Just how do you solve the problem of slow play? Do you dish out a fine or a penalty stroke? Perhaps you should just whip the dawdlers with the cat o’ nine tails, release the hounds on them or have the perennial plooterers chased by a baying mob?
Paul Lawrie has always been an outspoken critic of ponderous pace of play on the tour but the 1999 Open champion concedes he’s banging his head against a brick wall in the campaign to get the game cracking.
While JB Holmes’ remorseless faffing at the Genesis Open on Sunday brought this festering plook on golf’s complexion back into the spotlight, Lawrie, who was at Gleneagles yesterday to launch the Farmfoods Paul Lawrie Invitational, cited the prolonged palaver involving a Bryson DeChambeau approach shot into the green en route to victory in the Dubai Desert Classic last month.
Officials did nothing but the European Tour’s online department actually promoted a video of the shot to cheerily showcase DeChambeau’s eccentric, scientific deliberations as he discussed air density and all that phooey with his caddie. Oh, the irony.
An insight into @B_DeChambeau’s process 🔬 pic.twitter.com/WfTyzstkDu
— The European Tour (@EuropeanTour) January 27, 2019
“I don’t understand how the European Tour can show a video online of DeChambeau taking a minute or whatever to play a shot and not do anything about it?” said Lawrie, who tries to instil a sprightly pace of play in the juniors he nurtures in his own Foundation. “Is it because he’s winning and the sponsors don’t want that?
“I don’t know the reasons. But there must be reasons. Slow play is just getting worse and worse. There’s clearly something that is stopping the tours dealing with it. I don’t want to have a go at them but if they wanted to sort it out, I think they could but they are not so there seems to be something behind it.”
“In the Foundation, we’ve had a few kids that we’ve spoken to, making them aware about the time it should take. You have to try and educate them as they are coming through. That’s all you can do.”
READ MORE: Pace of play issue goes round in very slow circles
Lawrie has tried to tackle the slow play issue head on down the years and has confronted players guilty of such sloth-like tactics when he has been grouped with them.
Rather like telling a surly teen to take their grubby trainers off the train seats, though, the interventions were greeted with hostility.
“It doesn’t go well when you do that,” he confessed. “I have tried that a couple of times. I’ve had a couple of really bad instances with players I have always got on well with and I’ve said to them on the course and both times it went very badly.
“I hear a lot of people saying, ‘well, the players need to police it’. Well, I have tried that and that doesn’t work either.
“I wouldn’t raise it with players again now. I did it twice in my career when it has been outrageous and I said to the player, ‘I think your pace of play has been out of order there, you are putting everyone off as we are on the clock’.
“Both times it was not a nice reaction from the player I spoke to, so I wouldn’t do that again. I would leave it to the officials to sort it out. As you get older, when you are playing with these guys you just get on with it. Whereas 15 years ago you’d be raging as he’s costing you money.
“Now you just think, ‘if the officials are not going to sort it out, there’s nothing I can do about it.”
It will be fair to assume that the slow coaches Lawrie has encountered down the years onthe circuit won’t be getting an invitation to his own Pro-Cel-Am event at Gleneagles in July.
The 18-hole shoot-out will feature 22 teams made up of a touring pro, a celebrity and two amateurs and aims to raise money for Lawrie’s own Foundation as well as the Doddie Weir Foundation and the Beatson Cancer Charity.
“We are looking to raise as much money as we possibly can,” said Lawrie, who has already signed up Gordon Strachan and Neil Lennon for the day. “It will be a six-figure sum that we give away.”
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