Q&A (Part 2): Roger Maltbie dishes on Tiger and says the way NBC reduced his role was ‘pretty sh**ty’

RM: I’m not one of those players that hates slow players, you know.  I’m not one of those guys. I used to argue with (PGA Tour rules official) Jack Tuthill when I was on the policy board, and they went to this timing system and warning system and this and that, and I didn’t like it, and I went to Jack and I said, listen, I said, you’re driving down the freeway doing 90. You get pulled over by a state trooper, and he comes up to your window and says, I’m not going to give you a ticket, but I’m going to be on your bumper the rest of the way. How many tickets do you think he’s going to give out? None. This warning thing. Get after them. You know who they are. If you have to time them, time them secretly and penalize them. That’ll light a fire in their saddle.  That’s the way I looked at it. 

Real slow players: Ronnie Black was really slow. The whole timing thing, what I didn’t like about it is you’d be behind, they’d come out and say, OK, we’re going to time you. You’ve been warned. You’re behind. We’re going to time you.  

All of a sudden Ronnie would hit a shot and he’d walk over to the rope line and walk up ahead of you. So he’d be out there, fine, you’d play your shot, now he’s at his ball, he’s done whatever he’s had to do. You’re 40 or 50 yards behind him trying to get to the green. Now you’ve got to stop, wait for him to play. It just disrupted the flow of everything.

Then when you caught up, he’d go right back to being as slow as he was. It’s not just Ronnie. I’m not just singling him out. But Bernhard Langer, you know the guys.

GWK: Was there anybody that when you were walking that when you saw that he was in that final group, you’re like, oh, this is going to be a long day?

RM: We’ve had a few. It presents a real problem for the guys in the truck because they’d cut away to another shot and come back, and timing all that was not necessarily easy. So that presents some problems. 

I told Tuthill back then, too, I said, do you want these guys to play faster?  How about you give them time par and they come back under it and you get to take two shots off your card. Now you’re going to have a track meet, right?  You want a kid to do something, you reward him for doing it, not penalize him for not doing it.  He went, oh, we can’t do that.