The pace of play at the 2025 Open Championship has been a bit of a slog. It has Bryson DeChambeau thinking of solutions. It got under Marc Leishman’s skin. It has perplexed Jon Rahm.
That happens on a seaside links course with constantly changing weather conditions and a legacy-changing prize at the end. Things will be deliberate.
All 2016 Open Championship winner Henrik Stenson asks is that the officials consider everything when policing the pace of play.
Stenson, who shot a 1-under 70 during Saturday’s third round, spent some time in the video replay area with Open officials after the round to discuss how he and partner Sebastian Soderberg were told they needed to speed up their play on the 10th hole.
“I joked with the other guys after the first two days, first round took about an hour over the allotted time,” Stenson said. “Second round was four to five minutes over. I said, we just have to wait until halfway through Saturday or Sunday and someone is going to come up to you and say that you’re two minutes over and they’re going to start pushing you on. That’s exactly what happened.”
Stenson and Soderberg did their best to make up the time, but both made bogey on 14, and officials put them on the clock when they reached the 15th hole.
That caused Stenson to head into the replay review area and have a lengthy chat with one of the R&A’s head rules officials to let off some steam about being put on the clock after the slow pace was tolerated during the first two rounds.
“They started putting us on the clock on 15,” Stenson said. “When you’re almost done, it’s not really going to make a huge difference. So it was more I wanted to vent that with him. I think if you can play an hour over time scheduled in one day, and all of a sudden two minutes is of huge importance the next day, it feels a bit inconsistent to me.”
Officials also put DeChambeau on the clock late in his round on Saturday. After shooting a 3-under 68, the two-time U.S. Open Champion offered some solutions to speed up the game — one that he’s sure won’t be popular with all players.
“It’s very simple. It’s not difficult at all,” DeChambeau said. “You eventually time everybody for their whole entire round. Very simple. Nobody wants to do it because people are too scared to get exposed, which I am an advocate for. I’d love to be timed, and I have no problem with that.
“I think it would be more fair towards everybody,” DeChambeau continued. “If somebody is playing slower, the guy can go up to him and say, ‘Hey, man, you’re over par with your time.’ All you do is you just time them for every single shot. He gets there and puts the bag down, and how long it takes him to hit that shot and how long it takes him to walk to the green. It’s not rocket science. You time how long someone takes individually, and then you separate that from the other person playing. You start/stop on him the whole entire thing. It’s one way.”
