Nicholas Thompson is a Georgia Tech graduate who was an All-American and member of the 2005 Walker Cup team. Thompson has been a professional since 2006 and is playing his fifth season on the PGA Tour. He is not a fan of slow play, but recalls several occasions when his group was placed on the dreaded clock.
I’ve been in groups that have been put on the clock a few times. If one member of the group is slow, you’re all going to get put on the clock. Sometimes it happens because somebody is having a bad day or getting in trouble off the tee.
So it happens two or three times a year, but rarely because of me. My preshot routine takes 20 seconds, and if I can’t pull it off in 50 seconds, I probably deserve a penalty.
When it happens, you just try to keep on playing. You worry about it a little bit because of the fear of a penalty. If it is your fault, you try to speed up. You try to keep on playing.
A lot of the problem stems from college golf because they try to cram so many teams into one event. There’s no way to play fast. You play fast and wait, play fast and wait. You have to learn how to pace yourself over 5 1/2 hours.
In my days at Tech, we had a couple of slow players. Coach Bruce Heppler at Georgia Tech was always on us to play fast when we were qualifying. But he can’t be all over the course, and you can only play so fast. Like I said, you play fast and wait. In summer golf tournaments, you played faster, so it wasn’t quite as slow.
The reason there’s still slow play is because nobody ever gets a penalty. The penalty is never applied. The teenager, Tianlang Guan of China, got that penalty at the Masters. But they were only making a point of penalizing someone who wasn’t out there trying to make a living. They picked someone who was an amateur.
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