PGA Tour to enforce pace of play with secret list of slow players

In April the PGA Tour will start tracking which players are taking “excessive” amounts of time to take shots and penalizing them more harshly.

The tour announced a new policy wherein officials will use its data software, ShotLink, to keep a list of the slowest players on tour week to week, reports said Tuesday. Players on the list who take more than 60 seconds to play a shot will be given an official warning; the second offense will result in a one-stroke penalty.

The so-called “Observation List” will not be made public, however.

Separate from the list, any player who takes more than 120 seconds to play a shot, “absent a good reason for doing so,” will be dinged with an Excessive Shot Time. A player that accumulates two bad times in a single tournament will be assessed a one-stroke penalty, plus another stroke for every bad time thereafter, and players face a $50,000 fine upon their second bad time in a single season.

The policy will go into effect at the RBC Heritage event in April.

“You talk to players, read articles, hear from fans,” said PGA TOUR chief of operations Tyler Dennis. “What gets people, what gnaws at them, are these individual habits that people have. It’s seen as bad etiquette, it’s seen as a distraction, and we’re targeting those individual moments to help their fellow competitors and assist our media partners with presentation.”