‘Incredibly unfair’: PGA Tour contenders criticized for pace of play ‘mind games’

You’ve heard of icing the kicker.

How about icing the contender?

The latter is what appeared to happen during the final round of Sunday’s Houston Open, as the tournament leader, Min Woo Lee, endured a bizarre set of pace of play “mind games” from his Sunday playing partner, Alejandro Tosti, according to NBC’s broadcast team.

The weirdness appeared to begin on the 8th hole, as Lee, a 26-year-old pro with zero career wins, attempted to navigate a rules situation that necessitated a lengthy ruling on the right side of the fairway. Ultimately, Lee elected to take an unplayable from a bush on the side of the 8th hole, receiving a one-shot penalty before making a tidy par. Tosti, however, took issue with the amount of time it took Lee to figure out the ruling, complaining to a rules official about Lee’s pace of play. (Lee took more than 30 minutes to play the hole.)

For a little while, that seemed like the end of the drama. But then the NBC broadcast team cut back to Tosti and Lee’s group as they walked up the 12th fairway, where on-course analyst Bones Mackay had an interesting update.

“So Alejandro Tosti is way back there in the fairway — he just reached the fairway bones, what’s going on down there?” Burkowski asked.

“Steve, I don’t know what’s going on, but Tosti’s playing at his own pace,” Mackay replied. “At times it’s normal and at times it’s glacially slow, and he’s decided on this particular hole to really take his time. He’s holding up play in this particular group.”

NBC play-by-play man Dan Hicks then interjected with a brief recap of the situation on the 8th.

“And you remember the discussion that Tosti had — for background here — with the PGA Tour official,” Hicks said. “He was upset with the time that Min Woo Lee was taking at the par-5 8th, so we’ve got a … little thing going on there with the last group.”

“It’s just play whenever you want with that group,” Kevin Kisner, NBC’s lead analyst, replied dryly.

The NBC team left it off there, but then returned to Tosti’s group as he finally reached his ball in the fairway several minutes behind schedule.

“Tosti wasn’t even the last guy to hit off the tee,” Hicks said.

“He wasn’t, he’s really playing some mind games,” Brad Faxon said.

Hicks acknowledged the weirdness of the situation. It is somewhat unprecedented for contenders at PGA Tour events to engage in competitive antics like the ones NBC was accusing Tosti of doing. If he was trying to throw Lee off-kilter, Tosti’s behavior represented a major breach in golf etiquette. That Lee was the target of his actions was equally nefarious: Min Woo is still a PGA Tour youngster, and at the time of Tosti’s apparent slow-roll, he was trying to cling to a late lead for his first victory.

“Bones has seen a few things happen out there on the fairways through the years,” Hicks said. “he’s not gonna bring anything up unless he feels it has some validity to it.”

Faxon, like many at home, appeared more concerned about how Tosti’s actions might affect Lee than by the intent behind them.

“[Lee’s] head is really in the ballgame given the fact he’s trying to post his first win,” Bones said. “The bottom line is this is tremendously unfair for a 26-year-old guy trying to get over the finish line for the first time.”

Tosti, a 28-year-old Argentinian pro, has had an unusual history of controversy at this event and in pro golf. In 2024, he and fellow competitor Tony Finau got into an argument over the playing order. In 2023, after securing his PGA Tour status, Tosti was kicked out of the Korn Ferry Tour’s Boise Open for a “disciplinary matter.”