The PGA Tour will begin testing the use of rangefinders as the organization looks to speed up the pace of play immediately after Rory McIlroy won his first Masters. And World No.1 Scottie Scheffler has already offered a new proposal after the controversial change was unveiled.
McIlroy shook off a very rough start to the Masters, with some claiming he committed an “inexcusable” mistake” to capture his first Green Jacket in a heated playoff with Justin Rose. The 35-year-old also became the sixth player to complete the career Grand Slam, becoming the first since Tiger Woods accomplished the feat in 2000.
And while McIlroy’s tough start could be attributed to a number of factors, Golf Channel analyst Paul McGinley offered an interesting rationale: Akshay Bhatia took too long, therefore throwing the star off his game. Yet the new rangefinder rules being trialed could be a game-changer for pace of play.
“I think he got distracted,” McGinley said at the time. “It took him a long time to play that pitch shot. His playing partner Akshay Bhatia put his second in the water. He took ages to play his shot – he took about 10 practice swings.
“He is such a quick player – he wants to get on with hit. He got distracted. I don’t blame Bhatia or the players walking off 16. For a player who likes to play quickly, it was a drop in concentration. And that is what great champions don’t do. And I am sure that the 17th was a legacy of it.”
Originally announced during the Players Championship, the Tour will allow players to use rangefinders on the “distance-only” setting and will start to be used at RBC Heritage and Corales Puntacana events, and will end with the Truist Championship and Oneflight Myrtle Beach Classic, per Golf Digest.
If a player were to use any other features aside from the “distance-only” mode, the first offense results in a two-stroke penalty. The second offense carries a more severe punishment: Automatic disqualification from the tournament.
McIlroy was asked before Pebble Beach what could help the pace of play, and the Northern Irish star admitted that he had “no idea” how to fix the pace of play issue. “Courses are becoming — at Torrey Pines last week, courses are becoming more difficult,” he said at the time, per GOLF.com.
“You have those wind speeds combined with the green speeds. Even over a two-footer you’re wanting to mark it and reset and concentrate over it and whatever. This isn’t a new problem. This has been around forever, but slow play was also around when people seemingly loved golf.
“I don’t know what the answer is. There’s a lot of different answers, but not every answer is going to — is not going to make everyone happy. I could say smaller fields. Smaller fields would help pace of play, but that takes away playing opportunities from people, and that’s going to piss some people off.
“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.
Nowadays, most people go for par 5s in two, so you’ve got to wait on that. You’ve got longer par 3s. There’s a lot of different things that go into it. I don’t know. It seems like it’s — you can maybe improve it by 15 or 20 minutes, but that’s still a five-and-a-half hour round into a five-hour and 15 round, so is that really improving it enough to make a huge change? I don’t know.”
