PGA Tour Official Doesn't Believe There's A Slow Play Problem

Bob Verdi got about three minutes with PGA Tour VP of Rules and Competitions Slugger White - maybe on a golf cart - to talk about a few issues.  The most interesting exchange had to be this one:

One issue that doesn't go away on tour is pace of play.
You hear some guys say it's too slow, and the only way to speed it up is by penalizing strokes. But I don't believe you should affect a man's livelihood with a stopwatch. Also, I don't feel play is as slow as some people think. We've had 4½- hour rounds for 30 years.

Yeah, maybe the first group out.  Slow play is rampant on the PGA Tour.  Rounds routinely dip into the five hour pace.  At pro-am tournaments, it gets closer to six hours.  The Masters' pace of play card is set at four hours, forty-five minutes.  Four and a half hours is a rare time on Tour.

The pace of play on Tour is so lousy that they created Rule 78.  If more than 78 players make the two-round cut at a Tour stop, then there is a third round cut to get the field down to the lowest number near 70.  Why?  Logistics due to slow play.

Tim Finchem has admitted as slow play is problematic, even if he hasn't done anything especially substantive about it.  Commissioner Finchem and slow play defender Phil Mickelson think that it is just a condition of having 156 player fields slogging through courses on Thursday and Friday.  Maybe the answer is starting with fields closer to 120, cutting to the low 65 and ties, and having only 90 fully exempt players on Tour each year.  That model seems to work well in Europe.

White basically admits that the notion of putting players on the clock is a completely empty threat.  Why even bother with stopwatches?  Just let them mosey around any Tour stop at whatever pace they choose.

If the PGA Tour is unwilling to disincentivize slow play, then why not reward faster play?  Maybe a $10,000 per player bonus to the group that logs the fastest round time during the first two days and on the weekend.

That not good enough?  The cash incentive could even be individualized.  Here's a great example.  $500 to Jim Furyk for every putt that he only backs off of once before hitting.