On Sunday, Thailand’s Arpichaya Yubol lost the ShopRite LPGA by one shot to France’s Celine Boutier.
Somebody losing by one shot is extremely common in golf. It happens all the time.
However, what is a rarity in this case is that runner-up Arpichaya was assessed a one-shot penalty in the second round on Saturday – for slow play.
A 5-under-par 66 on Sunday helped her secure a second runners-up finish this year on the LPGA. The previous second place was last month in the Riviera Maya Open. But it could also have resulted in her maiden win on the LPGA, if not for the slow-play penalty.
It took me back a few years to a conversation with a Rules official on the DP World Tour, whose off-hand remark has stayed with me. Those were the days when the then European Tour was co-sanctioning a lot of events with the Asian Tour.
The Rules officials said that slow play was a major issue with most Asian players.
Years later, officials on the Tour still keep targeting Asian players – India’s Shubhankar Sharma and Malaysia’s Gavin Green often being chased and put on the clock.
Sharma was a slow player when he won twice on the Tour in the 2018 season. I still remember a conversation we had after his opening round at The Masters in 2018. He had paced about a 60-yard shot from the right rough to the green on the seventh hole, and I told him that walking and judging distance was something he’d have to delete from his system in the future.
However, I have seen him evolve into someone who is no longer slow. He still may not be the fastest player in the sport, but he now has a very decent pace of play.
Also, a few days ago, the Korn Ferry Tour became the first in the world to make public the Overall Speed of Play. It is the pilot of what’s to come on the entire PGA Tour in the future.
That list surprised me. The lone Indian on the KFT, Rayhan Thomas, was 115th in the list of 137 players. I have seen Rayhan play a lot, and he never appeared slow, except for sometimes on the tee, which I thought could be because of developing a driving yip earlier in his college years. I expected him to be in the 40th to 50th range.
While golfers want to be deliberate, thinking they have a better chance of scoring if they slow everything down, that’s not how things work. Because ball-striking is such an instinctive thing, it’s better not to let the mind wander. Several studies have been done that show the faster you play golf, the better you score.
In the earlier years of organised Indian professional golf, when I was working with the Tour, pace of play was always part of the discussions, but it did not really bother us much. Probably, one of the biggest reasons for that was the lack of live television and fans on the golf course. Since we were not bound by how much satellite time we had booked, events would finish in their own time.
The most popular method we used was to identify the really slow players, and either group them as a two-ball first out on the golf course, or pair them as a three-ball as the last flight out, and then pray that they came back home before the sun dipped in the horizon.
The PGTI, according to Board member Amardeep Malik, has become a lot better as an organisation over the past five years in hastening the pace. However, there are still no fines, and the methods used remain rudimentary. Of course, one of the major infrastructure gaps for them is limited manpower.
In 2018, I was attending the Asia-Pacific Amateur Championship, and one of the Indian players in the field, Kshitij Naveed Kaul, was penalised for slow play. He later spoke to the Indian media, and I thought it was very classy of him to first admit that he was at fault, and then to promise that he would work on becoming a faster player.
The reason I related the Kaul incident is that I firmly believe that the real responsibility of producing faster elite golfers lies with the Indian Golf Union (IGU). It needs to be drilled into the juniors that slow and steady might not always win you the race.
Of course, IGU has a bigger problem than the PGTI with regards to staffing for amateur events. If they cannot have officials out there chasing kids with stop clocks in their hands, they need to make better use of the time sheets, and conduct workshops during their tournaments in which they discuss ways of improving the pace of play.
Equally important is that coaches and parents need to ensure these kids develop a routine before hitting every shot. And just like their golf swings, this routine also needs to be timed and perfected.
