As the last pair in the Open Championship, Jordan Spieth and Matt Kuchar, started the back nine at Birkdale last Sunday, they received a message from officials of the Royal & Ancient Golf Club. It was not “Thank you so much for producing such a fantastic climax to the tournament and delighting our new best friends at Sky”. It was “Get a move on”.
Shortly, or rather longly, after that, Spieth sent his tee shot at the 13th not eastwards towards the hole but so far south-eastwards that he might soon have been putting in the Home Counties. The consequent kerfuffle meant a delay of 17 and a half minutes of what was on one level wasted time and, on another, compelling drama. Spieth’s recovery and subsequent victory are now in the annals. And nothing more was said about the earlier business.
The R&A’s original intervention perhaps stands as an example of sports administrators’ gift for doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. As golfers of all abilities know, the twin bugbears of the game are the same as those of driving on a single-carriageway A road: the slowcoach idiots in front and the impatient maniacs behind. Neither problem applied in this case.
Golf has a deep-seated issue with interminable rounds, probably incurable unless the sale of rights to Sky successfully kills off participation as it has in cricket. What is unusual in golf is that it is more of a problem to players than watchers. Golf Today said in 2005 that an amateur four-ball should take three to three and a half hours. Research from Florida, where many players use buggies, suggests four hours-plus is an average. Five is not unusual.
But the essential issue is the same in just about every major sport. All games without a fixed time limit take longer than they did, in some cases far longer. This causes much anguish and discussion. Even timed games exhibit similar symptoms. But no one ever seems to look at the underlying causes that link the different sports and to join the dots.
The most extreme case is American football. I have always thought this fitted my pilot-dad’s description of the Second World War: “About 10 minutes of blind terror and five and a half years of sheer effing boredom.” The analogy turns out to be more right than I knew. Notionally a gridiron game lasts an hour. The average NFL contest takes more than three hours, in which the ball is in play for 11 minutes.
The average major league baseball game, which lasted less than two hours in 1933, now takes more than three. Cricket, in which 20 overs an hour was a historic norm, now mandates 15 (including all kinds of allowances) in Test matches; it almost never happens. The official sanctions against this often resemble a head teacher’s attempts to make stroppy teenagers keep their ties done up.
Wimbledon managed for decades with no tie-breaks (until 1971), 12 days’ play not 13, 2pm starts, no Centre Court roof and low-tech covers and somehow got by. Now there is pressure to have tie-breaks in final sets, too. Meanwhile in snooker this year Fergal O’Brien took a record 123 minutes to win a single frame and qualify for the World Championship. And so on. And on.
Among the notionally fixed-time sports, rugby matches used to start at 3pm with an on-field orange at half-time. The players were back in the dressing room before 4.30 and heading for the first pint. For 4.30 and pint then read 5pm and beetroot juice now. Football, with longer half-times, up to double-figure stoppage times, extra time and penalties can easily bust the two-hour barrier.
Why? Where do we start? In British sport coaches - and even football managers - were peripheral figures, at least during the game, until about the 1970s: before that the manager was just the nerviest chain-smoker in the stands. Substitution, tentatively introduced in 1965 (originally for injuries only), gave him a role; so did greater tactical fluidity. These changes coincided with a new footballing culture, from the manly insistence that you had not been hurt to the professional insistence that the referee should think you had.
Time-consuming substitution reaches its apogee in baseball where the number of pitching changes has increased dramatically. These are now data-driven, which sometimes means a three-minute hiatus so a specialist can come on for what might be a single pitch, and then another three-minute hiatus. But in team games it does not need a manager to produce an extended faff: in cricket, tactical consultations sometimes take place after every ball, perhaps interrupted by a 12th man bringing out an unrequested bit of kit and a message.
The use of video in decision-making, most excessively and obsessively in rugby, and the Hawk-Eye genre of computer aids are also important factors. Most significant of all perhaps is sports psychology, which hardly existed before the 1980s and has expanded to produce such techniques as mental imagery, self-talk, pre-performance routines and arousal regulation (which, frankly, I thought was something else entirely).
Look, I am at the very edge of my knowledge here. What I do know is that the psychologists are constantly urging their clients to slow things down. This is entirely sensible when it comes to the mechanics of actually swinging a golf club. It is a pain in the arse if the player insists on spending several minutes before that can happen.
As a technique, slowing it down takes various other forms: the time-out in basketball is entirely legitimised and so frequent that a minute on the clock in the last quarter of an NBA game can pass more slowly than an hour being waterboarded. There is the quasi-legal time-wasting employed by football teams guarding a one-goal lead. There is the fake injury now being suffered by tennis players to break the rhythm of an opponent hurtling towards victory.
There are many other possible answers. The great baseball commentator Vin Scully had a one-word explanation for much of the unpaid overtime he did towards the end of his long career: Velcro. He blamed batters fiddling incessantly with their gloves between pitches.
So does it matter? It does to the extent that recreational players imitate their betters to irritate their opponents: if they insist on imitating Novak Djokovic, who is thought to have peaked at 29 ball bounces at match-point in Miami in 2012, or Rafa Nadal’s OCD-ish use of the towel, or if, as Frank Keating said of Jimmy Connors, blokes insist on hitching up an imaginary bra-strap before every point. Or if a 28-handicapper insists on prowling the green to view the hole from every angle before a putt he is going to miss by miles anyway while the club ace is waiting to smack his seven-iron stone dead.
It matters, not to the pace of the game but to its once immutable culture, that village cricketers now dispute umpiring decisions because that is what happens on telly. It matters to spectators watching floodlit sport if they have to choose between the final whistle and the last train home, something administrators seem to ignore in their scheduling. (When football matches were shorter, evening ones started at 7.30; now they last longer they start at 7.45 or 8.)
But I fear this is a losing battle. The uncomfortable fact is that crowds, who often dip in and out during actual play – especially at cricket – wake up when it is decision time. And the tennis stats reveal an uncomfortable fact. Using the ATP’s tour data, in 2015 the website fivethirtyeight.com posted the relative speed of play of 218 current and recent-past players. The slowest 20 included Nadal (216th), John McEnroe, Michael Chang, Connors, Jim Courier and Ivan Lendl – grand slam champions all. The top 10, headed by that wonderful and improbable German, Dustin Brown, had not a single grand slam between them. Slow play works.
“I don’t really care what people say. I need to do what I need to do to win a golf tournament,” said the notoriously deliberate golfer and former world No1, Jason Day, before adding more carefully, “And within reason of respecting other players and the Rules of Golf.”
He could have added: “And so long as I don’t piss off my paymasters”. Slow play used to matter in televised sport because mass-audience channels have obligations beyond sport: they need to switch to the news; viewers might be waiting for their favourite soap. On satellite channels not merely does no one care; the longer sport takes the better. Live product is the gold standard. Absence of action means more time for ads. Ten-hour rounds of golf? Bring ’em on. Far better than repeating the highlights again.
Thus it looks as though ever-slower sport is the future. Best to look at it this way: in a world full of hurry and rush, it is rather charming that sport can make time stand still.
