The speed at which Dylan Menante plays golf seems fitting for a pace-of-play discussion.
“I’ve always been the fastest,” he said the other day.
Fastest as a junior in Nevada, playing so quickly his father had to step in and slow him down. Fastest in college, when opponents purposefully grouped him with one of their slowest players as a means of psychological warfare. Fastest on the Korn Ferry Tour, and now with hard data to prove it. Last month, the PGA Tour’s feeder circuit became the first major tour to publish “speed of play” times.
Ask around the KFT and everyone mentions Menante’s pace. (Do the same on the PGA Tour, and they talk about Ludvig Aberg.) Off the tee, Menante hits shots 16 seconds faster than the KFT average. On approach shots and around the greens, he’s 14 seconds faster. Putting is where he slows down, grinding to a glacial pace of 9.62 seconds faster than KFT average. The man absolutely cooks his way around a golf course.
The only problem is that for every Dylan Menante — a true outlier on a distribution curve as you can see below — there is a grinder on the other side. And for every player even moderately faster than average, there are others moderately, or significantly, slower. Not many, but enough that the PGA Tour wants to do something about it.
“It’s only a very small percentage that each week seemingly could improve their pace of play,” says Jordan Harris, the KFT’s chief referee. “And that’ll be the interesting telltale sign, in my opinion, on how this all works. After it’s been posted for a bit, how those guys — do they change the behavior?”
Producing the dataset is simple in theory but reliant on tournament volunteers walking with groups and handling the scoring. Volunteers carry a phone on them, using an app that prompts them with a trigger. When players stand in over a shot, volunteers place their thumb on the screen, holding it in place until contact is made, at which point they release their thumb. The clock is perpetually ticking … for everyone. Once Player 1 plays a shot, that shot is time-stamped down to the second. Once Player 2 makes contact, that shot also is time-stamped. While the time between these stamps includes innocent gray areas — like, say, waiting for Player 1’s ball to land, or waiting for a caddie to quiet fans — in general these timestamps inform everything. If you’re a slow player, you’re going to be exposed.
KFT rules officials can use the same app to track timestamps all over the course in real time. But every player’s stamps are aggregated to see how quickly (on average) they’re ready to play following the player ahead of them. They’re also broken down by shot-type: off the tee, approach, around the greens and putting. The system isn’t perfect — the first player to play is never timed, an issue for which the Tour is trying to solve — but it has produced a dataset that matches what officials (and even players) believe they’re experiencing from week to week.
“Every week, we look at the list and it confirms what we’re seeing with our own eyeballs,” Harris said. “We don’t see anomalies.”
Harris jokes that he’s become the “Pace of Play Guy” for the KFT, and he explains the system well. He has to, because he’s tasked with telling players when they’re dragging. He knows how finicky this outdoor sport played on hundreds of acres can be. For example, what happens if there’s a ruling that requires a drop? Those times are thrown out. The slowest 10 percent of times are also discarded for each player each week. Players in contention always play slower, Harris explained, adding that most KFT winners in recent years finished with an “average stroke time” infraction — playing their shots more than seven seconds slower than the field. The only recent winner who didn’t? Yep, Dylan Menante.
Menante is, in some ways, the crown jewel of the data. The KFT wants to create positive storylines about the pace of its players, and he’s a great example. But the three other objectives surround helping (or fixing) the slower pros. The KFT wants to (1) Provide better context to fans, (2) Support members who have been incorrectly labeled as slow, and (3) Inform the tortoises that it’s time to pick it up. That’s where things can get tricky.
“If you ask the Korn Ferry guys, ‘Is pace of play a problem?’, I bet 80% of them say, ‘Yes,’” KFT pro Cole Sherwood said. “But then if you asked them, ‘How do we fix it?’, I think people just draw a blank because it’s not one thing in particular.”
Sherwood is on the slower side of the ranking, 113th out of 137, 3.45 seconds slower than average, or about 20 seconds slower than Menante. Sherwood’s not outrageously slow in any one category; just a bit sluggish across the board. But never to the point of it being a problem. When he views the data, one major theme sticks out.
“If you look at the middle 50%, take away the outliers, ” he said, “it’s maybe a seven-second difference.”
Not even! The middle 50% — players 34 through 103 — are separated by about a five-second difference across all shots. KFT officials feel mostly fine about that group. They’re more concerned about the 10 to 15 slowest players. Each week, the data is shared, and any players who take seven seconds or longer to play than the field average receive an “Average Stroke Time violation.” When a given player receives five of those violations, the KFT steps in with a simple message.
“Hey, we don’t want you to have to pay to play golf, right?,” Harris said. Translation: Upon the 10th violation, players incur a $50,000 fine. For their 11th, 12th, 13th and 14th violations, it’s $5,000 each week. And beyond that, $10,000 more for each violation. It’s a system that penalizes players only when they’ve consistently played at a woefully slow pace and not changed much about their processes to play more quickly.
As ever, it’s an easy topic to misperceive. There’s no shot clocks in the fairway. Or buzzers like you’ll find at TGL. Sherwood played with Ian Gilligan recently, who ranks as the second-slowest player on the KFT this year and no doubt is working his way toward a season-long fine. But…
“There was never one time that I thought he was slow,” Sherwood said. “Never even crossed my mind.”
Sherwood is a bit more accepting of golf’s fate as a bit of a slog; he doesn’t see a solution like baseball enjoyed with the introduction of a pitch clock. But like baseball did with its minor leagues, the PGA Tour is trying to use the KFT to create change. Harris is quick to cite how it took more than a decade for pitch clocks to graduate from baseball’s feeder leagues to the bigs. He’s seen enough from the data that he thinks it would be a good thing for the PGA Tour also to implement. (The PGA Tour has said it wants to, but it hasn’t yet.)
And how about our speed demon?
“It seems like on the bigger tour it’s a bigger issue,” Menante said. “And I think it’s coming out more and more where guys are getting recorded by fans of Oh you took a minute and 20 seconds to hit a six-footer. Like, come on.
“It should just be faster. I think on our tour, they’re really doing a good job. I hope it gets moved up to the PGA Tour just for the fact that accountability is key. Everyone should get a level playing field. It shouldn’t be unfair.”
