Confessions of a Hacker – Slow Play
Aside from cheats and those playing partners who are simply poor company, slow play is one of the great banes of my club golfing existence. As a Canberra resident for the past 14 years and a Coffs Harbour resident for the ten years prior, I’ve not developed the Zen of those who can brush aside the tedium of Sydney or Melbourne traffic gridlock and thus feel the need to expand on this issue. Before we delve into ways to handle this problem though, we need to subdivide slow golfers, as not all should be tarnished with the same brush.
Slow players can generally be categorised into two groups:
(1) An excusable group – Players who are simply having a lot of shots. If you shoot 110, realistically a round should take longer than if you shoot 80. This can ring especially true in a stroke round where lost balls are a real time sapper. As long as they’re doing their best to keep the game moving along, I’m 100 per cent fine with this group. But I’m not fine with….
(2) An inexcusable group – These include but are not limited to: Players whose pre-shot routine takes an eternity, players who conduct a five-minute post-mortem after every shot, and players who hold up proceedings through simple lack of consideration for others (leaving their buggy in front of the green whilst putting, filling out their scorecard and/ or gas bagging on the edge of the green so that the group behind can’t hit their approach shots, etc).
The second group grinds my gears no end. Worse yet, it is often the ‘holier than thou’ crowd at your local club who cause such grief. You know the types. They insist on whoever has the honour teeing off first – even if other shorter hitters in the group could tee off safely in the interim. They always play in turn around the green – even as three players wait on the green doing less than nothing while a fourth who just knifed his/ her bunker shot across the green takes two minutes to wander around and consider the plight of their next shot. They are sticklers for any semblance of common sense being overruled by the letter of the golfing etiquette law. While that might be entirely reasonable at the professional or even elite amateur levels, for club golfers who simply want to get around in less than five hours, a little exercising of common sense would go a long way.
The geography of each golf course also tends to lend itself to ‘player pile-ups’ occurring in the same spots each round (often on the back of a short par-4 + par-3 combination). At Yowani Golf Club, the 13th tee is a popular spot for two or three groups to congregate. At my old club of Gungahlin Lakes, the fifth tee was the most likely suspect. At the 27-hole Coffs Harbour Golf Club, it is rare to walk straight onto the 23rd tee and immediately swing away. You get the idea.
So we have a clear and present problem, one that threatens to ruin the rhythm of your round and take your patience with it. What to do?
One problem that often crops up is a poor shot immediately after the golfing gridlock clears, when you have gone perhaps 15 or 20 minutes between full swings. So whilst waiting around for groups in front to clear, keep your muscles warm and your rhythm in sync by making plenty of nice, smooth practice swings. The best part about this idea is that with no ball on the ground in front of you, why not just assume that you crushed it with every swing? No need for your confidence to dip during such a practice session!
It is also important to give your concentration a moment or two to relax. Watch any golf professional worth their salt or, just as pertinently, any Test cricketer spending a full day in the field. Concentrating non-stop for five or six straight hours without a break will take it out of anyone, so use these opportune moments to give your brain a short rest.
Rehydrating and/ or topping up your energy supplies with a mid-round snack is an important part of getting through to the end of your round strongly, so why not use in break in play to do this without feeling rushed? Two birds, meet one stone.
Finally and perhaps most importantly, club golf is about camaraderie with fellow golf lovers as much as anything else. Share a joke with your regular golfing buddies, learn a bit more about the playing partner you’ve never met before today or find any other way to enhance the social aspects of your round. It sure beats standing around in silence for 15 or 20 minutes, might make the time pass more quickly and may also help keep you in a happy and relaxed frame of mind for when the groups ahead finally clear and you tee your next one up.
To be fair, these four ideas will not always act as the panacea you may be hoping for when stuck behind some ‘steady’ golfers. Nonetheless, any time you can contort slow play into a win-win situation, you’ve done well mentally and deserve your little edge over the remainder of the field.
Previous ‘Confessions of a Hacker’ columns:
(1) Seeking help, (2) Racking them up, (3) Holding your nerve, (4) Five-foot putts, (5) Letting the Big Dog eat
