Jeez, Slow Down!

Sort of continuing the theme from my recent post arguing against the insane, over-the-top rhetoric about slow play, I thought I'd share an anecdote from my round of golf today. My dad and I were playing at our local course, and we both played pretty badly. I shot a 60 for nine holes, and he had a 58. We finished our round in slightly under two hours, maybe 115 minutes overall, so less than one minute per aggregate group stroke. (As my dad points out, it's not clear that there isn't some causality from rushing the play to the poor play, but that's beside the point right now.) Now, there isn't a formal par time for this course, but I definitely feel that a four-hour eighteen hole round is very much the standard. At the somewhat-tougher course my family plays in Cape May, there is an official par time and it's around 2:12 or 2:15 for each nine. My dad and I played in under par time today, in other words, I'm fairly certain. You definitely couldn't accuse us of slow play; I was actually surprised how fast it all went, given how awful I in particular was.

But that's all measuring against what I might call the objective or absolute standard, comparing our overall time performance against a theoretical ideal. The typical way to measure pace of play on a golf course, however, is subjective/relative: are you keeping pace with the group in front of you? Now, that's not always relevant, if your group is a foursome who tee off just behind a fast single or whatever, but what is true is that if you do keep pace with the group in front of you then you are doing nothing wrong in terms of pace of play, though the converse might not hold. Today, the group in front of us was a foursome, so we, being a twosome, should have had no trouble keeping up with them. And, as I said, we were not playing shamefully slow; we were playing rather, though not incredibly, quickly.

But they left us in their dust. They were in carts, we were walking, and after a few holes we just lost contact with them, and were playing as if there were no one in front of us. They must have been playing insanely fast, given that they were a foursome, basically just zipping from one shot to the next in their carts and not taking much time over anything. There was another twosome behind us, also in carts and therefore waiting for us on most shots, and the fact that we had failed to keep up with that foursome made the whole thing feel a bit uncomfortable, despite, as I keep reiterating, the fact that we were not playing overly slowly.

And that's really the point of the whole anecdote. If most of the groups out there on public courses are playing at such a hectic pace, using carts and a lack of care over their shots to achieve times way below standard, it creates an environment in which a twosome of conscientious golfers playing the game seriously and trying to hit each shot as best they can, i.e. taking time over their shots, but not playing slowly are constantly made to feel rushed. And, of course, as the authorities of the game encourage impatience and hurrying of one's neighboring fellow golfers in the name of combating slow play, one increasingly must assume that the people in the group behind you are in fact getting very impatient, and probably even feeling self-righteous about it. They may or may not be, but that is increasingly held up as the honorable, appropriate reaction for people in that position. It makes the whole thing very uncomfortable, and needlessly so: is it really that onerous to take the full four hours to play a round of golf? I get not wanting to spend five hours on something you expect to finish an hour earlier, but if you only have three hours or three and a half, don't go out expecting to play eighteen holes of golf. You'll have to rush yourself, and worse, you'll end up rushing the people around you. And that is at least as much a sin as making the group behind you wait a few extra minutes to finish their round.