There are a lot of slow professional golfers. They take their sweet time getting ready to hit shots. They don't play anything approaching fast golf. With the money on the line, the slow pokes say, they don't feel the need to speed up.
But that just doesn't work for professional golfers who like to play as quickly as the standards on the PGA Tour and European Tour indicate. Players like Edoardo Molinari are tired of playing five-and-a-half-hour rounds in threesomes on Thursdays and Fridays, and they'd prefer to play faster in the weekend rounds, too.
Molinari took to Twitter after the second round of the European Tour's Trophee Hassan II in Morocco to vent his frustration.
It’s time that professional golf does something serious for slow play...5h30min to play 18 holes on a golf course without rough is just too long...way too long! #stopslowplay
— Edoardo Molinari (@DodoMolinari) April 26, 2019
Thousands of people responded to Molinari's tweet, many of them his fellow professionals. A general consensus among the faster players is they need the tours themselves to take action in not only enforcing their standards but also applying penalty strokes, as allowed, to players who repeatedly defy or downright ignore the rules governing pace of play.
As the discussion continued, Molinari promised he would tweet out the European Tour's private list of slow players if his initial tweet got 1,000 retweets. And that was pretty much all he needed to say to guarantee the list would become public. Molinari's tweet got to that figure, and the former US Amateur champion produced the list.
As promised...list of timings as of April 22nd. Next updates list will come out at the end of June!
There are a few usual suspects and a few surprises.
Please retweet and share to speed things up!#stopslowplay pic.twitter.com/VpR65M4Xrb— Edoardo Molinari (@DodoMolinari) April 27, 2019
The list Molinari shared is regularly updated and distributed by the European Tour to its members, the players. This document shares the players who have been subject to timing in European Tour events after the groups they played in fell behind the expected pace of play, also called time par. This listing also shows how many events each timed player has competed in this season, as well if they've been fined by the European Tour for logging slow times when on the clock under the watch of rules officials.
So far through April 22, 2019, the players timed the most -- therefore, typically the slowest -- on the European Tour are:
- Adrian Otaegui - 6
- Henrik Stenson - 4
- Lucas Bjerregaard - 3
- S Chikkarangappa - 3
- Berry Henson - 3
- Maximilian Kieffer - 3
- Hideki Matsuyama - 3
- Ketih Mitchell - 3
- Jon Rahm - 3
- Kristoffer Reitan - 3
- Ajeetesh Sandhu - 3
- Aaron Wise - 3
- Fabrizio Zanotti - 3
However, being timed doesn't necessarily mean being fined. So far on the European Tour season, only three players -- Erik Van Rooyen, Louis Oosthuizen and the aforementioned Otaegui -- have been fined $3,000 for a bad time.
Of course, this list doesn't include PGA Tour events, as that would be done and managed separately. However, with several PGA Tour regulars on this list for European Tour events, you get a sense of which players lag behind others on the global stage.