By Joel Beall
Brooks Koepka is the best player in golf. And he’s quickly becoming one of its most outspoken, at least when it comes to slow play.

Throughout the past season, Koepka has sounded off on the game’s pace issues, highlighted by calling out Bryson DeChambeau in February and demonstratively expressing frustration with J.B. Holmes at the Open Championship. Speaking with the media on Wednesday at the Northern Trust, Koepka again hammered home his displeasure with the sport’s speed or lack thereof.

“I think it’s just gotten out of hand,” Koepka said at Liberty National. “It seems now that there are so many sports psychologists and everybody telling everybody that they can’t hit it until they’re ready; that you have to fully process everything. I mean, I take 15 seconds and go, and I’ve done all right. So I don’t understand why they’re taking a minute and a half.”

Koepka said he’s frustrated and baffled at what his fellow players are doing on the course, particularly with relatively easy decisions.

“Sometimes they might be trying to decide what club to hit. Well, you’ve had a day to think about it, and it’s pretty clear what the tee shot is,” Koepka said. “I mean, I just don’t get—a lot of times it’s on the simpler shots. The difficult ones, you already know what to do with it, but it’s the simpler ones where guys seem to take their time.”

Koepka relented that, in his position, there’s only so much he can do, saying the onus falls on rules officials to enforce pace.

“What I don’t understand is, if I hit in the water, I have to take a penalty stroke. It’s in the rule book,” Koepka said. “And then you have 40 seconds to hit a shot. That’s in the rule book, too. … They’re all in the rule book. So figure it out and penalize somebody.”

The reigning Player of the Year wasn’t the only one to address the subject. Tiger Woods halted his practice round after nine holes because of stiffness but still made his way to the flash area to answer questions after a stroll around the course Wednesday morning. When asked his thoughts on slow play, the 15-time major winner shared how some players are battling the issue.

“We’ve had guys—I’m not going to mention any names here, OK. … But we’ve had guys that have played with slow players, that will play slow on purpose to put them on the clock, so the group will play fast,” Woods said. “They want to play fast. And that’s their version of combatting slow play is they will play even slower.”

Unfortunately, Woods said, that creates a separate problem, as that decision creates a pile-up in the groups behind.

“We can only go as fast as the group in front of us goes,” Woods said. “It’s important that the first group goes out and sets the pace because as you know, the times get slower as you go on, and if the first group goes out slow or has rulings, hits the ball badly, it just logjams everyone behind them.”

Though Woods said slow play has been an issue since he arrived on tour, Koepka warned that failing to take action will damage the sport in the long run.

“I mean, five and a half hours to play golf is a long time,” Koepka said. “Everybody’s going to get bored.”

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By Ryan Herrington
PORTRUSH, Northern Ireland — Brooks Koepka knew what he was getting into on Sunday at Royal Portrush. It wasn’t just trying to figure out a way to rally from seven shots back of Open Championship leader Shane Lowry and steal a fifth major title in 10 starts. And he wasn’t just trying to do it in a steady rain and winds blowing 20 miles per hour. There was also the golfer he was going to be paired with in day’s penultimate twosome.

J.B. Holmes’ reputation for slow play precedes him. So does Koepka’s outspokenness about pro golf’s pace-of-play issues. The two were bound to collide on Sunday, and it seemed like they did a few times on the back nine. At one moment off the 12th green Koepka was spotted talking to a rules official and motioning to his wrist at the spot one would ordinarily be wearing a watch, as if to suggest time was dragging by.

In another instance, TV cameras caught Koepka looking upset at Holmes deliberateness on a green.

Would love to know what @BKoepka is thinking right now. #TheOpen pic.twitter.com/CNbWf2Se5r

— George Savaricas (@GeorgeSavaricas) July 21, 2019

Of course it didn’t help matters that Holmes was having an awful final round, the elements and the moment double-teaming him. He started the day six shots back of Lowry in third place, then hit his tee shot on the first hole out of bounds en route to a front-nine 41. It got worse on the back, as he eventually signed for an 87 to fall into a tie for 67th place.

Koepka, meanwhile, continued to battle his putting, unable to hole any early putts to give him some momentum before the weather made a comeback near impossible. Still, he managed to finish off a closing 74 that left him in a tied for fourth place.

After the round, Koepka was both pointed and tempered when asked about the incident and the day overall with Holmes. “Yeah, I mean, there were some times where I thought it was slow,” Koepka said. “There’s a lot of slow guys out here.”

Richard Heathcote/R&A
Koepka walks briskly through a tunnel on the Portrush course on Sunday as his playing parter, Holmes, is off in the distance.

Koepka explained what is his biggest issue with Holmes on the course.

“I just always play … I’m ready to go most of the time,” Koepka said. “That’s what I don’t understand when it’s your turn to hit, your glove is not on, then you start thinking about it, that’s where the problem lies. It’s not that he takes that long. He doesn’t do anything until his turn. That’s the frustrating part. But he’s not the only one that does it out here.”

Just how bothered Koepka truly was is hard to tell given the way in which he finished out his round, which capped off an impressive stretch of major play in 2019. In all, he recorded a win, two seconds and a T-4. By carding top-five finishes in all four majors, he’s just the fifth golfer to accomplish this, joining Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods, Rickie Fowler and Jordan Spieth.

“It was a great run for three of them and then this one, nothing you could do,” Koepka said. “How cool is that to win in Ireland? Props to Shane, he played unbelievable golf.

“As a whole it’s awesome. That’s what I’m striving to do, play well in the big events. And I sort of did that. This week is disappointing, but the rest of them have been—it’s been great. I’m not going to lie. It’s been fun. I would have liked to have just made a few more and finished it off with a bunch of second places.”

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By Alex Myers
Another long day of golf is in the books at the 2019 Open Championship and we have decided to keep it short in summing up all the action from Royal Portrush on Friday. Here’s the story of the second round in 9 (or so) sentences.

1.) Shane Lowry is carrying all of Ireland on his shoulders.

Ramsey Cardy

The guy is flying the flag (literally) on his golf shoes and flying high atop the leader board through two days. The Guinness will be flowing from the claret jug come Sunday night if he keeps this up.

2.) Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson made history! (In a bad way)

Mike Ehrmann

For the first time, Tiger and Phil missed the cut at the same major. Ever. Wow. Speaking of Tiger …

3.) Tiger Woods just wants “to go home.”

Ross Kinnaird/R&A

Tiger looked much better on Friday, but his 70 wasn’t enough to stick around for the weekend. He also announced he’s taking the next couple weeks off, including skipping the WGC event in Memphis. Sadly, there are weekend golfers who play more than this guy these days.

4.) J.B. Holmes played on his high school team as a THIRD-grader, is still good at golf.

Francois Nel

When you spend two days at the top of the leader board at a major, fun nuggets like this resurface.

RELATED: The story of Day 1 at the British Open in 9 (or so) sentences

5.) Brooks Koepka hasn’t “made anything,” still lurks.

David Cannon

At five under, Koepka is in great position to finish in the top two for a fifth consecutive major. In other words, this tournament is probably over.

6.) Jordan Spieth has made just about everything, still lurks.

Matthew Lewis/R&A

After scrambling his butt off for two days, Spieth is in contention at five under, trying to win his first event since the 2017 Open. The man loves slow greens. Well, and fast ones considering his record at Augusta. Let’s just say the man can get hot with the putter.

7.) The British are coming!

ANDY BUCHANAN

Tommy Fleetwood and Lee Westwood (!) are one shot back. Is it his time?! At LONG last?!

8.) Justin Harding went from a near-death experience to nearly leading.

The South African picked himself up from that bunker mishap gone viral on Thursday, dusted off his pants, and shot the low round of the tournament (65) so far on Friday. Never give up, kids.

9.) Rory McIlroy makes a great Friday charge … but falls one stroke short of making the cut.

A second-round 65 couldn’t undo the damage of his opening-hole 8 on Thursday.

Andrew Redington

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Given the difficult conditions—a disjointed week that included playing multiple rounds in the same day because of inclement weather at the start of the tournament, plus chilly temperatures and wind gusts upwards of 30 m.p.h. on the final afternoon—it was an impressive performance, even if Holmes was aided by Thomas’ lousy putting and four-over 75 on Sunday.

Hey, someone had to claim the title, and Holmes did enough to be the one holding the trophy at the end when plenty of others didn’t. A win is a win.

“Always thought that would have been a better chance for me,” Holmes said of the nasty weather. “Usually when the conditions are crappy, I do better.”

It didn’t hurt, either, that he took his time in doing so.

The final threesome of Holmes, Thomas and Adam Scott played in 5 hours, 29 minutes. Most of the slow-rolling came at the hand of Holmes, long considered one of the biggest culprits in the game of playing at a glacial pace.

Not that he seemed to mind.

“Well, you play in 25-mile-an-hour gusty winds and see how fast you play when you’re playing for the kind of money and the points and everything that we’re playing for,” Holmes replied when asked about the topic following the victory. “You can’t just get up there and whack it when it’s blowing that hard.”

On one hand, he had a point. The conditions were difficult, and Riviera is a difficult golf course.

On the other, Holmes’ group found itself a full hole behind the group in front of them for nearly the entire round. Still, they were never put on the clock, or so much as warned to pick up the pace.

“I’ll tell you my thing on slow play is it’s never going to change,” said Scott on Sunday night, reiterating a point he made earlier in the week in an interview with Golf Digest in which he admitted that he told the PGA Tour he’d be willing to intentionally take a penalty to make a point. “Until television and sponsors say ‘No more money,’ slow play ain’t going to change.”

He ain’t wrong.

That doesn’t mean it’s right, either.

Holmes had the support of members in the crowd, even if he took an awfully long time getting around the course on Sunday. (Stan Badz)

Pace of play has for decades been a topic of conversation, with many griping for the game to move faster. Yet in a recent anonymous player survey from Golf Magazine when players were asked if they played at an acceptable pace, laughably, 100 per cent responded yes.

But when an average NFL game is just past 3 hours, an NBA game around 2½ hours, and a Major League Baseball game 3 hours, golf is asking a lot when it comes to taking 5½ hours to play, even when it is the final group.

It’s not always as simple as move faster. And it’s not always better when players do—Jordan Spieth’s 30-minute bogey on the 13th hole during the final round of the 2017 Open Championship at Royal Birkdale, and Tiger Woods’ stalking of the 16th hole in the final round of the 2005 Masters before chipping in was great theatre. But in most cases it is.

“It was slow,” Thomas admitted of Sunday’s final round of the Genesis, adding that wasn’t the reason he didn’t play well.

It also wasn’t a good look, for the tournament, or Holmes. Why? Put it this way: Will you remember the final round of the Genesis Open more for Holmes’ or Thomas’ performances? Or for Holmes’ pace of play?

When slow play becomes the topic of conversation—on social media, on CBS’ telecast and among fans at Riviera—than the guy who won (or lost) the tournament, that is a problem.

Which is just as unfortunate as the fact that slow play is something that doesn’t appear to be improving or going away anytime soon.

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By Brian Wacker
Despite the disjointed nature of the weather-plagued Genesis Open, where the third and fourth rounds were completed on Sunday at Riviera Country Club, Justin Thomas looked to be in control of the tournament—at least through the first 55 holes.

Then came a missed 11-footer for par on the second hole of his final round, and another from just inside eight feet on the fourth, and another empty 11-footer on the fifth.

By the time Thomas made his fourth bogey of the day, on the drivable par-4 10th, where yanked his tee shot well left of the green before a three-putt that included missing a five-footer, his four-stroke lead at the start of the round had vanished. J.B. Holmes would take the lead and eventually the title, surprisingly beating Thomas by one stroke.

“I really struggled putting in that wind out there,” said Thomas upon finishing with a four-over 75 after posting rounds of 66-65-65 to tie the tournament’s 54-hole scoring record. “It’s something that I’ve needed to get better at, and it unfortunately just kind of showed a flaw in my game.”

Despite all of that, Thomas had multiple chances for his 10th career victory and first since the WGC-Bridgestone Invitational last August. After a two-shot swing to give up the lead to J.B. Holmes, Thomas grabbed it right back with a birdie on the par-5 11th while Holmes made bogey.

He wouldn’t hang on to the lead long.

Two holes later, Thomas three-putted again, this time missing a par putt from eight feet and then his bogey tries from inside three feet. Oof. He followed the double bogey with another bogey at 14, where this time he missed from five feet.

And still, he had a chance to tie the lead with two holes to play. Trailing Holmes by two, Thomas stuck his approach on the par-3 16th to seven feet and made the putt to cut the deficit to one. But on the par-5 17th, he came up empty again, missing an eight-footer for birdie that burned the edge before tapping in for par.

Needing to birdie the last to force a playoff, Thomas’ 23-footer from behind the pin on 18 slid by on the low side and that was that.

“J.B. won. He played great,” Thomas said. “But it’s always a bummer to hand him a tournament. I feel like I should have won that thing.”

To Thomas’ point: He took 34 putts in the final round and was -2.954 in strokes gained/putting after three straight rounds of terrific putting. Over his final 18 holes, Thomas made just one putt outside 10 feet.

The one he missed that stuck out the most?

“The third putt on 13. It’s just I’ve got to stop doing that,” he said. “I could feel the wind coming, and I got scared so I tried to hit it harder, and I did hit it harder and that’s why I missed it, I jammed it. That’s not the speed that I hit putts at when I’m putting well. And every time I miss a short putt, it’s from that similar kind of scenario where I feel something when I’m over it and I either don’t back off or I try to adjust over it. It ended up costing me the golf tournament.”

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By Alex Myers
You obviously don’t get to the top of the Official World Golf Ranking without a solid all-around game. But when Jason Day was really rolling from the summer of 2015 to the spring of 2016, it was mainly due to how he was rolling his golf ball on the greens. Day finished sixth on the PGA Tour in strokes gained: putting in the 2014-15 season and first in the stat in 2015-16.

And after slipping to 39th during a difficult 2017, Day leads again in the tour’s best putting evaluation metric thanks to having the best week on the greens of anyone in the new season.

Related: Watch Jason Day make a ridiculous par from Pebble Beach’s beach

Day finished T-2 at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am, but he was No. 1 in SGP for the tournament — and it wasn’t even close. Day finished the week with a sparkling SGP of +3.616, meaning he gained 3.616 shots on the field per round on the greens, or nearly 14.5 shots for the event. In fact, Day was more than one stroke per round better than the next best putter in the field last week.

Previously, J.B. Holmes’s SGP of +3.463 at the Farmers Insurance Open (won by Day) was the best in 10 tour events that have tracked the stat this season. No one else has posted anything above +3.0 in 2017-18.

For the season, Day now leads the tour in the stat at +1.861, which explains why he already has a win and a runner-up in his first two starts of 2018 despite poor play from tee to green. The Aussie currently ranks only 94th in strokes gained: tee-to-green, dragged down by a dismal 189th in strokes gained: approach-the-green.

“If I keep doing what I’m doing,” said Day, who won seven times in 17 starts from 2015-2016, on Sunday, “finishing first and second in the first two events, but also improve that and kind of cut out the blemishes, then hopefully it will be more like 2015.”

It already is when he gets on the green.

The post Jason Day’s putting was absurdly good at Pebble Beach — and it put him back in a familiar position appeared first on Golf Digest Middle East.

Personally, I felt more sympathy than the CBS announcers, the writers, the fans and even Holmes’ fellow players. The timing was bad, yes, but Noren could just as easily been delayed for 10 minutes by a group on the green (it happens all the time, especially in the winter). Also, isn’t it the nature of professional golf that players must summon intense concentration after long periods of inactivity, over and over and over? This is, after all, a sport where a theoretical highlight reel of each moment in a round when a golfer is actually striking the ball would last about 90 seconds. If I were being glib, I could describe a round of golf as two minutes of exertion sprinkled among five hours of waiting. Is four more minutes really that big a deal? And hey, why didn’t everyone get this mad at Jordan Spieth when he took a half hour to hit a shot at the British Open last year? Is it because it’s easier to pick on a low-profile athlete?

Part of my sympathy, too, stemmed from Holmes himself. I interviewed him in 2014, not long after he won the Wells Fargo Championship, the third of his four career PGA Tour titles. He struck me as an atypical American pro. For one thing, he’s dealt with a rare amount of adversity. He grew up fighting a form of dyslexia that made it hard for him to read small but critical words like “it,” “and,” “but” and “the.” It made school an agonizing process, and he had to work hard just to make average grades—one of the hardest fights of his life was finishing with a 3.25 GPA at the University of Kentucky.

The brain problems didn’t stop once he got on the PGA Tour, either. In 2011, he started to notice his balance failing, and after almost falling in the water at the Players Championship, he learned he had a Chiari brain malformation, which meant his cerebellum was being pushed into an opening at the top of the spinal canal. It required two surgeries—doctors removed part of his skull—and a complicated recovery. (As of 2014, Holmes was keeping the partial skull in a jar.)

Stuart Franklin/Getty Images
It took Jordan Spieth nearly 30 minutes to play his infamous recovery shot on the 13th hole at Birkdale during last summer’s British Open, and the criticism he took was mild compared to Holmes’ 4-minute, 10-second episode this weekend.

So, Holmes’ is not your average American country-club prodigy—his dad was an insurance salesman, his mom was a nurse, and any privileges he had growing up were offset by his learning disability. None of which means he did the right thing at Torrey Pines, of course. The criticism was harsh, but valid, and slow golf is a plague that needs to be cured. It’s just that I felt a wince of sympathy at seeing Holmes portrayed as selfish, when he had seemed so grounded to me, at least by PGA Tour standards.

But, bias aside, reality is reality—Holmes pulled a selfish move on the 18th hole. He may not have realized he was doing it, but selfishness doesn’t require self-awareness. In fact, the two are often mutually exclusive. In golf, over and over, selfishness wins out over self-awareness, but the truth goes beyond that simple observation. It’s worth exploring not just why professional golfers tend to be self-centered, but why they have to be, and why the sport self-selects individuals who meet that criteria and weeds out those who can’t pass the test. Let’s start with a few quotes I’ve collected over the years:

“This is going to sound selfish, but being a pitcher in little league, I’d get out there and pitch four, five scoreless innings, and they’d score a run and we’d lose 1-0 or something, and I hated that. … In golf, the better you play the higher you finish. You don’t really have to depend on anybody else, you just gotta do your own thing, and I thought, yeah, sounds very attractive to me.” —Brian Harman

“I loved team sports, and team golf is my favorite kind of golf, but at the same time the reason I fell in love with golf is I could control my own outcome, I never had to rely on someone else. … It was something I was able to do myself, and really got a lot of satisfaction from that.” —Jordan Spieth

“I pretty much started just playing golf probably when I was in seventh grade. I just liked golf just because it’s … you know, it’s a sport you can play by yourself, it’s just you and the golf course, so you can’t blame anyone else. You don’t have to depend on anyone else, either.” —Dustin Johnson

“Let’s just talk about how golf is the best sport. My dad wanted me to play baseball, but you can play baseball—whatever position you are—you can play with no errors, bat 1.000 and go 5-for-5 that game and lose the game. Why? Or you can throw perfect pitches but you have a human being calling the strikes or balls. You see on TV when they have that little box, it doesn’t match up sometimes. You can play a perfect game and lose it. But when it came to golf, it was straight me and only me. I win or lose.” —Bubba Watson, told to Scott Michaux

I’ll stop there, because you get the point, but I could pull the same quote, with only superficial variations, from a dozen other players—and those are just the ones I’ve asked. To succeed at a sport like golf, which requires thousands of hours of solitary practice, you have to enjoy being alone. You must be an individualist, in other words—someone who doesn’t need, or even want, the support of a team.   

Donald Miralle/Getty Images
Noren took the delay in stride, but we’ll never really know if he might have won the title outright on Sunday had he had the opportunity to play more quickly.

A person who can’t tolerate solitude for very long, who gets uncomfortable without regular human interaction, will never put in the lonely hours needed to become a pro. And that’s what I mean about self-selection—unlike team sports, golf puts up an initial obstacle that only a certain type of introvert can surmount. In the same way that most basketball players are tall, or most great actors love attention, golf rejects the social animals and embraces the loners. And when those loners succeed, it can harden a budding solipsistic mindset—they’ve learned what works.

Selfishness becomes even more important at the professional level. Every golfer is a kind of CEO (an annoying cliché, I know), but the success of the “company” depends primarily on one person. The successful players build teams around them (an ironic but necessary evil) to shelter them from “distractions” and allow them to maintain the self-centered drive that vaulted them to the professional level in the first place. This is a heightened, big-picture kind of selfishness, and preserving a solid career demands it. Lose that me-first edge, and your status will disappear along with it. Forging an insular existence in a very public field may seem impossible, but the best ones manage.

Of course, this mindset can seep into other walks of life where the results, to some, appear less attractive—social behavior, political leanings or even situational awareness on the course. So while you or I may have spared a thought for Noren on the 18th hole at Torrey Pines, Holmes thought nothing of waiting four minutes for the wind to die down, and he didn’t think it necessary to apologize after. He may have more humility than most of his peers, and he may have endured more hardship, but at heart he’s still a golfer, and the first and last thought in that moment was for himself.

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By Joel Beall
The golf world has not been kind to J.B. Holmes for “icing” Alex Noren on the final hole Sunday at the Farmers Insurance Open. That’s included fire from his fellow pros. On Wednesday, someone came to Holmes’ defense: the reigning PGA Tour Player of the Year.

“I have J.B.’s back all day on that situation,” Justin Thomas told the media at the Waste Management Phoenix Open. “If you put me in 18 fairway, and I need an eagle to win the golf tournament or to have a chance to win the golf tournament, I mean, I knew the exact position he was in, and I would do the same thing.”

Needing an eagle to tie the clubhouse lead, Holmes was criticised for taking more than four minutes to hit his second shot into the par-5 18th. That he ultimately decided to lay up only amplified the noise. (Holmes later said he felt he had a better chance at making 3 by holing out a wedge rather than attempting to keep a fairway wood on the firm green.)

“If you put me in 18 fairway and I need an eagle to win the golf tournament or to have a chance to win the golf tournament, I mean I knew the exact position he was in, and I would do the same thing,” Thomas continued. “If I have a 5-wood in my hands—and he hits it pretty similar trajectory to me—that thing’s going to go high. And into the wind, he’s into about a 10- to 15-mph wind, that wind gusts at all, like it was, when he was waiting for the gusts to go down, that ball’s in the water. Three-wood, as long as he hits it, has no chance. You saw where [Alex] Noren hit it, and J.B.’s probably longer than Noren, so and then he’s got no chance.

“So he’s debating what to do, what to not do. I get it, 4 minutes, 10 seconds is a long time, but nobody behind him, last hole, you need a 3 to win the golf tournament, you need to take as long as you can.”

Though Thomas did mention slow play is a problem on tour—one the players need to discuss—to place the final group’s six-hour round on the foot of Holmes is unfair.

“It was a bummer. I hate it for him, how much he’s getting bashed and ridiculed,” Thomas said. “When you’re trying to win a golf tournament, this sport is very much about committing and being a 100 percent being all in on what you’re doing. I honestly applaud him for waiting and making the decision until he was ready, because he was just trying to win the tournament.”

Holmes is in this week’s WMPO field, a tournament he’s won twice in his career.

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