Is Rory McIlroy right to suggest that golf should be speeded up?

Golf, perhaps the only game in which strolling is traditionally encouraged, was the latest sport seen to be in a crisis of tempo. 

 

In 2013 America lost about half a million regular players compared with the previous year. In Britain the number of young people regularly playing the game almost halved between 2010 and 2013. 

The latter fact was put forward as one reason why Rory Mcllroy lost to Lewis Hamilton in the popular vote as sports personality of the year. When Mcllroy was asked about some of this by the BBC he suggested that the fall-off in players was most likely down to speed. “Gone are the days that you could spend five or six hours on a golf course,” he said. “Everything’s so instant now, and everyone doesn’t have as much time as they used to.” His solution, when pressed, was to suggest the need for “some way of speeding the game up … I don’t think they need to alter tournament-play formats”, he said. “It’s the grassroots – definitely not at our level.”

For the same period television viewing figures for golf have risen in Britain, the argument sounds a lot like a contemporary truism: boredom thresholds are plummeting, better hurry the thing up, keep them interested. It is the same argument that led – successfully – to the creation of Twenty20 cricket and, lately, the effort to accelerate tennis with the inaugural International Premier Tennis League – strapline: “break the code” – in which the Indian Aces, led by Roger Federer and Pete Sampras, triumphed over the UAE Royals of Novak Djokovic and Caroline Wozniacki. The tournament, organised by the Indian former player Mahesh Bhupathi, promised “to change the manner in which the world enjoys the sport”, to bring “NBA-style entertainment” to tennis fans. To this end, in a six-player-per-team, five-set format, perceived frustrations such as deuce points and tie breaks were eliminated, along with much in the way of concentration or intensity. There were frequent substitutions and the introduction of “happiness power points” that counted double. A big clock counted down time between serves and quietness (that other perilously dull quality for sporting entrepreneurs) was inevitably outlawed in favour of thumping bass lines and raucous crowd “participation” between points. Some players were being paid more than a million dollars a day to take part; one of them, Federer, called it “a crazy, but fun” event, one likely to become an annual fixture.

Mcllroy may be correct in his belief that one way to increase participation in golf is to make changes to the Royal and Ancient code that would speed the game up – though it is quite hard to imagine what those changes would be beyond pitch and putt or running between strokes – but he is perhaps naive to believe that will have no impact on how the game is played at the highest level. As cricket is still discovering, the qualities that created the Test match game – concentration, stamina and doggedness as well as skill and technique – are often directly opposed to those needed to thrive in the Big Bash.
Would speed golf work? There is no clear evidence to suggest that the modernisation of sports, the breaking of codes, results in greater participation in them. In fact, the converse seems likely.

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