Campaign against slow play must move into higher gear
The fun is being taken out of the game as rounds take longerthan ever to complete
There is no reason golf should take this long to play. That's why players at Merion for the US Open received a notice when they registered that warned about pace of play. The fear was that slow play was damaging the game's popularity, and the instructions in the notice could not have been clearer: "Be observant, reach your decision quickly and execute your shots with promptness and dispatch."
Just don't get the idea anything will change. This notice was handed out at the 1950 US Open.
If the players at the US Open this week would read David Barrett's book, Miracle at Merion, on Ben Hogan's victory in 1950, they might laugh. Or maybe cry.
Joe Dey, the USGA's executive director at the time, is quoted in the book as saying: "The time has come when we simply must act if the game is not to be seriously injured."
The size of the field for the 1948 US Open at Riviera was 171 players. It was lowered to 162 players the following year at Medinah, but that didn't seem to help. Dey lamented that the first group (threesomes) took three hours and 27 minutes to complete the opening round, while the last group took a whopping four hours and 16 minutes.
"That is just awful, and it doesn't make sense," Dey said. "It hasn't been so long since three hours was considered adequate for a round. This is murder on spectators as well as on players who wish to play at a reasonable speed."