Working Out With Waits

An editor doesn’t like to wait to hit his golf shots -- know anybody who does? -- so he wants a story on the epidemic of slow play and ways to combat it. You know, they play in three hours in Scotland and there’s no reason we can’t here if we just educate the masses.

So, here it goes, a few magic tips to help you speed up play ... and get the heck out of the editor’s way:

* Play ready golf (whoever is ready to hit or putt, do it).

* Always watch everybody in the foursome hit to help locate wayward shots.

* Limit searches for lost balls to two or three minutes, not the five allowed by the U.S. Golf Assn.

* Always carry a spare ball in your pocket.

* Drop off your cart passenger and then go to your ball.

* Plan your shot and select your club while approaching your ball.

* Line up your putt before it’s your turn.

* Rake a sand trap for a buddy while he has to fetch his putter.

OK, now that you’re a regular Richard Petty of golf, here’s a dirty little secret: Duffers aren’t necessarily to blame for the molasses movement at your local muni. It’s the golf-course operators and the number of minutes they allow in spacing the groups they send off the No. 1 tee.

It’s called a starting interval and it’s as simple as that.

Don’t believe it? Just ask Bill Yates, the guy who helped write the book on slow play. Well, the manual, anyway.

In 1992, Yates, an industrial engineer and avid golfer, joined forces with Dean Knuth, then senior director of handicapping for the USGA, to study the bane of the game. Together, they developed the Pace Rating System, which analyzes the combined interaction of a particular golf course’s length, obstacles and green-to-tee distances to determine how long it should take to play that course.

The conclusion was that the biggest obstacle in eliminating sluggish play was debunking the two biggest myths: that all rounds should take four hours and that players are the major cause of the congestion on America’s fairways.

Think about it. Does anybody believe the 405 is at a standstill at 5 p.m. because there are so many slow drivers out there? It’s case of the system being overloaded with more vehicles than it can handle. And telling the guys on your favorite course to play ready golf and expecting an improvement is like honking your horn on the freeway and expecting to be home for dinner half an hour earlier than normal.

“When I came into this, I was already looking to the left when everyone else was looking to the right,” said Yates, of Rolling Hills Estates. “When you talk about ‘slow play,’ you’re talking about people playing slowly. By definition, we’re already blaming the players. Are there players who play slowly? Yes. Can it be managed? Yes. But is it the solution? No.

“My background is as a management consultant, mostly in the manufacturing business. I work with management teams to lower costs and improve efficiency and quality. I look at the management side, not the workers, because the workers can only perform with the tools they’re given. No worker shows up for work and says, ‘Let’s see how inefficient I can be today.’ And no golfer shows up at the course saying, ‘Let’s see how slow I can play.’

“The traffic jam on the freeway is a great example. But in this case, there’s only one on-ramp -- the No. 1 tee -- and management has control of it.”

More than 98% of the courses Yates has measured over the years have a pace rating of more than four hours -- they just don’t build them here like they do in Scotland -- which is not the problem, he says. Players who leave the course disgruntled about slow play are less concerned with the actual length of playing time than they are about the fact they had to wait to hit almost every shot.

Yates’ consulting firm works with course managers, stressing a combination of realistic expectations and an emphasis on flow of play to optimize their customers’ experience.

“The beauty is that once we get management to do its part, then it becomes very easy to spot the truly slow golfers and action can be taken,” he said. “Marshals are always getting the rap for not doing enough, but in most cases, they’re being asked to manage the impossible. Once you get the golf course loaded properly, the marshals know where every group should be and when they should be there.”

Yates spends three days evaluating a course and meeting with management, assessing natural bottlenecks on the course and suggesting changes that will facilitate flow of play.

The nature of slow play, apparently, is that every possible solution that seems to make sense doesn’t work. When the starter tells the group on the No. 1 tee to hit away when they’re ready, it slows play. When you let a group play through, it slows play. And often Yates suggests a course make certain holes more difficult, so golfers won’t play them too quickly, resulting in an inevitable backup on the next tee.

The Blame Game

There are steps even deliberate golfers can take to speed up play. First of all, remember that none of your putts have $200,000 riding on them, so don’t laboriously scope them out like that pro you saw Sunday on TV who was tied for second and trying to sink a 10-footer for birdie on the 18th green.

But too much testosterone may be a bigger problem than 360-degree strolls around putts for double bogey or too many practice swings.

The guys in your foursome have no problem giving a stroke on a hole, but when was the last time anyone handicapped a hole by using different tees? No one wants to tell his cigar-smoking buddies: “You guys can hit from the tips and I’m just gonna dance up here and swing away from the whites.”

“Actually, more men should be playing from the red tees,” says Jeff Johnson, director of golf at Redhawk Golf Club in Temecula, “but you’re probably not going to see that. People seem to want to rob themselves of having joy on the golf course. You might spend two minutes engaged in actually hitting the ball, so you better do something meaningful with the other 4 1/2 hours, enjoying the camaraderie and the beautiful environment.

“Instead, we seem to be consumed by competition and ego. It’s almost like, ‘How tough can I make it on myself?’ It’s been an epidemic for the 34 years I’ve been in this business, and we don’t seem to be growing a new generation who sees it clearly.”

Yates and course designer Pete Dye’s wife, Alice, recently were watching a group tee off from the back tees and after they hit, she said: “I have no idea why anyone would want to hit two woods and wedge on every hole. What fun is that?”

At Redhawk, one of the longest courses in Southern California (7,180 yards from the back tees), they go to great lengths to help golfers maintain flow of play. On blind driving holes, they have forecaddies -- white jumpsuits and everything -- to locate drives off the fairway and the club will replace any lost ball in an effort to limit searches for wayward shots.

“We have a championship course, but we work hard to set it up in a user-friendly way,” Johnson said. “You want to be able to entertain a 17-handicapper who plays once a month. You don’t want that player to leave feeling like he’s gone 10 rounds in a prize fight. If you let people have a chance at making a birdie and a good score, only good things can happen.”

Gene Park, director of golf at Westridge Golf Club in La Habra, thinks the trend toward longer, tougher courses is a key factor in the congestion on courses, but he also puts some of the blame on the players.

“Nowadays, a golf course is judged by how tough it is and how long it is and it has to have a slope rating of 140 or more to rate as a top-notch course,” he said. “But, in reality, the majority of the players are not that good. They’re happy if they break 90.”

Westridge, with green fees ranging from $58 to $80, has global positioning satellite devices on its carts, so little time is wasted ascertaining the correct yardage. The starter gives every group a short speech about the local rules and the importance of keeping pace. And they always maintain a generous nine-minute interval between groups.

But it takes only one slow group to wreak havoc.

“No matter how hard you try, golfers think it’s their world once they pay their green fees,” Park said. “In the current world of customer service, when golfers around here have so many choices, you go out and tell people who have paid $60-$70 that they’re too slow, they’re going to get offended and they won’t come back.

“And some of the problem is just human nature. I mean, when you hit that brand new [Titleist] Pro VI into the bushes, you’re going to want to go look for it. You’re going to want to find that ball. That’s why I think if courses were easier, with less of these environmentally sensitive areas, that would go a long way to speeding up play.”

And that’s the beauty of water hazards. There’s no searching ... only cursing, dropping and hitting.

Farther and Slower

If the editor is hoping that innovations in technology are bound to speed things up -- what with all those hackers whacking the ball farther and straighter and getting out of his way faster -- well, he can forget it.

Like most cures for the epidemic of slow play, it sounds reasonable ... until you examine it closely.

Most golfers are all too familiar with finding a backup on the tee of the first par-three on their favorite course. Only one group at a time can play the hole, it usually takes at least eight minutes to play a medium-length par-three and few courses have starting intervals of eight minutes or more. (You can do the math while you’re waiting for the green to clear.)

Now, if just one player in a foursome, with his extra-distance ball and oversized clubhead and space-age shaft, has a shot at driving a downhill 310-yard par-four, you’ll be able to make -- and eat -- a sandwich on that tee.

It’s the worst possible scenario, a par-four that accommodates only one group at a time and takes 12 minutes to play. No course on Earth has a starting interval that can overcome that logjam. It’s a matter of real estate. The more each group uses up, the fewer number of groups the course can hold while maintaining a steady pace of play.

There are, however, a minority of golfers who actually don’t mind a five-hour round. William White of Rancho Santa Margarita is hoping to get the chance to play at least once a week when he retires in five years, and he’s at the driving range at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo working on his game ... which admittedly needs the work.

“I’d rather the round was a little slow than having to feel like it’s a track meet,” he said. “As you can see, I’m going to hit some bad shots during a round and sometimes a couple in a row. I took some lessons and the pro told me to take my time and make sure I’m ready to hit the shot, but that’s hard to do when all you can think about is playing fast.

“Nobody wants to wait to hit every single shot, but I’d rather be waiting a little here and there than having to sprint after hitting a crummy shot and then probably hitting another crummy shot because I felt so rushed.”

As for the editor and his single-digit handicap, he needs to find a golf club that allows only persimmon heads and wound balls, has a 10-minute starting interval, forecaddies on every hole and water bordering every fairway.

Either that or continue to play modern public golf in America: the waiting game.