Bryson DeChambeau’s start to the 2020 PGA Tour season left us under the impression that he’d become a changed (or at least different) man.

From dietary changes providing him with explosive length off the tee, to his development as a semi-professional gamer and Twitch streamer, to an ab-off with Brooks Koepka, it all felt different. Bryson seemed to have moved past his furious, highly publicized battle with slow play and toward a new dawn, embracing life as one of golf’s most enigmatic stars.

A+ highlight reel from @OutsideTheCut of Bryson's twitch stream last night. pic.twitter.com/PlD1AumB7S

— LKD (@LukeKerrDineen) January 7, 2020

But Sunday morning at the Dubai Desert Classic, DeChambeau reminded us of an important lesson about change: it takes time.

Despite driving the ball out of his shoes for the majority of the week, DeChambeau couldn’t keep himself off the European Tour’s unforgiving slow-play clock. And the result wasn’t pretty.

DeChambeau could be seen on the TV broadcast arguing with the rules official over the initial ruling, which happened on the par-5 10th.

Today in Dubai, Bryson DeChambeau was put on the clock and given a slow-play warning on the 10th hole.

He went on to shoot 76, T-8, which included bogeying his last four holes. pic.twitter.com/3RovwMAgbM

— Samantha Marks (@SamanthaSMarks) January 26, 2020

As he continued down the back nine, the wheels fell off. DeChambeau bogeyed the last four holes en route to a four-over finish for the day to move him to five under for the tournament.

Making matters worse, had he merely gone even par through the final four (a stretch of holes he played two under for the week heading into Sunday), he would’ve found himself in a three-way playoff. Instead, it was Lucas Herbert who emerged from the playoff to win.

The Sunday finish amounted to a frustrating end of the week for DeChambeau, who moved from T1 to T18 as a result of the final quartette of holes.

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Perhaps someone should inform Sebastian Soderberg that the European Tour’s “Race to Dubai” isn’t literally a race.

There are many culprits in golf’s slow play crisis, but Soderberg isn’t among them, especially not after Sunday morning. The European Tour pro played his final round at the Dubai Desert Classic like his hair was on fire, finishing with a 3-over 75 in a little over an hour and a half.

97 minutes. 75 shots. 😅

Sebastian Söderberg on the fastest round in European Tour history.#ODDC pic.twitter.com/4J4TxH9wV1

— DP World Tour (@DPWorldTour) January 26, 2020

“I just tried to play as fast as possible,” he said after the round. “I felt like it would be a fun thing to do and I didn’t necessarily think that it would hurt my game too much at some points.”

The blazing round amounts to the fastest in European Tour history by nearly a half-hour, clocking in at 97 minutes and destroying Thomas Pieters’ previous record of a little under two hours.

Excuse me @EuropeanTour, is this true that Soderberg has already finished?!! That’s most definitely a record if so surely? 🏃🏼‍♂️🏌🏼‍♂️ pic.twitter.com/ObpFyZjZWV

— Eddie Pepperell (@PepperellEddie) January 26, 2020

Soderberg was uniquely positioned to pull off the historic feat. His third-round 77 left him at 10 over, in last place among the 71 golfers who made the cut. When he realized he’d be teeing off alone on Sunday morning, he elected to chase a different kind of history.

“I said, ‘we’ll try to go as fast as possible for the first five-to-six holes,'” Soderberg said. “I took my time on putts and normal shots and just ran in between.”

After a birdie on the par-4 5th hole, he was off to the races.

“I played quite well in the beginning so I just kept going,” he said. “I think it was a record-breaking time, so it was quite fun.”

Soderberg finished the tournament well out of contention at 10 over, but incredibly, his lightning-fast final round allowed him to jump Aaron Rai on the leaderboard. Not bad for an early morning workout (provided his caddie lives to tell the tale).

Tough morning for the caddie 😂 pic.twitter.com/wa50hzRv8W

— Hero Dubai Desert Classic (@DubaiDCGolf) January 26, 2020

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Both major men’s golf tours have taken recent steps to attack the slow play epidemic within their ranks. That’s just fine with Bryson DeChambeau, who temporarily became the face of slow play after a few high-profile incidents in 2019. The way he sees it, he never had a slow-play problem in the first place, and all the racket last year was much ado about nothing.

For some background, the PGA Tour announced an updated Pace-of-Play Policy on Tuesday, following in the footsteps of the European Tour, which announced updated slow play regulations last summer, and made them even more severe for 2020. For both tours, it’s a positive step in the right direction and a genuine sign that they are taking the problem seriously.

DeChambeau is overseas this week to play the European Tour’s Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship. While he spends most of his time on the U.S. circuit, he’ll have to contend with the new Euro Pace of Play regulations first, also known as the four-part plan. But the most significant change, assessing a penalty after a player receives two bad times, matches the PGA Tour’s new regulations.

At his press conference in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday, DeChambeau said he “welcomes” the stricter regulations.

“Look, I don’t want to be out there for six hours, nor does anybody, right. And there’s numerous times out there, more than not, I’m waiting,” he explained. “It’s going to hurt my momentum. Every time it happens, I feel like I get cold.”

Similarly, Dechambeau added that he doesn’t want to cause those problems for other players, saying, “I don’t want that to happen to people behind me or in front of me.”

But DeChambeau spent most of the time defending his actions from the previous season, particularly the controversy at the Northern Trust where he was caught on camera taking what many thought was a painfully long time to hit a chip and a putt during the second round.

In DeChambeau’s eyes, he was playing within the Pace-of-Play rules the entire time, and the controversy was completely unwarranted.

“I was playing under the rules and there was no rhyme or reason to be called out,” he said, “other than the fact that it looked like it was a really, really long time that it took, and it was, absolutely. I’m not saying it wasn’t.”

He then argued that what he did was no different than what all other PGA Tour golfers do on a regular basis, and he was unfairly targeted. The difference is that he was caught on camera.

“There’s no reason why I should have been given so much heat, considering other things that had occurred that day and previous days of other people that I played with … it happens literally with everybody out there. They just caught it on camera at that specific moment in time,” DeChambeau said. “To be called out like that was kind of weird, but it is what it is and I take it and I understand it.”

Though it’s often said that it’s impossible to fix something without acknowledging there is a problem, DeChambeau genuinely doesn’t think he has issues with his pace of play. And even if he did last year, he’s confident those problems will be solved this year, not because he’s strategized to play more quickly, but because he’s improved a particular part of his game.

“Considering how far I’m hitting I don’t think that will be an issue anymore.”

He’ll get his first chance to prove himself on Thursday, and he can be sure the whole golf world will be paying extra close attention to his pace.

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Pace-of-play changes are coming to the PGA Tour, and soon.

The Tour’s policy board approved a series of changes to address slow play problems on Tour earlier this week, just months after an August announcement in which the Tour said it would dive deeper into the issue.

Golf Digest reported the changes are not expected to be drastic and are directed more toward individual players than at adjusting the game at large — unlike the European Tour’s sweeping pace-of-play changes this summer.

PGA Tour Commissioner Jay Monahan said at the Tour Championship in August that the PGA’s review of pace-of-play changes would occur independently of the European Tour’s. It appears as though, following the review, the Tour has determined the problem of pace-of-play on their circuit needs an adjustment, not an overhaul.

Golf Digest also reported that the changes are likely to go into effect after the Masters in April.

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Slow play and the way it’s policed in pro golf has long been a hot and controversial topic among players, fans and media, but apparently it’s a problem at the younger levels of elite golf, too.

GOLF.com recently conducted its first-ever Anonymous Junior Golfer Survey, in which 64 competitive junior golfers (boys and girls, ages 12-18) in four regions of the country were asked about their game, practice habits, parents, the pros and more.

Some of the most interesting results surrounded pace of play. For example, 86 percent of the juniors polled answered “yes” when asked if there is a pace-of-play problem in competitive junior golf circles, yet only 3 percent of them considered themselves to be slow players. The other 97 percent said they didn’t consider themselves slow. Additionally, almost half of those polled (44 percent) said they or someone they were playing against had been penalized for slow play. That’s a huge number when contrasted with the PGA Tour, where slow play penalties are rare.

Slow play in golf is a topic that’s been around forever and won’t go away soon. The stigma has a trickle down effect that can influence younger generations — If my favorite pro is taking this long to hit a shot, why can’t I? — which won’t do the game any favors in bucking the trend.

Brooks Koepka and Bryson DeChambeau were the centerpieces of a debate surrounding slow-play on Tour toward the end of last season, and that essentially pushed the Tour to start monitoring the pace-of-play of every player on the course using ShotLink data. (According to DeChambeau, that’s already started and players have seen the results.)

Last month at the BMW PGA Championship the European Tour rolled out another step of its previously announced action plan to tackle pace of play. Every group had a tracking device attached to one golf bag in the group, and on-tee video boards let groups know if they were keeping up with the players ahead.

The complete Anonymous Junior Golfer Survey will be unveiled later this week on GOLF.com.

Golf is slow. Professional golf is slow. The degree to which that slowness is an inevitable feature of the game versus being “too slow,” “crisis slow” or “embarrassing slow” is a matter of opinion. But there’s no doubt that the chorus of professional golfers calling for speeding up play has never been louder.

Brooks Koepka has never minced words on the topic. Rory McIlroy has added his thoughts, too. And a video of Bryson DeChambeau taking more than two minutes to hit a 10-foot putt at the Northern Trust went viral, sparking a confrontation with Koepka and inspiring several more players to speak out against the plague of slow play.

With that in mind, co-host Sean Zak and I had iconic PGA Tour rules official Slugger White on this week’s Drop Zone podcast to discuss what he and the Tour think of slow play. While he’s keenly aware that people are discussing it, White made it clear that it’s a constant focus of his team, but that he doesn’t think there’s a ton that can be done to speed things up.

A portion of the interview with White is transcribed below; I’d encourage you to listen to the whole interview here for Slugger’s perspective on the intricacies of the rules, the Tour’s most knowledgeable players, backstopping, giving rulings to angry players and much more.

DROP ZONE: Do you guys see that as a big issue and what are some of the steps that you guys take to make sure you keep play moving?

SLUGGER WHITE: I don’t see a big problem in the last 40 years, 42 or 43 years I’ve been around the Tour. We just need to kind of recognize the guys that maybe do have a little extra time that they don’t need. We just need to adjust that and try to help them out.

As far as saving time, I don’t think we’re going to save a lot of time. Just so many times it’s been earmarked with certain guys with certain shots that take a little bit of time and sometimes it takes a little bit of time.

You’re playing for a lot of money. With Joaquin Niemann, he won a million-three last week. Sometimes it takes a little time to hit a pressure shot. And I think part of the problem is the greens are so quick now. When I started, shoot, the greens were running 9.5, 10 we’re looking at 11.5, 12 now, and guys don’t finish hardly at all. They putt, and they go and they go and they mark the ball from a foot, where it used to be you could kind of step across the line to tap ‘em in. But you don’t see that much any more.

Last week we had 156 players and you’ve got 26 groups on 18 holes and, y’know, some guys are going to wait. We’re just trying to keep play going. We don’t want to see a hole open; if there’s a par-5 open, we’ll go ahead and we’ll warn a group. 99 times out of 100 they’ll catch up and get back in the flow, we’re just trying to keep everything going and that’s all it is.

DZ: And are there any changes that you guys would like to see to the way these things are enforced? Do you like the idea of more penalty strokes, or a shot clock, or anything like that? Or do you generally see it as, “We’re in the right ballpark”?

White: I think we’re in the right ballpark. I’m not a big penalty shot person but I think we do a great job. It’s all we talk about all day long, where’s this group, where’s that group, has anybody talked to this group. We’re constantly talking about that, in fact it’s all we talk about on the radio. And I think we’re in a good place, I really, really do. I think the Tour has done a good job, we’ll come up with something that makes sense, that’s going to be a big thing on the PAC meeting coming up, and we’ll go from there with it, see what comes out.

The complete Drop Zone interview is below. Oh, and we’d love for you to listen and subscribe to the Drop Zone wherever you consume your podcasts:

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While last week’s Solheim Cup will be remembered for an epic Sunday, Europe’s late rally and Suzann Pettersen’s epic walk-off, the first two days at Gleneagles in Scotland were marred by a sluggish pace of play.

Slow play has long been a controversial topic in the golf world, and this week the European Tour is trotting out some new ideas in a step toward speeding up rounds at the BMW PGA Championship. Rory McIlroy told Golf Channel on Wednesday that he watched the Solheim Cup — but he also noticed the slow pace.

“I watched and I don’t want to single out particular people, but I watched a lot of the Solheim Cup at the weekend, and it was really slow,” McIlroy said. “As much as you want to sit there and watch and support the European girls, like it’s just hard not to get frustrated with it.”

Groups were put on the clock and one player, American Lizette Salas, received a bad time.

“It’s not fair, because the other players know how to play the game,” U.S. captain Juli Inkster said of Salas’ bad time. “So my players are playing at their pace. And then when they say we’re timing them, they speed up. And that’s — they make a living out of that. So until we change the rule, they’re going to keep doing it. And they know who they are.”

Conditions in Scotland were difficult and players were battling for precious points. The Solheim Cup, like most team events, also uses foursomes for the first two days, which in turn takes more time. Yet still players and captains came under fire.

“You look at this golf course, it’s tough,” Inkster said. “The wind’s blowing. The greens are firm. The ball’s not going anywhere. It’s cold. I mean, it’s not like it’s a pitch and putt. It’s a tough golf course. And out here every shot counts. Every putt counts. So it’s going to take longer. That’s just the way it is.”