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Rory McIlroy has a solution for professional golf’s slow play epidemic – but not everyone is going to like it. 

The glacial pace of play at the elite level has long plagued the game, but was brought into sharp focus at last week’s Farmers Insurance Open, where the leaders took five and a half hours for their final round.

In what felt like a significant moment at Torrey Pines, the legendary CBS Sports broadcaster Dottie Pepper told the PGA Tour dawdlers to show some “respect.”

“It’s just got to get better,” the fed up on-course commentator said having spent nearly three hours watching Harris English, Andrew Novak and Aldrich Potgieter play nine holes on Saturday.

Many different solutions have since been raised, including the possibility of the PGA Tour bringing in a shot clock, just like McIlroy and Tiger Woods have in their new made-for-TV simulator league.

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But whilst McIlroy understands his own suggestion will irk the rank-and-file, he insists that shrinking field sizes would have the desired effect when it comes to slow play.

“There’s a lot of different answers, but not every answer is going to make everyone happy,” said McIlroy, when asked how he would fix this perennial problem.

“I could say smaller fields. Smaller fields, smaller fields would help pace of play, but that takes away playing opportunities from people and that’s going to p*** some people off.”

McIlroy, making his first PGA Tour start of the season this week at Pebble Beach, added: “The other thing is when we play in this time of the year, the tee times have to be a little bit tighter together so that they can get everyone through with daylight and everything.

“If you could be able to space the tee times out a little bit more, that would hopefully make things flow a little bit better.”

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McIlroy’s TGL venture, of course, is the antidote to regular PGA Tour events, with a two-hour primetime TV slot meaning there is no room for hanging around.

“It certainly created a buzz,” he said after his Boston Common team lost to Tiger Woods’ Jupiter Links on his debut on Monday.

“I think that the good thing that we’ve seen so far over at least the first three weeks, haven’t got the numbers yesterday from yesterday, but the demographic is skewing much younger than a typical PGA Tour telecast.

“The average age is 62, 63. We’ve been able to drop that to about 13 years to right around 50.

“I think just under half of the viewers are between 18 and 49. It’s doing what we wanted it to do, which is to try to entice a younger demographic to watch golf in a way that’s maybe more manageable for them and more of a bite-sized version.”


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Ben Parsons joined bunkered as a Content Producer in 2023 and is the man to come to for all of the latest news, across both the professional and amateur games. Formerly of The Mirror and Press Association, he is a member at Halifax Golf Club and is a long-suffering fan of both Manchester United and the Wales rugby team.

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