Nothing ruins a good round of golf faster than having the pace of play come to a standstill. You know, when everything’s been moving right along only to walk up to a tee box and see two or three groups stacked up on the next hole.

You start looking up ahead to find who’s causing the problem. You lose focus of your game, even your next shot. Soon there’s a group or two behind you and you’re selfconscience of holding them up … even though there’s no place to go.

You start thinking about things you need to get done that day. You wonder if you’re ever going to make it off the course. You feel like you’re a hostage to some unknown terrorist representing the cause of stupidity.

You wonder, “Where’s the marshal?”

The pace of golf is very much like the pace of traffic on a busy highway. And we all know what it’s like to be caught in a traffic jam.

Basically, a golf course determines the basic speed of play by tee time intervals. For many courses, 10 minutes is a standard time interval between groups beginning play.

This means that if the pace of play (the time it takes your group to hit, put away the clubs, walk or ride up to the next series of shots, select clubs and hit again and continue on until your group is out of range for the next group) should not exceed 10 minutes.

If every group stayed within its 10-minute interval, the duration of the round of golf would be four hours. However, it only takes one group to create havoc in the flow of traffic.

For example, if a group were to encounter a situation that slows its pace (lost ball, someone stopping to use the restroom, etc.) to perhaps a 12-minute interval, it would literally cause two groups behind them to stack up. Unless these two minutes are made up quickly, and by every group being affected, the pace of play for every group behind you will literally slow to 12 minutes. (Just like how traffic slows on a freeway. Once you stop the pace, the ripple affect lasts well after the initial slowdown.)

That means a group just starting its round will likely experience a five-hour round of golf. (Twelve-minutes multiplied by 24-intervals divided by 60 minutes.)

Likewise, if for whatever reason there’s a five-minute delay (the pace slowing to 15 minutes), a group starting its round is looking at a six-hour round of golf.

It’s easy to see how just one slow group can turn a walk-in-the-park into a death march.

Now, like any highway, if there isn’t a lot of traffic on the road, you can usually pass a slower group and the pace of play tends to keep flowing. And the pace isn’t necessarily determined by the number of players in a group. It’s determined by the slowest player

in the group—you know, the guy who’s never ready to golf his ball; the one who requires a special invitation to take his turn… and then has to analyze his shot options, examine the terrain or slope, choose a club or walk around his putt, before he can actually golf his ball. Then he has to go through his post-shot routine of analyzing his swing, complaining about the rub of the green, offering a dissertation about weather factors and running through the list of excuses on why that particular shot was just a freak of nature and very uncommon for him to execute.

You can see it doesn’t take much for a golfer to consume the 10-minute time interval of the group. Throw two, three or even four of these guys into the mix, and you have the makings of a long day. Some courses don’t help their cause when they actually determine tighter time intervals by having 7-minute tee times, or worse—5-minute tee times. On a 5-minute interval, a 10-minute lapse equates to an 8-hour round.

Just shoot me in the head right now. It’s clear to see that the tighter the time interval, the greater the need for a course marshal keeping an eye on the pace. After all, many of us need a round of golf to escape the frustrations of work. We don’t need the round to add to our frustrations.