U.S. Open week has arrived and the USGA is on formal notice from The Dog House:
DON’T SCREW THIS ONE UP!
The stuffed shirts and starched collars from the good old United States Golf Association haven’t done the best of jobs at their signature championship over the past few years.
This year’s venue is the iconic Pebble Beach Golf Links and the golf world is hoping that the USGA will get it right — get the setup right, not feature five and a half-hour rounds of grinding golf that makes you just want to scream: STOP IT!
The USGA desperately needs a win. They broke the slow barrier two weeks ago in Charleston when the women’s weren’t pushing five hour rounds, they were going on SIX HOURS!
Seriously, the USGA better check itself and get this championship right.
The dogs will be down there playing on the beach so obviously they don’t care how slow the play may be — but everyone else does.
Otherwise, we should just go play on the beach with the dogs. It would be a lot more fun.
2 Comments
baxter cepeda
The USga has to figure out pace over setup. With Setup all they need to do is not kill the greens and they will be fine.
But pace is an issue.
I’m still salty about something that happened in March to my girls.. 11-12, playing in a women’s 4 ball qualifier.
They were first group out in freezing wet conditions in nor cal. The older girls paired with my kids were good, but one was was wild and the other just wildly slow.
After hole 1 the lady scoring freaks we are 3 minutes behind. Second hole the older girls had to go back to the tee with one ball and the other took 5 minutes to chip sideways.
After much of that, and my girls trying to catch up pace all day while their parents told us not to worry about it; this happened:
Well long story short, even thou my girls were literally playing out of turn to finally catch the group up, the usga folks decided to not penalize the older girls at all and to penalize my fast playing girls because they were shorter hitters so the older girls couldn’t prepare for their shots, or some nonsense like that.
I couldn’t believe that after following us for many holes they determined that.
Actually I could believe it because most of the officials had their sand buried in the sand looking at phones or papers or anything but this young lady taking forever on every shot.
I told her partner and her dad after that her partner was going to cause a lot of pace issues for them.
But what we learned for us is that at the lower usga events being first out is a very different pace experience than anything else in golf.
Meanwhile every junior tour in existence seems to have their own silly pace of play systems, mainly because the usga system is no bueno.
So bottom line is the usga needs to set a fair pace of play system for all groups.
For me the usga needs to officially give players a shot clock of 1 minute.
Regardless of wind or situation, the trigger needs to be pulled within a minute of arriving to the ball and/or another player hitting.
There is actually increasing slow golf out there. It’s time to do something. Fast.
Tom Edrington
Great report Baxter…..pace of play is a plague everywhere, I noticed how damn slow the men’s college players were in match play with the coaches standing there and discussing who knows what, took forever for those kids to hit their shots….so college golf is prepping them for slow play.