Matt Fitzpatrick slams ‘pathetic’ PGA Tour over slow play concern

Matt Fitzpatrick has hit out at the PGA Tour after a host of changes were approved on Monday night.

The Policy Board voted to reduce field sizes and cut membership for 2026, which is hoped will tackle slow play concerns.

Lucas Glover told Golfweek “it’s terrible,” as he sounded off on the upcoming changes.

“And then hiding behind pace of play, I think challenges our intelligence. They think we’re stupid,” he said.

Fitzpatrick, 30, insists the fellow US Open champion is right and voiced his frustration that no concrete change has been made to address it.

“Pathetic that pace of play is spoken about every year and nothing ever gets done,” the Englishman wrote on X.

Standard 156-player fields will soon feature 144 or 132 players, while The Players Championship, the flagship event at TPC Sawgrass in March, will move from 144 to 120 players.

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Pace of play has long been a sticking point on Tour, and in the professional game as a whole.

At last week’s LPGA Tour event, Charley Hull called for ‘ruthless’ punishment to be dished out to offenders.

“I’m quite ruthless, but I said, listen, if you get three bad timings, every time it’s a two-shot penalty,” she said in Florida.

“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.”

Glover, meanwhile, argues that when he started out on tour 20 years ago, there were only a handful of slow players. Now, “we have 50,” he claims.

“So don’t cut fields because it’s a pace of play issue. Tell us to play faster, or just say you’re trying to appease six guys and make them happy, so they don’t go somewhere else and play golf.”

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However, Gary Young, the PGA Tour’s senior vice president of rules and competition, believes otherwise.

“Absolutely it will,” he said when asked if reduced fields will help slow play.

“It’s something that we’ve been saying for years that 156-man fields are too many players.

“It’s basically 78 players in a wave, 13 groups per side and our pace of play is set somewhere around 4 and half hours.

“You do the math and if they play in time par, which is basically 2 hours and 15 minutes, they make the turn and, all of a sudden, the group ahead of them is just walking off the tee because there’s 2 hours and 12 minutes of tee times.

“It becomes a parking lot. There’s nowhere to go.”

Among other changes to the PGA Tour include a reduction in the number of weekly Monday qualifiers and fewer Korn Ferry Tour graduates.

John Turnbull A graduate of the University of Stirling, John joined the bunkered team in 2023 as a Content Producer, with a responsibility for covering all breaking news, tour news, grassroots content and much more besides. A keen golfer, he plays the majority of his golf at Falkirk Golf Club. Top of his 'bucket list' is a round of Pebble Beach... ideally in the company of Gareth Bale.