NAPLES, Fla. — Angel Yin, one of professional golf’s most perky souls, says she felt like she was being put to sleep, though the sedative most certainly wasn’t her golf, nor the golf course she was playing.
It was the effort being put forth by some other folks, whose names she safely kept hidden, but it’s OK to say they made viewing blades of grass sprouting up beneath her a more lively game.
Yes, the subject here is slow play, whose name mostly tells you everything: Play is slow — and that can frustrate. It came to light last weekend, at the LPGA’s Annika tournament, where the golf bogged down, rounds stretched well past five hours, pros battled darkness — and Charley Hull, a victim and not a perpetrator, went viral with some of her thoughts on the matter.
“It was crazy,” she began. “I’m quite ruthless, but I said, listen, if you get three bad timings, — every time it’s a two-shot penalty — if you have three of them, you lose your tour card instantly; go back to Q-School. I’m sure that would hurry a lot of people up and they won’t want to lose their tour card.
“It’s ridiculous and I feel sorry for the fans how slow it is out there,” she said. “We were out there for five hours and 40 minutes yesterday. We play a four-ball at home, on a hard golf course, and we’re round in three and a half, four hours.
Of course, this is nothing new. You’ve read about this before. It’s raised on both the women’s tours and the men’s tours. There are fines and stroke penalties, too, but here we are. At this point, you could maybe call it just SP and people would know what you were inferring. So you then wonder: How, again, hasn’t this been solved?
Leave a Reply