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Hands on his hips, typically feisty Rory Sabbatini appeared ready to engage in verbal battle. Instead, he merely exhaled, a beaten man.
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| Ben Crane accepts it good naturedly, but he has become a poster boy for slow play on the PGA Tour. (Getty Images) |
"Guys, I've said and done about all I care to say on that subject," said Sabbatini, who once upstaged a playing partner he believed was tarrying. "If they want to fix slow play, then do what the LPGA has done. Do it once and it's 'problem solved.'"
Evidence suggests he has a point, though he's over-simplifying the issue. The LPGA has done far more than assess two-shot penalties to slow players, implementing a series of hard-edged changes this year ranging from increased fines to dramatically altering the way players are put on the fabled clock.
In a video-game age in which the public attention span has grown shorter than the lines at a Hummer dealership, the pace of play in golf has slowed to the painful point where, if for no reason other than self-preservation, it required fast fixing. While the men have dawdled, the women have clearly moved to the fore for both practical and professional reasons.
"The game of golf has an issue with slow play and it's not just an LPGA issue," LPGA commissioner Carolyn Bivens said. "We struggled last year and missed a number of television windows. When you are where we are as a developing brand, you cannot leave fans hanging with your stars left to finish up holes."
Truer words have never passed over her lips. Except maybe for these: Tick, tick. Tisk, tisk.
"It was time for some changes," LPGA rules official Doug Brecht said, missing the fun in his pun.
Everybody from Tiger Woods on down this season has decried the lack of speed. PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem this month termed it a "complicated subject" for a variety of reasons, ranging from turbo-charged equipment, tougher courses and set-ups to annoying pre-shot patterns. Whatever the cause, professional play has often become glacial, across gender lines.
Yet, as noted by Sabbatini, the LPGA, unlike their male counterparts, has long been willing to drop penalties on snail-paced players in the heat of competition, assessing a two-shot sentence earlier this year to Angela Park in Hawaii, even though she was in contention in the final round. Upper-tier players such as Suzann Pettersen and Christina Kim have also been whacked by two-shot assessments over the past few years.
Beyond the LPGA circle, though, few realized at the time that the Park penalty was only the beginning. In the offseason, the 10-player LPGA executive committee, looked at a series of pace- and pulse-quickening proposals from Brecht and his staff and summarily shot him down.
But it was in a decidedly positive fashion. The committee wanted even harsher strictures put into place.
"They wanted it to be as tough as we could make it, with as much teeth as possible," said Jane Geddes, the tour's vice president of competition.
