If there is one truth upon which every golfer can agree, it’s this: slow play is the worst. And at this week’s U.S. Open at Oakmont, brutal conditions, long walks and long holes are resulting in agonizingly slow rounds.
On Friday, Scottie Scheffler, Viktor Hovland and Collin Morikawa needed a whopping five hours and 44 minutes to play the second round. That equates to nearly 20 minutes per hole. In fact, the trio’s opening three holes reportedly took 71 minutes.
One particular pain point on the course is the 12th hole, a 647-yard par 5. On Friday, there were an incredible five groups on the hole at one time. How does that happen? A backup of three groups waited on the tee, with one group in the fairway and another group on the green. The third group to arrive on the tee ended up waiting nearly a half hour to tee off.
You can imagine that enduring such a glacial pace of play would contribute to other problems on the course, but according to Hovland, whose rounds of 71-68 (one under) have him positioned near the top of the leaderboard, the ample time for rumination between shots actually helped him.
“Personally, when I’ve had a couple bad holes back-to-back, I tend to rush,” Hovland said Friday. “I tend to really get quick. Out here when the rounds are so long, you can’t really do that. As you said, you have to reset, and yeah, you might have had a bad hole on the last hole and then you’re sitting on the tee box for 10, 20 minutes. At least it gives you a good opportunity to get that out of your system and reset and think about the next shot.”
Leave it to Hovland to find a silver lining in what most golfers would describe as excruciating circumstances. Despite the lengthy round, and despite several opportunities for upset — a double bogey on 2, and three more bogeys on 6, 8 and 18 — Hovland kept his composure.
“I didn’t really come close [to losing my mind],” he said. “I was pretty happy with that. Even after the double on 2. Yeah, I kept it together really nicely.”
