Secret Tour Caddy: A three-ball in professional golf has always taken 5 hours and always will. Get over it

‘It’s not f****** Amazon you know’.

In a nutshell, this is the best argument I’ve ever heard to counter anyone whining about how long it takes tour pros to get around a golf course.

Tour pros aren’t picking things off a shelf. They’re playing a bloody difficult game, occasionally in very trying conditions, often under a lot of pressure, and generally for a lot of money and that takes time, especially the tricky shots.

Of course, even the cynics admit there have to be some limits, but the simple fact is pro golf takes as long as it takes which, by the way, is nowhere near whatever wildly optimistic pace of play they happen to print on the reverse of the daily pin sheet that week.

18 holes in a tournament, in a three-ball, takes about five hours. Interestingly and perhaps more pertinently, this is irrespective of who’s actually in your three-ball because you may see Snail A “taking their time,” and lots of it; and yes, that might be irritating to people they’re playing with or who are watching.

But the harsh reality is that short of them fundamentally changing the way they do their job (because that’s what they’re actually doing), daft as it sounds, one individual doesn’t actually fundamentally change the amount of time it generally takes to get around.

ALSO: Secret Tour Caddy: These simple Tour player drills will improve every club golfer

ALSO: Secret Tour Caddy: You wouldn’t believe the freebies that the players get handed out to them every week

Slow play in golf: It’s not f****** Amazon!

Again, this is about five hours for a three-ball. Always has done. Always will do, and to back this up, if you’re of the “it’s not f****** Amazon” persuasion, you then point out that the clamour to speed things up, bar a few exceptions (which kind of proves the rule), seems to be coming exclusively from outside the professional game.

This puts the whole slow play debate in the same bracket as the one about “rolling back” the golf ball and the one before that about banning anchoring. It’s a valid, if inconvenient, point that the vast majority of tour pros weren’t exactly screaming for.

It’s also a fair point that the only time it ever gets mentioned is when a golf journalist asks about it in a press conference, usually to validate their own bandwagon agenda. The logical conclusion is that the world’s golf tours really should just ignore the “something needs to be done” mob, and listen only to their members, all of whom are frankly pretty quiet on all these things.

To a degree, this is exactly what the PGA Tour has done at the start of 2025 by neatly changing the definition of what actually constitutes slow play based largely, as I understand it, on hard and fast data on how long guys actually take to play on that tour.

By setting the bar just lower than the slowest possible time it can take, they can simply point to everyone getting around in the expected time. Slow play is no more. Job done.

And tacit admission that, at least on the PGA Tour, professional golf is indeed not f****** Amazon.

NOW READ: Tour players get fined for failing to replace divots or rake bunkers. It should be exactly the same at club level

NOW READ: The Secret Tour Caddy: Never expect honesty from professional golfers

NOW READ: Tour Insider: Our best young golfers are betrayed by the broken system the moment they turn pro

Do you think there should be a penalty for slow play in golf? How harsh should it be for a penalty for slow play in golf? Do you know how to avoid slow play in golf? Do you think it’s an issue at all? Tell us on X!