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Slow Play and the Rules of Golf

By Jeffrey Standen

It's golf season in the TSLP house, which means putts across the carpet, chip shots onto the sofa, and yard golf with plastic balls and crazy routes around the house for holes. The boys and I do get out to the real golf course too, once and a while, but the cost of a round limits us a little. We're also limited by the fear of slow play, particularly on certain days and times, namely when the course is packed with players. Slow play has long been a bane of the sport. What can be done?

Many golf writers have addressed the problem. Most of what I've seen amounts to preachy exhortations to speed things up by playing "ready golf" (basically hitting out of turn), by lining up putts while others are putting, by hitting tee shots from the next hole while playing partners finish off the last one, and by other such nonsense. At best, hustling around on the golf course in the recommended manner will shave but a few minutes off a round. Worse, some of these recommendations counsel rudeness. Golf is fun in part because of its relaxed camaraderie and time-honored etiquette. Leaving the green early or playing out of turn is not playing nice.

So what can be done to speed up golf? What's the problem that produces slow play? In TSLP's view, it's not the golfers who cause the pile-ups on the tee. It's the rules of golf that, oddly, impose needless costs to the game, bringing a wonderful, relaxed sporting pastime to a crawl.

1. Before we get to solving the problem of slow play, let's first put the problem in perspective. Just how slow is golf? People typically complain about golf rounds lasting much more than four hours. Indeed, some of my golfing buddies limit their play because they say they cannot find that many free hours in their schedule. But is four hours too long? Think of other sporting endeavors filling up the schedule of the typical suburban parent. A morning of fly fishing on a mountain river will easily take up more than four hours, especially since fishing holes are not nearly as accessible as golf courses. A youth baseball game takes about two hours, but really the total time is closer to four when you add in the hour-long warm-up period, the twenty-minute post-game coach's lecture, and the drive time. What about other individual sporting endeavors, like cart racing, horse competitions, or motocross, all of which usually involve travel and camping for an entire weekend? The worst of all sports? Competitive swimming. All day at the pool, and your kid's in the water for about two minutes total. At least in golf your kid gets to play every shot.

2. What's the baseline for golf? In other words, if four and a half or five hours is too long, what's just right? I would think a single golfer playing decently well and playing alone, with the no one else on the golf course, could complete a walking round of golf in about three hours. Each additional golfer probably adds at least fifteen minutes to the total time (if only from the added waiting for one's turn to play), bringing a fast-playing foursome to almost a four-hour round. That's four hours of golf at a point pretty close to the ideal, four golfers all playing well. So a round of golf that includes at least one sub-average golfer adds more time. Even still, a "bad" round that takes four and a half hours only wastes thirty minutes. Think of all the ways of wasting time; I could think of a lot worse than lingering with your pals on a beautiful golf landscape waiting to play a stroke. We can't compare four and one-half hours to zero; it should be compared to four. Golf is not that bad.

3. Further, slow play in golf is commonly misunderstood. What's slow is not necessarily measured in reference to the total time spent playing the game. Slow play can denote the minutes spent hanging around on the tee or fairway, waiting and waiting for the coast to clear for your next shot. A round of golf with little waiting feels fast; a round of the same total duration where one has to wait often feels slow. So what accounts for the waiting? Sometimes, yes, it can be golfers taking too long up ahead to line up putts or play shots from the fairway. But it can also constitute players of different abilities and strengths playing in consecutive groups, or from overbooked tee times or other traffic issues. But the "blame the slow player" explanation doesn't adequately account for slow play. That explanation is too facile. As always, when we see costs and delays and the like, I suspect the rules and rulemakers have imposed unnecessary infringements to impede the natural order of things.

4. What rules of golf unnecessarily slow down the playing of golf? The most costly of rules is the inordinate penalty for lost or out-of-bounds balls. The penalty is stroke and distance. It's a killer, along several dimensions. First, the penalty kills your score. Even a well-played provisional ball (for a par) results in a double bogey on the scorecard. Play the provisional ball for a bogey, the mean score of handicap players, and you get to record a triple bogey, basically ruining any chance of completing the round with a good score. It's a huge penalty from just a single stray shot.

5. Second, the harsh stroke-and-distance penalty is a killer on another front: it causes delay. Remember we're not talking here about the PGA tour. Most golfers carry significant handicaps. The hardest shot in golf for the majority of players is not the rare long bunker shot. It's the long, straight drive. Most golfers will send a pretty high number of their fourteen tee shots (not counting par three's, although we could) somewhere astray. On most golf courses, "astray" usually means some combination of rough, woods, water, rocks, and white stakes indicating the edge of the golf course. Put four golfers in a group, and that group is going to be searching for a stray drive or other shot pretty near every hole, especially on a tougher, tight golf course. It's not uncommon to have to look for more than one ball per hole. That can take a lot of time. In addition, the "fast play" commentators exhort players to play provisional balls whenever there's "even a chance" of the original ball being lost. This advice is fairly unrealistic. Even decent golfers hit so many balls that have a decent chance of being lost that we'd have to have a significant increase in the number of provisionals to make this approach work. And hitting a provisional is not easy: one's playing partners typically have begun their march down the fairway; everyone's a little annoyed at the extra shot; the provisional shot is often rushed, to repeated bad results; and finally it's not a "real" stroke, so it's usually played a little more carelessly. All this provisional playing takes time. Finally, the harsh penalty exacts an additional time penalty: even if one has hit a good provisional shot, the duration of one's search for the original ball will extend as long as possible in an attempt to avoid the two penalty strokes. Of course, if the extensive search is successful and the original ball is found, the provisional ball is picked up; in other words, the time spent playing the provisional was wasted. In casual rounds, notably, where often players take just a one-stroke penalty for a lost ball, golfers search less diligently.

6. The better rule is to treat the all stray areas of the course as lateral hazards. A lateral water hazard supplies the perfect penalty: the ball is obviously gone, so no time is wasted in search. Just drop the next one at the point of entry and you're in play. Indeed, in a casual round, or even a serious round with below-average players, this "rule" is the mode. Just drop a ball, take a stroke, and keep playing. "Let's play a fast round" is a golfer code phrase for a mulligan on the first tee (saves warm-up time) and abrogation of the stroke and distance penalties.

7. Why are the rules of golf to the contrary? Why does the rule contradict the common, speedier practice? The penalty for a ball in a lateral hazard is a stroke; for an unplayable lie, one stroke. The penalty for lost ball and out-of-bounds balls is (essentially) two strokes (the stray stroke, plus the penalty, plus the drop at the original spot) so that the course designers can have the option of a more severe penalty for variety. Golfers should regard woods, rocks and other nightmares as "more dangerous" than water simply because of the heightened penalty the woods and rocks potentially carry. Yet no golfer does. Woods and other lost-ball zones permeate every hole. Yet water scares golfers every bit as much, and creates the "forced carries" that so influence shot-making decisions. We're afraid of the water when we should fear the deep, dark forest even more. (Perhaps only slightly more, since a ball in the water is with near certainty unplayable, while a ball in the woods may with luck be located and with more luck be located in a playable position.) Treating the forest like the water would provide plenty of penalty for the stray shot. It would even supply enough penalty for the advanced golfer or professional. Pros don't appear indifferent to water hazards or rough; so too they would adequately fear and be penalized by woods and little white stakes, all of which would present equivalent obstacles to be avoided.

8. Golf is certainly a tradition-bound game, but the tradition here is pretty unclear. It seems as if the original penalty for a lost ball was "stroke OR distance" (the same penalty as for a lateral water hazard, in other words), not stroke AND distance. See here for some evidence for that point. Interestingly, the traditional penalty for an unplayable lie was stroke and distance, which of course has now been mitigated. So the rules can change.

9. Other rules that inhibit the normal pace of play: all of them, collectively. Each year the USGA sends out a rules quiz to a couple of hundred golfers. These golfers carry various handicaps, but all have in common a serious devotion to the game. They have something else in common: they all fail to get the test completely right, or even nearly so. Players of other sports would not misunderstand the rules of their sport: baseball players would score one hundred percent, presumably, except perhaps on the dread infield fly rule, which came under vicious TSLP attack here. Yet even devoted golfers don't know the rules. Trust me, this sad state of affairs is not the players' fault: the rules are just too convoluted and nonintuitive. Don't believe me? Speaking of the devil, what is a "lost ball"? Believe it or not, it can include a ball that sitting in the middle of the fairway in plain sight. See Rule 27 and work it out for yourself. The rules of golf could easily be simplified. One place to start is to change the penalty for lost balls.

10. The downside of my proposal? Golfers wouldn't look too hard for their stray shots in order to avoid difficult situations. They might not ever make themselves play tough shots; they might even avoid entirely the penalty for unplayable lies. The attraction of a one-stroke drop at the edge of the woods would quickly make the new lost ball rule the normal penalty for stray shots. But is that so bad? The outlets for relief (under penalty) provided by the unplayable lie rule offer no real relief on some of the rocky areas in the mountain courses I frequent. There's nowhere to drop the ball, or even to drop again after the first drop (with a second penalty). And there's no where to go back in the line to find a drop area; just rocks everywhere. The only practicable resolution is to replay the original shot, which means walking back to the tee and hitting again. Talk about slowing down play! Balls in bushes, on rocks, and in unspeakably long and unprepared grasses are not meant to be played. Whacking a ball out of bushes is not golf. A drop at the point of entry coupled with an added stroke is penalty enough. That's golf, in about four hours.

Full post as published by The Sports Law Professor on July 26, 2008 (boomark / email).