Henrik Stenson: Slow play makes it painful to play at St Andrews

Criticising the Old Course at St Andrews is like Harry Potter mentioning Voldemort in the Hogwarts Great Hall.

What follows is hushed silence and turned heads but the perils are real even at a place so magical as the Home of Golf.

The dream of all golfers is to visit the Old Course but what quickly crops up when it hosts large tournament fields and congested crowds is the phrase which must not be named: slow play.

It’s a debate as old as anything but one that always reappears when The Open rotates back around to Fife in Scotland. Henrik Stenson, one of the best European players of the last two decades, used St Andrews as an example of how the slow play debate intensifies when events go to the most logistically challenging golf courses.

“There’s always been that issue and sometimes, it’s too many players on the golf course and some courses like the Dunhill links,” Stenson said to NCG. “That’s always been slow as slow can be because you can have a snake that eats its own tail.

“You’ve got a two-tee start and you’re playing St Andrews with the double greens. That place, we all love St Andrews but at the same time, it’s painful to play an Open Championship there with the pace of play because you wait on these double greens on the way out and the way in, it just takes forever.

“Certain places are slow as a starting point but it clearly doesn’t help if then players aren’t ready to play when it’s their turn and keeping it somewhat within those timelines that we’ve been given, so anything above five hours is clearly not acceptable.

“I feel like sometimes we get a time for about four hours and 20 minutes, four hours 45 minutes for a threesome for 18 holes and there are tournaments and certain conditions when that’s a push to be able to make that happen but I feel like four and a half hours and four hours and 45 minutes is acceptable.”

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Henrik Stenson: Slow play is worse in the elite amateur ranks

The general perception is that professional players don’t play fast enough and their sluggishness is magnified by television, with several tournaments being shown live nearly every week of the year. Most club golfers would see a four-hour round as monotonous, but this would be a miracle at the elite level.

Complaints aren’t exclusive to the men’s game. Fans are frustrated watching the LPGA and the Ladies European Tour as well, with particular fury emanating from the 2024 ANNIKA tournament where it took the Nelly Korda and Charley Hull pair over five-and-a-half hours to play one round.

“You’re going to lose the will to live when you’re out there in a twosome and it takes six hours. I don’t know what was going on there, I saw something flash by about it,” Stenson commented.

Carlota Ciganda received financial penalties for her pace of play in 2024 but some fans, and significantly her Solheim Cup teammate Hull, want two-shot penalties instead, something that is perhaps unlikely to be implemented but would strike fear into the game’s most tedious timewasters.

Such is the inflated world of prize money golfers inhabit, fines can be shaken off but on-course penalties could nudge you away from a trophy or even below the cutline. Stenson, an Open champion, five-time European Ryder Cupper and FedEx Cup champion, pertinently pointed out that hard conditions and tough golf courses can hold up even the most rapid players and those on higher scores are taking longer than those going deep in the red.

But concerningly, the DP World Tour star-turned-LIV Golf rebel believes amateur college graduates aiming for professional tours are even slower than the stars on screen and he hopes these bad habits can be eradicated before they become part of the problem.

“Certainly, you’ve got to compare apples with apples there, if you’re playing a tour set-up for tournament play and it’s a difficult golf course on a difficult day, that’s going to demand more time and a totally different thing than if you play on your home course on a Sunday afternoon,” Stenson said.

“But I think there’s no question that the professional game is what gets shown and what people see and it’s definitely been a worrying thing for me to see young players coming out. When the next generation is coming out through college, and the amateur ranks and so on, and they’re actually a lot slower than what the guys are who play on tour already, that’s worrying and disturbing in a way because I can see how quickly my son plays, for instance, how quickly they play when they play.

“Somewhere something happened, I don’t know if it’s around the age of college until they turn professional when everything starts to slow down or whatever, but the younger players seem to be playing quite quickly, not everyone but quite a few, but then I’ve seen a lot – on LIV, on the DP World Tour, the PGA Tour over the last five or 10 years, you have new players coming up and they’re ridiculously slow, so I don’t know what has happened there.

“Clearly, they would look and see how the boys and girls on the PGA Tour, LIV, LPGA Tour, wherever they’re playing, how their routines are but I would never have imagined they would go back and make it slower than what they see on TV if that makes sense. I think there’s certainly an argument to try and nip that in the bud before they come out on the various tours.”

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What do you make of this Henrik Stenson slow play view? Is it possible to solve the St Andrews pace of play issue? Tell us on X!

Henrik Stenson features in the new documentary series Inside the Ropes, a series with LIV Golf that gives exclusive, behind-the-scenes looks at the Majesticks team campaign in the 2024 LIV Golf season.

“I think they’re really well done, I think the editing and the footage and everything – I was very impressed and pleased with that. It’s a good production and I think fans and I included, I’ve always been a small F1 fan, but then when I watched Drive to Survive, I really got back into things again and getting to know the drivers and the people on the teams. The behind-the-scenes part of it – you get interested and caught up in that and then like you said, with Full Swing, I think tennis did something – you’ve got Below Deck if you’re not really into sports, but drama on luxury yachts.

“It’s interesting, you’re always going to learn things either about the sports or the businesses or whatever it might be, and about the people, the players or the sports personalities and so on – a lot of the time it could be something totally different when you only have a picture of how someone would be, you might get a totally different feel once you get to know more about them in this type of documentary.”

CLICK HERE to watch.