PGA Tour announces new temporary rule regarding rangefinders
PGA Tour commissioner Jay Monahan announced a big change in rules while speaking with the media at TPC Sawgrass on Tuesday ahead of The Players Championship, which is set to begin on Thursday.
Monahan announced that the PGA Tour will allow the use of rangefinders at six tournaments between The Masters and the PGA Championship:
- RBC Heritage
- Corales Puntacana Championship
- Zurich Classic of New Orleans
- The CJ Cup Byron Nelson
- Truist Championship
- OneFlight Myrtle Beach Classic
Rangefinders have only been allowed to be used during practice rounds. The PGA Championship already allows rangefinders to be used in the tournament, making it the only major tournament that allows the use of rangefinders.
The use of a rangefinder in these six tournaments will be done as an experiment to see whether or not the Tour will adopt the policy for all of its events.
Why does the PGA Tour change the use of rangefinders?
Monahan said on Tuesday that the reason for the PGA Tour making this change is to address the issue of the pace of play. Monahan believes that fans are unhappy with the pace of play on the Tour and that allowing players to use rangefinders could improve that.
"It's a little bit harder to find the solution, just given the depth and breadth of everything that goes into pace of play, but we're looking forward to finding solutions on that front," Monahan said via Golf Channel.
Monahan said he believes that this experiment is a way for the PGA Tour to show their fans that they're willing to try new things in an attempt to improve the pace of play.
"When you go back to the commentary that you've heard on Fan Forward and you just look at the commentary generally, you know, we're listening to our fans and we're responding. And clearly this is something where they'd like to see imrpovement," Monahan added.
Aside from the PGA Championship, players have not been allowed to use rangefinders in PGA Tour events. For the entire existence of professional golf, players have been reliant on pre-round measurements to figure out the distances on certain shots during the tournament.
This has led to caddies having a crucial role in figuring out yardages during practice rounds. Caddies usually measure the yardages from certain locations on each hole and then put them into the yardage book.
However, this results in caddies and players having to do a lot of math and measurements by pacing distances, which Monahan and many fans believe slow down the pace of play.
This experiment will give the Tour an opportunity to see just how much rangefinders could speed up the game.