After it took the ultimate pairing roughly three hours to finish their first 9 holes at Torrey Pines, CBS Golf Reporter Dottie Pepper minimize proper to the chase, delivering some laborious, chilly information concerning the state of the sport.
“We’re beginning to want a brand new phrase to speak concerning the tempo of play subject, and that’s respect,” Pepper stated on the published.
“Respect in your fellow opponents, for the followers, for the broadcasts, for all of it. It’s gotta get higher.”
Not in contrast to the LPGA, rounds on the PGA Tour have become full slogs. All too usually, execs are taking nearly six hours to complete rounds, a actuality that makes golf followers bored and turns them away—no marvel the tour has struggled with tv rankings for over a 12 months now.
It’s not as if the published can do something, both. Throughout weekend rounds, with tee instances predicated on leaderboard positioning, producers and administrators have few choices on what to indicate because the day progresses. That’s why you see so many ‘payoffs,’ the tv time period used when displaying a participant tapping in on the ultimate gap. Viewers will even see loads of scenic pictures or extended views of a participant’s response, hoping these mitigate the glacial tempo of play.
This week isn’t any totally different. Nonetheless, one other subject has reared its ugly head: a scarcity of star energy. With no family names on the leaderboard, why would your run-of-the-mill golf fan wish to tune into this week’s Farmers Insurance coverage Open? Ludvig Åberg, Hideki Matsuyama, and Jason Day are the three stars that would have made issues fascinating on Saturday, however none of them got here near contending.
As an alternative, 4-time winner Harris English, third-year professional Sam Stevens, and fourth-year professional Andrew Novak — the latter two have but to win on tour — are jockeying for the title on a Torrey Pines South course that has produced extra bogies than birdies. This isn’t a slight in opposition to these three gamers both, all of whom have terrific tales of their very own. However the actuality is that they received’t appeal to a lot curiosity from the higher sporting world. And given the truth that YouTube golf has soared in recognition, in addition to enjoying the sport itself, what would stop the common fan from tuning right into a 60-minute Bryson DeChambeau video jam-packed with motion as an alternative of watching a 6-hour ultimate spherical of a sleepy PGA Tour occasion with random execs? That’s the dilemma the PGA Tour faces, and it appears, sadly, that this downside will go nowhere quickly.
Jack Milko is a golf workers author for SB Nation’s Enjoying Via. Observe him on X @jack_milko.
