FASTER GAME PLAY, INNOVATIVE FORMATS… AND AVOID PROBLEMS WITH THE RULES
In the past, the authorities governing world golf have tended to be identified with a stubborn resistance to change and an insurmountable defense of the sometimes inexplicable rules of the game. Many people, for example, still remember, with a combination of derision and bemusement, the “No Dogs, No Ladies” sign with which a notable British club once welcomed visitors to its parking area.
Since then, other antediluvian golf clubs have also modified their gender-discriminatory rules, even if anachronistic practices still prevail at some. And in recent years there have been more reassuring signs that even the fiercest guardians of golf tradition are aware of the growing clamor for change and are willing to tolerate it, if only to avoid what has become a troubling decline in the number of golfers worldwide. Self-interest has a way of focusing the mind.
Last year, for example, the Royal & Ancient (the British body that oversees the Rules of Golf along with the United States Golf Association) introduced “Ready Golf” to improve pace of play. And, in a commendably quick response to another thorny issue, the R&A and USGA agreed to adopt a new set of protocols for video review when applying the Rules. This followed such high-profile incidents as Lexi Thompson’s four-stroke penalty at an LPGA major last year, which cost her the title (as she ultimately lost in a playoff).
Touring authorities around the world have also shown a great sense of creativity when it comes to tournament formats, as highlighted by the World Super 6 in Perth, Western Australia, which returns in February after its inaugural edition in 2017; the Shot Clock Masters, which debuts on this year’s European Tour in Austria in June; a mixed European Tour tournament (men and women) in Glasgow in August; and concerts by top rock bands at the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth.
Closer to home in 2017, the Andalucia Costa del Sol Match Play 9 at La Cala Resort (in Mijas), a tournament on the Euorpean Challenge Tour, included two days of stroke play from which the top 32 players would qualify to play nine-hole rounds over the weekend. (The 2018 schedule for the aforementioned Tour had not yet been made public at the time of going to press).
These tournaments are in addition to other tournaments with different formats that are played at late in the year and are usually invitationals, exhibition tournaments and other unofficial, novelty format, limited field golf competitions, many of which include the best players in the world, albeit in a more relaxed and informal way than during the official stages of the season when there is more pressure.
For example, in Florida last December the PNC Father/Son Challenge in Florida, where Jack Nicklaus played with his grandson Gary “GT” Nicklaus for the first time, and where Bernhard Langer plays sometimes with his daughter Christina and sometimes with his son Jason; and QBE Shootout, where two-person teams included Tony Finau and Lexi Thompson (the latter became the first woman to compete in two editions of this tournament).
Also competing in the QBE was Shane Lowry (paired with Graeme McDowell), who clearly relished the opportunity to compete in a different format. “Golf is pretty monotonous at times, and you only play 18-hole, stroke-play, year-round, 72-hole tournaments. Being in a tournament like this is a lot of fun.”
Also on the agenda last year (and no doubt continuing into 2018) was the question of how far players may be able to hit the ball – in many cases effectively reducing drives – and whether this warrants changes to the current golf ball, at least for elite players competing on the world’s major professional tours. Tiger Woods is one of the players with an interesting view on this.
But first let’s see what’s new for the 2018 season.
Shot Clock Masters
The 2018 Shot Clock Masters in Austria will be the first professional golf tournament to use a clock to measure the time spent on each shot as part of the European Tour’s bid to combat slow play.
In May last year in Denmark, the European Tour experimented with a ‘shot clock’ on a single hole at GolfSixes, a novelty that proved popular with players and fans, and the concept will now be used at the new European Tour tournament at Diamond Country Club from June 7-10.
In announcing the initiative, the Tour explained, “In a marked departure from the GolfSixes model, this tournament will include the official Tour timing policy (similar to policies used throughout the world of professional golf) over 72 holes, with the intention of showcasing a European Tour tournament played at a more compelling pace.
According to this official policy, in a competition with 120 contestants, the first player in each group will have 50 seconds to hit his or her shot, while the other players in that group will have 40 seconds for their shots. Players will incur a one-stroke penalty each time they exceed that set time, and those penalties will be shown on the leaderboard by a red card next to their name. Each player will be entitled to request two “time-outs” during a round, which will allow them double the allotted time (the 40 or 50 seconds).
In 2016, the European Tour committed to speeding up the game of golf by introducing a new pace of play policy that includes monitoring penalties and giving referees additional powers to flag slow players.
“This policy had an immediate effect,” according to the Tour, “leading to a visible reduction in round times, and further development in Austria could have an even more significant impact. This regulation is expected to reduce times by around 45 minutes, reducing three-player match times to approximately four hours, and two-player matches to around three hours and 15 minutes.”
Keith Pelley, CEO of the European Tour, said, “The 2018 Shot Clock Masters will be a fascinating addition to our calendar. Not only will it help us combat slow play and reduce the times of each round, but it is also further evidence of our desire to embrace innovation.”
Leading Austrian player Bernd Wiesberger added: “With this change there will be more attention from the international sports media during the tournament. The new Shot Clock format is an ideal way to address the issue of pace of play. Golf should definitely be faster and therefore this is a step in the right direction.”
– EurAsia Cup, Glenmarie Golf & Country Club (Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia), January 12-14: Led by Thomas Bjørn, eight months before he also captained Europe at the Ryder Cup in France, Europe will be looking to retain the trophy they won with a convincing 18½- 5½ score in 2016, but will face a strong Asian team on home soil captained, for the first time, by India’s Arjun Atwal.
For Europe, leading the 10 automatic qualifiers from the 2017 Race to Dubai rankings is England’s Tommy Fleetwood, and alongside him his compatriots Tyrrell Hatton, Ross Fisher and Matthew Fitzpatrick, Spain’s Rafa Cabrera-Bello, Austria’s Bernd Wiesberger, Ireland’s Paul Dunne, Belgium’s Thomas Pieters, and Sweden’s Alex Noren and Henrik Stenson. The European team will be completed by the two players selected directly by Bjørn: Englishman Paul Casey and Frenchman Alex Levy.
– ISPS HANDA World Super 6 Perth, Lake Karrinyup Country Club (Western Australia), February 8-11: Second edition of a tournament sanctioned by the Australasian, Asian and European Tours and featuring a six-hole stroke play format on the final day. Confirmed players include Tyrrell Hatton, Lee Westwood, Danny Willett and defending champion Brett Rumford.
– Zurich Classic of New Orleans, TPC Louisiana, April 26-29: pairs tournament framed on the PGA Tour with full official status and ranking points, and won in 2017 by Sweden’s Jonas Blixt and Australia’s Cameron Smith.
– GolfSixes, Centurion Club (London), May 5-6: now in its second year, this “inclusive golf festival” is something of a replica of other “cut-down” sports concepts such as the T-20 Big Bash (cricket), the World Rugby Sevens Series , Nitro Athletics and Tie Break Tens (tennis). European Tour data from 2017 tournaments showed that GolfSixes “attracted new fans to the game while delivering impressive social media engagement.” There was a 42 percent increase in new golf fans at the tournament compared to standard European Tour tournaments; spectators were on average 14 percent younger than those watching the rest of the season’s tournaments; and, as a result of attracting a younger audience, social media engagement around the tournament also exceeded the average seen at other European Tour events by 24 percent, resulting in more than 20 million social impressions.
“GolfSixes combines the camaraderie and intrigue of team golf with the drama and intensity of a shorter format,” said Nathan Homer, commercial and marketing director for the European Tour. “Players love it, and fans enjoy the different and more entertaining atmosphere….. Golf needs a route for younger fans, adult groups and families to participate. We know GolfSixes appeals to those audiences while still offering something for our fans. We need to continue to innovate to grow our appeal, and the statistics suggest that GolfSixes can have a powerful presence on the golf calendar.”
– Belgian Knockout, Rinkvan International Golf Club, Antwerp, May 17-20: The European Tour will return to Belgium for the first time in 18 years when three-time winner Thomas Pieters hosts the tournament. The first two rounds will follow a traditional strokeplay format and from that will emerge the 64 players who will go head-to-head in elimination strokeplay matches contested over nine holes over the weekend. “I think it’s going to be exciting,” Pieters said. “We’re going to see a new and innovative format that will make the tournament really exciting for people coming to the course and also for people watching at home on television.”
– BMW PGA Championship, Wentworth, May 24-27: Veteran rock band Simple Minds will perform at the BMW PGA Championship, headlining the BMW Show Stage on the final day (Sunday, May 27) of the European Tour’s flagship championship and the first Rolex Tournament Series of the year. They follow in the footsteps of Kaiser Chiefs, Mike and the Mechanicals and Status Quo, who have played at the tournament in recent years.
– European Golf Team Championships, Gleneagles (Scotland), August 8-12: part of the first edition of the European Championships, which will be held every four years and will combine the existing European Championships in athletics, water sports, cycling, gymnastics, rowing and triathlon (in a sporting partnership between the host cities Glasgow and Berlin), the European Golf Team Championships will bring together the best players from the European Tour and the Ladies European Tour in a mixed competition.
– World Cup of Golf, The Metropolitan Golf Club (Melbourne, Australia), November 21-25: The 59th edition of this major sporting event is one of five tournaments recognized by the International Federation of PGA Tours, and is the only one apart from the Olympic Games where the world’s best players come together and compete for their countries. The 2018 tournament will mark their third consecutive appearance in Victoria’s Sandbelt region. Denmark’s Søren Kjeldsen and Thorbjørn Olesen won the 2016 edition at Kingston Heath Golf Club, while Australians Adam Scott and Jason Day were victorious at Royal Melbourne Golf Club in 2013.
The “Lexi Rule”: Red card for ‘armchair referees’.
In December a working group led by the R&A and USGA and including the PGA Tour, LPGA, PGA European Tour, Ladies European Tour and PGA of America announced that they had reached unanimous agreement to adopt a new set of protocols for video review in applying the Rules of Golf.
The following measures have been implemented as of January 1, 2018:
– Assign one or more officials to monitor the video broadcast of a tournament to help identify and resolve Rules issues as they arise.
– Failure to take spectator calls into account as part of the Rules decision process.
In addition, The R&A and the USGA have approved the adoption of a Local Rule, available January 1, to eliminate the additional two-stroke penalty for failure to include a penalty on the scorecard when the player was unaware of the penalty. All organizations represented on the working group will introduce the Local Rule for 2018 and this penalty will be permanently eliminated when the modernized Rules of Golf go into effect on January 1, 2019.
The R&A and USGA established the video review working group in April to initiate a collaborative discussion on the role that video footage can play in applying the Rules, including the challenges and benefits of its use and also issues arising from viewer calls.
According to David Rickman, executive director of governance at The R&A, “This has clearly become a major issue in the sport that we felt we should address at this stage ahead of the implementation of the updated Rules of Golf in 2019. We have concluded that while players should continue to be penalized for all Rules infractions during a tournament, including any that come to light after the scorecard is returned, no additional penalty is required for scorecard error.”
Thomas Pagel, USGA senior director of Rules of Golf and amateur status, added that “the level of collaboration with our partners has been vital and rewarding as we look to the future. As technology has continued to evolve, it has also allowed us to evolve the way we operate.”
The new protocols also recognize the importance of limiting video review to footage obtained by the committee—commissioned broadcaster. No other video source, such as a smartphone or spectator’s camera, will be used under these protocols.
The new protocols and Local Rule are the latest measures announced by The R&A and the USGA to address concerns related to video evidence. In April, Decision 34-3 / 10 was issued to limit the use of video through the introduction of a “reasonable judgment” standard and a “plain view” standard.
Ready Golf: Improving the pace of play
The statistic is particularly enlightening. According to the Royal & Ancient, if each player in a four-ball spends five seconds less to play each stroke, his round time can be improved by 25 minutes.
Last summer, the R&A introduced a new procedure at its amateur championships as part of efforts to improve the pace of play. Known as Ready Golf, it is listed in the R&A’s Pace of Play manual “as a recommended solution to address slow play that allows golfers to play when they are ready to play rather than strictly adhering to the preeminence requirement of the farthest away from the hole.
As Duncan Weir, executive director of golf development, explained at the time of his presentation, “We support solutions that address the problem of slow play and Ready Golf is an effective means of reducing the time it takes to complete a round. Our research has shown that golfers would enjoy the sport more if it took less time to play, so we are introducing Ready Golf during stroke rounds at our amateur tournaments to help improve the pace of play and the experience for players and spectators.”
The Ready Golf concept is described in section two of the “Management Practices” manual.
The R&A notes that Ready Golf “is not appropriate in match play because of the strategy involved between opponents and the need to have an established method of determining which player plays first. However, in strokeplay formats it is only not permissible to play out of turn if that involves gaining an advantage. On this basis, it is permissible for authorities to encourage “Ready Golf” in stroke play, and there is strong evidence to suggest that playing “Ready Golf” improves the pace of play.
“For example, in a survey of Australian golf clubs conducted by Golf Australia, 94 percent of clubs that promoted Ready Golf to their members enjoyed some degree of success in improving pace of play, with 25 percent saying they had achieved ‘satisfactory success’.”
The R&A emphasizes that, when Ready Golf is encouraged, “players must act sensibly to ensure that playing out of turn does not endanger other players. Ready Golf should not be confused with being ready to play, which is covered in the “Player Behavior” section of this manual.”
According to the R&A, the term “ready golf” has been adopted by many as an all-purpose phrase for a number of actions that, separately and collectively, can improve pace of play. There is no official definition of the term, but examples of actions would be:
– Hit a shot when it is safe to do so if a player further away faces a difficult shot and is taking his time to evaluate his options.
– Even if it is not their turn, less powerful hitters may play first from the tee or fairway if a fellow hitter can reach the group ahead with his or her stroke.
– Hitting a tee shot if the player with the turn takes too long to be ready to play
– Hitting before helping someone look for a lost ball.
– Kicking even if it means staying close to someone else’s line of fire.
– Hit if a person who has just played from a greenside bunker is even further away from the hole but is delayed due to raking the bunker.
– When a player’s ball has gone over the green, any player closer to the hole, but chipping from the front of the green, should play while the other player has to walk to his ball and evaluate his shot.
– Mark results immediately upon arrival at the next tee, except that the first player to play marks his card immediately after playing.
Over the years, more and more stars have been highlighting the potential consequences of Tour players getting more and more distance on the ball. Seve Ballesteros was one of the first to sound the alarm, and now the voice of Tiger Woods has been heard.
The Californian former world number one has warned that getting so much distance on the ball now is forcing longer and longer courses.
“We have to do something about the ball,” he said. “I just think it’s going too far because, if they want to host championships, we’re going to have to build golf courses between 7,400 and 7,800 yards long.”
“And if the game continues to advance as it does with technology,” he added, “I think the 8,000-yard course is not too far away. And that’s quite alarming because we don’t have enough land to start designing these kinds of golf courses, and it just makes it that much more complicated.”
As he prepares to return to competition at the Hero World Challenge in November after undergoing back surgery in April, Woods said he was seeing a lot more distance on his shots. “I can’t believe how far I’m hitting the ball,” he said. “I’m back to getting the distances I had before and I’ve really accomplished it without making a special effort.”
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