[PHOTO: Tracy Wilcox]
Dottie Pepper was fed up. The well-respected lead on-course reporter for CBS had spent nearly three hours following the final group of Harris English, Andrew Novak and Aldrich Potgieter. It probably didn’t help her mood that it wasn’t the best day to be walking Torrey Pines South, with a cold, steady breeze blowing off the Pacific Ocean and the temperature not getting out of the low teens.
When the players reached the 10th, Pepper had to vent a little when speaking to broadcast teammate Frank Nobilo.
“You know, Frank, I think we’re starting to need a new word to talk about this pace of play issue, and it’s respect,” Pepper said. “For your fellow competitors, for the fans, for broadcasts, for all of it. It’s just gotta get better.”
“Well said,” Nobilo replied.
With sunset at 5:15pm local time on Saturday and the players averaging 20 minutes per hole through the front nine, the last group, which teed off at 11:11am, wasn’t going to finish before dark at the same pace. Certainly, it looked possible that any playoff would be pushed to the next day.
The slow play came after the uproar caused by the laborious pace in last Sunday’s final round of the American Express tournament. The final group on the PGA West Stadium course that included winner Sepp Straka took 5 hours and 39 minutes in perfect conditions, finishing about 40 minutes beyond the TV window.
The tour has said it believes that changes coming next year, including smaller fields, will help the pace of play, though that factor seemingly wouldn’t have made much of a difference in pace for either of the last two weekends.
