NEWTOWN SQUARE, Pa. — During their second round at the PGA Championship, the trio of Justin Thomas, Keegan Bradley and Cameron Young found themselves placed on pace-of-play monitoring, leaving them confused about why officials targeted their group.
The slow play wasn’t limited to just their threesome. Thomas contended that rather than causing delays for trailing players, his group was actually waiting on the golfers in front of them. Television coverage showed Thomas and Bradley gesturing toward the preceding group while on Aronimink Golf Club’s fourth hole.
“The hard part to me with the whole pace of play thing is that you, there’s so much that goes into golf and there’s so much that goes into hole to hole,” Thomas said. “… Are you hitting it close? Are you able to tap it in, or you have to mark it? Stuff like that — are you holding the group up or are you not — to where it’s very hard to make that call. And we just didn’t agree with it, to be honest.”
After picking up their pace on the following hole, officials removed the timing restriction from Thomas’s group. While multiple delays during clock monitoring can lead to penalty strokes, Thomas maintained he never felt pressured to rush his shots.
“I backed off on my first shot being on the clock, even,” Thomas said. “It’s just, it’s so hard out here, and that’s the last thing I’m going to do is make a mistake because I feel like I’m rushing.
“If we were, for some reason, to get in a position where I was getting, we were getting bad times and we were continuing to be on, I would have had more discussions with the rules officials to kind of plead my case.”
This marked the second consecutive day at the major where playing times regularly surpassed five hours, occasionally reaching 5½ hours. The group featuring world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler alongside Englishmen Justin Rose and Matt Fitzpatrick began their round around 8:40 a.m. local time and finished shortly after 2:10 p.m.
Scheffler and fellow competitors cited the challenging pin placements selected by the PGA of America as a contributing factor to the sluggish pace.
“You just got to continue to try to hit good shots, and most of the pins today were, I mean, kind of absurd,” Scheffler said after shooting 1-over 71 to reach 2 under for the tournament.
“They were just so far into the areas where we thought the pins were going to be, and then they just — like the one on 14 was probably the hardest pin that I’ve seen in a long time just because, I mean, there’s literally just like a spine (in the green) and they’re like, ‘Oh, we’ll just put the pin right on top of it.’ And you’re like, ‘All right, well, I’ll see what I can do.’”
Chris Gotterup shared comparable sentiments despite recording an impressive 5-under 65.
“I don’t think it’s unfair, but I do think for pace of play and certain aspects, there have been a couple — you know, 14 today is probably aggressive, I will say,” Gotterup said. “You’re hitting a 4-iron to a 10-foot circle, and if it doesn’t go there, it’s off the green, and if you hit it 40 feet left, you have a very hard 2-putt.”
Course design appears to contribute to the delays as well. With 156 competitors starting from both the first and 10th tees — which utilize the same tee area — groups sometimes encounter bottlenecks. Additionally, players finishing the eighth hole must navigate through the 11th tee area to reach the ninth tee.
“Back nine requires a little bit more quality, and pace of play was incredibly slow on the back,” Denmark’s Nicolai Hojgaard said Thursday. “We were two groups (waiting at a time) on a couple tee boxes. It was hard to get into a rhythm. Where, on the front nine, we were on the fly.”
Slow play commonly becomes an issue at major championships due to their large participant fields, though conditions should improve over the weekend after Friday’s cut reduces the field to the top 70 players and ties.
