Furious Colin Montgomerie wants two golf rules changed after The Open

Colin Montgomerie has watched golf change for decades. This time, he didn’t like what he saw.

Colin Montgomerie never won a major. He came close enough times that it still stings. But last week, at Royal Birkdale, his frustration had nothing to do with trophies. It had to do with the clock.

The Open Championship delivered drama, a champion, and a finish worth remembering. It also delivered rounds that dragged on for nearly six hours. And Montgomerie, never one to stay quiet, wasn’t about to let that pass.

Colin Montgomerie Slams Slow-Play Epidemic At The Open Championship

Speaking to Today’s Golfer, Montgomerie didn’t ease into his point. He went straight at it.

“Christ almighty, last night [it] was 5 hours 40,” Montgomerie said. “TV hates it. Spectators hate it.”

Five hours and forty minutes. For 18 holes. Among the best players alive.

He didn’t stop at the overall time. He broke down exactly where it was being lost—the endless chatter between player and caddie. The yardage book, pulled out again and again, looked like it held some secret nobody had read the first ten times. Then came the part that really set him off. The way players read greens now.

“Once that ball is placed on the green, it should not be marked again to get the line on the ball, and then there is this business about AimPoint,” he said. “Oh my God, don’t talk to me about that. It does my head in, the slow play.”

Two fixes, according to Montgomerie. Stop letting players re-mark their ball on the green. Get rid of AimPoint. That’s it. That’s the whole ask.

Here’s the part that should embarrass golf’s governing bodies more than the six-hour rounds themselves. The R&A already has a Pace of Play Policy. Warnings exist. Fines exist. Penalty shots exist, on paper.

Montgomerie’s problem isn’t that the rules are missing. It’s that nobody’s using them. “They say there’s a deterrent for slow play, don’t they? They say there’s a huge deterrent for slow play,” Montgomerie said. “5 hours 40, was anybody penalised yesterday? No.”

No. That’s the whole answer. And it says everything. “Something’s gotta be done because it’s too slow,” he added. “Far too slow. If I had a bee in my bonnet, that was it, you know? Slow play.”

Montgomerie wasn’t shouting into the void alone. Tyrrell Hatton felt it from inside the ropes. Grouped with Bryson DeChambeau and Scottie Scheffler for the first two rounds, Hatton’s trio teed off early and still weren’t done until the evening. Nearly six hours, for one round.

“Yeah, it felt slow,” Hatton said. “The conditions that we played in today were perfect, weren’t they? So in that sense, I don’t want to say the golf course can play any easier; it’s still challenging out there.”

Perfect weather. Perfect scoring conditions. Still nearly six hours. Hatton didn’t offer a fix. He didn’t need to. The complaint spoke for itself. Slow play has been golf’s oldest unsolved argument. Every major brings it back up, and every major, it quietly goes away again. But when a former Open runner-up and a top ten player in the world are saying the exact same thing in the exact same week, that’s usually when someone starts paying attention. Whether the R&A actually does anything about it is a different story entirely.