Another week, another slow-play debate in professional golf. Then again, is it really a debate when everyone is in agreement it’s a major issue that seems to never get fixed?
Popular LPGA pro Charley Hull had the best idea for fixing slow play yet – taking away players’ tour cards. The “ruthless” penalty, as she described it, would never come to fruition. The PGA Tour is attempting to fix it in its own way by shrinking field sizes, a proposal that was recently approved but won’t go into effect until 2026. The Australasian and DP World tours, to their credit, actually penalised a player recently at the BMW Australian PGA Championship, though the player was a DP World Tour rookie, Jacob Skov Olesen, who took 130 seconds to play his second shot on the 10th hole in the first round.
Last week on the Ladies European Tour, it was Carlota Ciganda, a notorious slow-play offender, who drew the ire of a number of people on social media for taking well longer than 40 seconds (the allocated time per shot, according to the Rules of Golf) to play a shot on the 15th hole of the final round at the Andalucia Costa del Sol Spanish Open. One Twitter/X user, @Golfingbrock, began timing Ciganda’s pre-shot routine once her playing partner’s ball had found the 15th green:
https://twitter.com/Golfingbrock/status/1863234572994945081
To be honest, the bar for pace of play has been set so low that this doesn’t even seem that bad. But as a repeat offender, Ciganda got people on the internet riled up with her nearly 90-second routine. The 34-year-old Spaniard was actually penalised two shots for slow play in the second round of the 2023 Amundi Evian Championship, a penalty she refused to accept, ultimately leading to her disqualification from the event.
There was no such penalty on Sunday in her native Spain, where Ciganda went on to win the Ladies European Tour event for the second time, much to Golf Twitter’s chagrin:
This is cheating. Plain and simple.
— Tron Carter (@TronCarterNLU) December 1, 2024
Amen. The only way to change it is to start hammering people with strokes, and it needs to start at the AM level yesterday.
— Steve M. (@GolfBurner) December 1, 2024
Good grief that's insane how long she took. People need to be given 2 stroke penalties everytime they take over 45 seconds if your the 1st player and 25 seconds for everyone else. I guarantee that will resolve issues immediately. Simply have a shot clock in each group.
— Greg Mitchell (@gregnmitchell) December 1, 2024
As Ryan French, a.k.a. Monday Q Info, pointed out, Ciganda’s group was put on the clock in the third round and she also received a few bad times. That was it:
And in the third round, her group was on the clock, (as her group almost always is), she got bad times after that but nothing is done about it. No fine, no penalty shot. pic.twitter.com/xLivlPnOhU
— Monday Q Info (@acaseofthegolf1) December 1, 2024
Something tells us we’ll be discussing this issue again, and again, and again in 2025.
