Golf analyst Dottie Pepper after ripping slow play at Farmers Insurance Open: ‘It’s been gnawing at me’

Posted by author January 28, 2025 Golf

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Dottie Pepper was not happy on Saturday afternoon at Torrey Pines.

The former LPGA star and longtime on-course analyst ripped the sport during the final round of the Farmers Insurance Open in San Diego after learning that the final group in the PGA Tour tournament had made the turn in nearly three hours.

“I think we’re starting to need a new word to talk about this pace of play issue, and it’s respect,” Pepper said on the CBS broadcast. “For your fellow competitors, for the fans, for broadcasts, for all of it. It’s just gotta get better.”

Pepper spoke about her comments to The Associated Press, and insisted that she wasn’t criticizing the final group of Harris English, Aldrich Potgieter and Andrew Novak specifically. That group took just shy of 5 1/2 hours to complete its final round on Saturday. Remarkably, that was a 10-minute improvement from the week before — though The American Express went well past its coverage window.

“It’s been gnawing at me and a lot of people for a while,” Pepper said. “It was not a comment targeted at the final group of a PGA Tour event that CBS was carrying. It was at the general state of the game, down to club play — private or municipal — junior golf, amateur golf, collegiate golf.

“It’s taking away from the opportunity we have for this game. It’s on fire post-COVID, and it’s our darn fault if we don’t do better.”

Like Pepper mentioned, this issue is nothing new. It’s been a frequent complaint at all levels of the sport forever, though it’s been front and center in recent years. Patrick Cantlay was ripped for his slow play repeatedly and very publicly a few years ago, for example.

The PGA Tour will issue an official warning if a group falls out of position, which can lead to officials putting a timer on players. Players are permitted 40 seconds per stroke, and they are granted an extra 10 seconds if they are the first player in the group to hit. If players repeatedly exceed the applicable time to play a stroke, they can be hit with penalties or even a disqualification — but neither are seen on Tour much at all.

Nothing seems to change with the issue, and nobody seems to have a good solution as for how to fix it. TGL has implemented a shot clock in its events, though that is a vastly different setup compared to a full four-day, 72-hole tournament on an actual course.

“I have no idea [how to fix it],” Rory McIlroy said when asked about the problem on Tuesday at the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am.

“I don’t know. I think like, this isn’t a new problem,” he added later. “This has been around forever, but slow play was also around when people seemingly loved golf. I don’t know what the answer is.”

While slow golf is annoying, it’s not the players that Pepper is most concerned about. It’s the state of the sport in general — which is still incredibly fractured while the PGA Tour and LIV Golf continue their negotiations for some sort of reconciliation. If the game is too slow, fans will disappear.

“I love the game too much,” Pepper said. “Let’s take advantage of the heat we have. People are more engaged than they’ve been in a long time. We have TGL. We have influencers. Golf has a little bigger profile than it did before. Let’s not mess it up.”