After it took the final pairing roughly three hours to complete their first nine holes at Torrey Pines, CBS Golf Reporter Dottie Pepper cut right to the chase, delivering some hard, cold facts about the state of the game.
“We are starting to need a new word to talk about the pace of play issue, and that is respect,” Pepper said on the broadcast.
“Respect for your fellow competitors, for the fans, for the broadcasts, for all of it. It’s gotta get better.”
Not unlike the LPGA, rounds on the PGA Tour have turned into complete slogs. All too often, pros are taking almost six hours to finish rounds, a reality that makes golf fans bored and turns them away—no wonder the tour has struggled with television ratings for over a year now.
It’s not as if the broadcast can do anything, either. During weekend rounds, with tee times predicated on leaderboard positioning, producers and directors have few options on what to show as the day progresses. That’s why you see so many ‘payoffs,’ the television term used when showing a player tapping in on the final hole. Viewers will also see plenty of scenic shots or prolonged views of a player’s reaction, hoping those mitigate the glacial pace of play.
This week is no different. However, another issue has reared its ugly head: a lack of star power. With no household names on the leaderboard, why would your run-of-the-mill golf fan want to tune into this week’s Farmers Insurance Open? Ludvig Åberg, Hideki Matsuyama, and Jason Day are the three stars that could have made things interesting on Saturday, but none of them came close to contending.
Instead, 4-time winner Harris English, third-year pro Sam Stevens, and fourth-year pro Andrew Novak — the latter two have yet to win on tour — are jockeying for the title on a Torrey Pines South course that has produced more bogies than birdies. This is not a slight against these three players either, all of whom have terrific stories of their own. But the reality is that they won’t attract much interest from the greater sporting world. And given the fact that YouTube golf has soared in popularity, as well as playing the game itself, what would prevent the average fan from tuning into a 60-minute Bryson DeChambeau video jam-packed with action instead of watching a 6-hour final round of a sleepy PGA Tour event with random pros? That’s the dilemma the PGA Tour faces, and it seems, unfortunately, that this problem will go nowhere soon.
Jack Milko is a golf staff writer for SB Nation’s Playing Through. Follow him on X @jack_milko.
