World No. 1 Nelly Korda, who plays as quickly as anyone, provided a solution to the LPGA’s biggest issue: slow play.
Slow play has been a pertinent topic of discussion on the LPGA this season. And the biggest stars in the game have had enough.
Two days after winning her seventh event of the season at The ANNIKA, Nelly Korda fielded a question about the glacial pace of play that has plagued the LPGA for years. She offered a simple yet effective solution, one that should be enforced time and time again.
“Players just need to be penalized,” Korda said blatantly.
“Rules officials need to watch from the first group. Once they get two minutes behind, one minute behind, it just slows everything down.”
Korda’s comments came soon after Lexi Thompson took a shot at the LPGA’s slow pace of play. Thompson talked about how competitive rounds should not take more than four and a half hours, which was not the case on Sunday at The ANNIKA. Korda’s group, which included Charley Hull and Weiwei Zhang, took more than five hours to trudge around Pelican Golf Club.
Photo by Douglas P. DeFelice/Getty Images
“I personally think it’s a pretty big issue. I think it’s not good for the fans that come out and watch us,” Korda added.
“If it was me personally, I would be very, very annoyed watching for five hours, over five hours, five hours and 40 minutes, close to six. I just think it really drags the game down.”
After this past weekend, Hull, who tied for second and finished three strokes behind Korda, offered a “ruthless” solution to the pace of play issue. She and Korda also completed their third rounds in the dark.
“I’m quite ruthless,” Hull said.
“Listen, if you get three bad timings, every time it’s a tee shot penalty; 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.”
Perhaps the LPGA should at least entertain Hull’s thought. Thompson said she “did not disagree with it.” Korda called it “funny.”
But you know what’s not funny? When a player stands in the fairway, waiting to play their shot while a fellow competitor takes two or three minutes to line up a putt from inside five feet up on the green. It’s infuriating to everyone involved.
“I’m hitting right after the person in front of me just hit,” Korda said.
“I think people just need to be — people overanalyze, one, and I think people just need to be ready faster. People start their process a little too late and stand over it for too long. We need more people on the ground to monitor the pace of play. I don’t think we have enough people to monitor it.”
Perhaps that is the remedy the LPGA needs: more officials on the ground to enforce the pace of play. That would help, at least in Korda’s mind.
Regardless, the LPGA cannot continue to do what it has done for quite some time: sit idly by, just as Korda did on the tee and in the fairway on so many occasions this past week.
Jack Milko is a golf staff writer for SB Nation’s Playing Through. Be sure to check out @_PlayingThrough for more golf coverage. You can follow him on Twitter @jack_milko as well.
