Obviously there’s a sense of urgency that’s developed on the player behavior side. They do not want to get on the clock, and if they are on the clock, they want to get off the clock as quick as possible.”
Those policy and punishments are not in effect on the PGA Tour, but the circuit’s Player Advisory Council is expected to discuss the matter when it meets later this summer. Such a punitive policy would be sure to ruffle some feathers, although plenty of players have been pleading for action.
“You just have to start [administering stroke penalties] and giving guys actual penalties, whether it be strokes or FedExCup [points],” Morikawa told reporters this year. “What I’ve learned is that monetary fines are useless. We make so much money, and some guys frankly couldn’t care less about — I don’t know how much the fines are, but whatever X amount they are — and I think they care more about playing good golf and making sure they make the playoffs and making sure they make, you know, [the top] 70, 50, 30. That’s where it hits hard.”
On the LPGA side, administrators updated the policy this year designed to expedite play, at the urging of players. Under the new rules, a player is to be fined for eclipsing her allotted time on a hole by one to five seconds, issued a one-stroke penalty for six to 15 seconds over and deducted two strokes for a delay of 16 seconds or longer.
The provisions went into effect March 27 at the Ford Championship.
LPGA Tour players typically are granted 40 seconds to hit, but under the previous rules, the first player to hit at any hole was allowed an extra 10 seconds. The new policy permits an extra 10 seconds only to the first player to hit on a par-3. At all other holes, players are required to hit within 40 seconds.
Women’s PGA Championship officials have not addressed publicly what measures, if any, they undertook to mitigate the interminable pace of play during last week’s tournament, in which only Lee and two others finished below par.
“Yeah, it was pretty crazy,” said England’s Charley Hull, among the most fervent advocates for fast play. “We were playing two balls … and it took us 3 hours and 10 minutes to play nine holes, which is pretty crazy. We play a four-ball at home in like three hours, you know what I mean, with bogeys and stuff.”
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