"Tour should rethink its aversion to controversy"

I have a column in this week's Golf World that I just know Tim Finchem will be making copies of and distributing to his VP's with a big Post-It note attached, with the words "Maybe if you read this backwards it makes sense, Coterminously Yours, Tim."

"We've settled down now to a glacier pace here on the 10th hole."

Thanks to John Strege for documenting Gary McCord's comment on the last group's slow play Sunday at Harbour Town. I heard it and swore I must have been wishfully thinking that an announcer just called out the leaders of a PGA Tour event!

When Davis and Furyk appeared to be dawdling on the 10th green on Sunday, CBS' Gary McCord said, "We've settled down now to a glacier pace here on the 10th hole."

They were playing twosomes on Sunday at the Verizon Heritage and it still took more than four hours to complete play.

Do you think that just maybe the networks are tired of the slow play and extended finishes caused by slow play? Finally?

"The game needs sweeping change now."

Nice job by Alistair Tait to not get swept up in the excitement of the day to let the ridiculous pace of play go unnoticed. In our live chat the UK readers noted Peter Alliss' complaints about the pace, which ended up at 5 hours and 45 minutes for the Woods-Kuchar-Choi group.

These days the five-hour plus round is the norm. The way it’s going, the six-hour round will soon become commonplace.

Meanwhile the R&A and USGA sit in their ivory towers and do absolutely nothing. Exactly two years ago, at Royal Birkdale, R&A chief executive Peter Dawson said there was going to be a meeting during The Players Championship where the subject of slow play would be discussed by governing bodies and professional tours. He promised then that he wouldn’t slow play us on this one. Two years later and we’re still waiting for the powers that be to do something.

(Are you reading this Peter?)

What's interesting about round one was the role of the golf course setup. Clearly Fred Ridley and the committee wanted to get the players around in the face of a bad weather forecast. The easier hole locations and forward tee placements worked in one sense: thirty players finished under par and we saw some of the most exciting golf in years. Yet the pace of play remained awful. And as Tait notes in his piece, there's only one solution: shot clocks and penalty strokes.

Letter From Saugerties, Jimmy Cannon Edition

After a number of recent posts, Frank Hannigan files this Cannonesque "Nobody Asked Me, But..." Letter from Saugerties:

Dear Geoff,

There are no words to express my gratitude for your posting of The Crazy Swing of a man in Egypt.  I wonder what happens when he finds himself in a bunker?

Peter Thomson ran for the Australian equivalent of our Congress. His politics? Let's just say he was not a man of the left. He came here in 1985 to play on the senior tour for only one reason: to beat Arnold Palmer like a drum. He told me not to pay much attention to his scores since "we are playing from the ladies tees."

He is also memorable for his speaking the ultimate truth about instruction which is that neither he nor anyone else could teach a newcomer anything useful other than how to grip the club properly and to aim. Peter once covered a US Open at Oak Hill in Rochester for an Australian newspaper. I asked him what he thought of the course. "It's too good for them" was his response.

Slow play by the women in the Solheim Cup, with 4-ball rounds approaching 6 hours, could be cured immediately by the simple device of sub-letting the role of the committee to officials not employed by the LPGA or the European women's tour. I would put USGA alumnus Tom Meeks in charge and tell him that if any given round takes 4 hours 45 minutes to transpire that he would not be paid.

Corey Pavin's average driving distance on the Tour today is 260 yards, or 8 yards longer than he was in 1999. You figure it's the mustache?

Comparisons of some other short drivers: Jim Furyk 278 now, 268 then. Paul Goydos is up 12 yards in a decade to 276, Billy Mayfair has become a brute at 284 but was only 269 a decade earlier.

In the early 1990s I was a consultant (unpaid) for a golf course project at Liberty State Park - the site of this week's Tour event. It required the blessing of then New Jersey Governor Christie Whitman, herself an enthusiastic golfer.

She wouldn't help us because the mayor of Jersey City said that golf was inherently elitist and that none of his city's precious land should be wasted on the rich. Never mind that the land in question was poisonously polluted. My idea was for a daily fee course supplemented by renting the course out once day a week for huge fees from Wall Street firms who would arrive by boat. What's happened is the creation of a $500,000 private club that is out of the reach of anybody who isn't loaded.

Liberty National is a design of the architectural pair of Tom Kite and Bob Cupp who survived the misfortune of designing a 2nd course at the Baltimore Country Club. It's adjacent to the wonderful Five Farms course created by AW Tillinghast. There were to be 36 holes as routed by Tillinghast. Because of the Great Depression the second course was put off for 50 years. The contrast between the two courses? Let's just say that the Kite-Cupp course concludes with a double green.

I twitched whenever I heard the name "Solheim" on television last week. Remember the great U groove wars of the 1980s when Ping sued both the USGA and the PGA Tour? There were endless meetings in attempt to resolve the matter without litigation. One took place in our USGA offices in New Jersey. Karsten sent one of his primary technicians. The man recorded the meeting secretly with a device hidden in his briefcase, hoping I or my colleague Frank Thomas would be caught saying something that might be useful to Ping in the suit to come.

Never mind how we found out. The tapes are stored in Mayer Brown, the USGA's Chicago law firm. Pity the
meeting did not take place in New York where such bugging is a crime. Anything goes in New Jersey.

Frank Hannigan
Saugerties, New York

“Well that’s wonderful, I beat everybody by two shots.”

Sean Martin reports on Tim Jackson's record-breaking play to become the oldest U.S. Amateur medalist at 50, despite a one-shot penalty for slow play.

The only thing that upset Jackson was a slow-play penalty that he received after the round. “I’m not real happy about it, let’s put it that way,” Jackson said. His group was warned at three of the four timing checkpoints (the fourth, ninth and 13th holes).

When it was confirmed that Jackson, who’d finished earlier in the day, was the medalist, he replied: “Well that’s wonderful, I beat everybody by two shots.”

How can you be a jerk about it when you are warned at three of four stations?