‘I’m quite ruthless’: Charley Hull’s LPGA slow-play fix shows little mercy

When you watch Nelly Korda and Charley Hull play golf, their quick pace is immediately evident. There isn’t tons of deliberation before every shot. Select a club, pick a target, hit the shot. Simple.

You wouldn’t know that if you tuned in over the weekend to watch The Annika, though.

As Korda and Hull dueled over the final 36 holes at Pelican Golf Club in the LPGA’s penultimate event of the season, the pace ground to a halt. Playing in the final group on Saturday, the duo needed five hours and 38 minutes to complete their third round. The pace was so slow that they finished the round after dusk with the sun setting on them as they played the 18th hole.

“It’s kind of hard when you don’t really see,” Korda said. “I think it was a little bit of poor planning by starting so late for us. Whenever you’re sitting on 18 and the sun is already down, I mean, it’s never nice.”

Korda can take solace in the fact that her third-round in-the-dark finish did not come back to haunt her as she earned her seventh win of the season on Sunday evening. But the point remains: Slow play is a serious problem in the upper echelon of professional golf.

“It’s ridiculous and I feel sorry for the fans how slow it is out there,” Hull said. “We were out there for five hours and 40 minutes yesterday. We play in a four-ball at home on a hard golf course and we’re round in three and a half, four hours. It is pretty crazy.”

To the LPGA’s credit, the organization does make an effort some effort to curb slow play, with several instances of penalties being handed out over the past several year. But obviously, that loose enforcement is not nearly enough. Despite the threat of penalties and fines, five-plus hour rounds are the norm rather than the exception.

Hull has some ideas on how they can change that.

“I’m quite ruthless, but I said, ‘Listen, if you get three bad timings, every time it’s a tee [sic] shot penalty,” she said. “If you have three of them you lose your Tour card instantly. I’m sure that would hurry a lot of people up and they won’t want to lose their Tour card. That would kill the slow play, but they would never do that.”

The penalty would be harsh, but it would almost certainly curb the slow-play epidemic. For now, slow players can be thankful Hull isn’t in charge of enforcing her rules. If she were, there would be a few less players teeing it up on the LPGA Tour.