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Jon Rahm believes that pace of play warnings should remain with a player throughout a tournament, as he commented on how much of an issue slow play is at the major championships.
The subject of pace of play is in the spotlight for a slightly different reason following The Open Championship.
Ryan Fox won the Claret Jug after a stunning performance on Sunday at Royal Birkdale.
Fox is one of the fastest players on the PGA Tour, with the New Zealander taking just 22 seconds to hole the winning putt after his playing partner in the final round, Sam Burns got out of the way on the 72nd hole.
Jon Rahm comments on the pace of play at major championships
Of course, fans have become used to seeing tournaments overrun in recent years. Certain players are definitely guilty of being too methodical when it is their turn to hit their shot.
Some may dismiss pace of play in the majors as a problem, with the golf courses designed to put the world’s best through the toughest tests.
Jon Rahm was asked about the first and second rounds at Royal Birkdale taking the best part of six hours last week. But he explained why slower days at the majors should be expected, as frustrating as it can be.
“I’ve talked about it with a lot of players. When you go to a major Thursday, Friday, you know it’s going to be five and a half hours. It’s just what it is. I don’t think it’s necessarily pace of play from players. You have 156 people trying to compete in two of them. A U.S. Open being the hardest of them all, it’s always going to take a long time. The Open, depending on weather conditions and setup, it’s always going to take a little bit as well, just because it’s that many players. There’s nothing you can do when you have that many people playing at once,” he said.
“That aspect is never going to change. Augusta you have less players, so it’s less of an issue. But it comes down to how difficult the setups are and how many people you have in the field. You rarely have an issue with pace of play on the weekend. We were playing four hours, fast.
“When you play smaller events with smaller fields like here in LIV, we don’t have a pace-of-play issue. It’s four and a half hours on average when we’re playing threesomes in shotgun. When you’re playing in the playoffs and you have 70 players or less, pace of play is never an issue.
“It gets to a point where you can only do so much, but when you have, like last week, for example, a hole like 14 where it’s reachable but the green is really hard to hit as a par-5, very few people are going to hit the green, now your ball is running off the green. It’s a difficult chip. It’s just going to take time. As people hit the fairway, slowly it will delay and delay and delay, and by the end of the day it’s going to be quite a wait. It is the nature of the game.
“I think the pace of play has been blown out of proportion a little bit as of late, and I think most people only fall back to playing slower simply because the group in front is slow, and you only see a small part of the whole narrative, when the truth is I think when you have a smaller field, it rarely, rarely becomes an issue.”
Jon Rahm suggests an idea to tackle slow play
Rahm was one of the players who was embroiled in some controversy during The Open. The Spaniard threw his club after a wayward tee shot during the second round.
Rahm confirmed that he was given a warning for the incident. That came just one month after Joaquin Niemann was handed a two-shot penalty for his actions at the US Open.
When asked about the code of conduct, Rahm admitted that he is not sure where the line is that sees a warning become a penalty.
And discussing the incident prompted him to suggest a change to the rules around slow play.
“No, I think you can all kind of understand what it may or may not be. I completely forgot about it until it happened. I know they issued multiple warnings over the course of the week. Yeah, it would be nice to have some clarity,” he said.
“Now that you bring up pace of play, I can give you an idea. If you get a warning for code of conduct on Thursday, that warning stays for the whole week and it doesn’t reset. You can be slow on Thursday; your group gets warned; you have time to catch up. Then you get put on the clock, and once you’re on the clock you get one more warning before you get penalized. So you get three possible bad times amongst many others, and then when you tee off on Friday, you start from zero again. That doesn’t seem very fair to me.
“How come one which is a present issue in the game that can cause slow play and affect other people, you get so many breaks, and it’s completely looked over, and then in code of conduct, you don’t know where the line is. You have no definition of what you can or cannot do, even though we understand where the limit may be, and that warning stays with you for the whole week.
“I know the different things and why they’re doing it, but either make one of them a lot more stricter or the other one a lot looser. Whatever you choose. But it would be nice to see them on the same line. Don’t care.
“I think make pace of play stricter.”
The main tours have often threatened to do something about slow play.
However, when it comes to taking stern action, they are – funnily enough – too slow to deal with the problem.
There will be plenty of fans who, at the very least, back Rahm’s idea.
