Three Cheers For The R&A! A Proper Slow Play Answer!

Other tours and governing bodies now just throw up their hands, shrug their shoulders and give the "it's always been that way" answer to slow play questions.

Not for the R&A's Championship Committee head Jim McArthur, with a nice assist from Peter Dawson! From the R&A press conference:

Q.  This is by no means a new question at all, but I wanted to ask your current thoughts on pace of play.  Some of the most exciting players to watch are the quickest, as well.  Do you have any sense ‑‑ there are rules obviously in place to stop people from dawdling.  They don't seem to be enforced much.  Do you have any new thoughts about that?  Are things dragging too much?

JIM McARTHUR:  Obviously we have a tight schedule for the championship this week.  First two rounds in threeballs the time schedule is 4 hours and 30 minutes, and for twoballs it's been for us 3 hours, 45 minutes.  It is a perennial problem where it's not just The Open faces, The Tour faces it all the time.  And I think we have to strike a balance between getting people around quick and keeping it as a spectacle.  We can't have people running around, but I think we need to try gradually to make sure that we do speed up play a bit.
   
If there's one thing that we're finding, I think that the whole union probably agrees with us, one thing we do find, just the way society is, a lot of people are not joining golf clubs because of the time it actually takes to play.  And I think we need to find some ways of getting around, speeding up play so people are not taking six or seven hours for a day's golf.
  
 There are issues there.  We are trying with our friends around the world to try and improve that all the time, but it is difficult.

PETER DAWSON:  If I could just add to that, I think the fact that the players at the top of the rankings today fortunately are by and large quick players is going to make people think about this.  I don't know if you've noticed how much quicker Luke Donald is putting now in the last few months than he did before, and how successful he's been in so doing.  I'm not indicating Luke was slow before, but he's much quicker than he was.  Rory is a very quick player, Lee isn't slow, and let's hope that now rubs off.

Q.  Is there a correlation between fast play and good play?

JIM McARTHUR:  It's quite interesting, it's amazing how many times people are put on the clock and then screw up two or three birdies in a row.  So maybe there is, but there's no science to it.  It's just a thought.

And it's a good one, even though we Americans don't think birdies are screw ups!