Pepperell: Should Golf Change With The Times?

Recent tournament winner Eddie Pepperell's latest blog entry rightfully questions whether golf (and his European Tour) should be adapting to a changing (and unhealthy) society by trying to shorten, speed-up and coolify the golf experience.

As always, I urge you to read the entire piece for context and to understand his premise, but I think it's well worth you time.  But a sampling:

All of these things I believe have huge potential in dealing with chronic illnesses, whether that be physical or mental. I would imagine golf as a form of healing from depression could be enormous due to what I’ve outlined above. Plus, why change a sport to simply ‘conform’ to what we believe society ‘wants.’ Conformity is boring, each sport is different in its nature and we should celebrate that, not the opposite.

When it comes to the changes we can make as professional golfers to ensure the viewing experience is better, I do believe like many others that there are things that can be done. We should be making an example of players taking way too long to hit simple shots. We shouldn’t be advocating pre shot routines where you close your eyes, breathe slowly and pretend to be a Power Ranger. Golf can be played faster at tournament level, as well as club level. But it can never be played in 2 hours. And I don’t want golf to change itself in such a way to make that possible. I think it would ultimately be a bad move for the game and risk dilution, the same way Cricket has done.

Chief Executive Keith Pelley will not be calling on Pepperell to helm any of his cutting edge initiatives anytime soon.

We may currently have an ‘image problem’ in golf, but we don’t need to add schizophrenia to that. 40 second shot clocks may reduce a round of golf to 4 hours from 4 hours 30 minutes in a 3-Ball, but that’s still 4 hours, and in my opinion that’s not enough of a change to direct attention away from our sport being ‘too slow.’