Baz Plummer of Golf Monthly spent a May 2026 afternoon at Sand Moor Golf Club, in the Yorkshire town of Alwoodley, watching the PGA North professional championship and holding a stopwatch. He timed 100 shots, hit by club pros — head professionals and assistant pros at member courses around the north of England, the kind of golfer who plays in two amateur opens a summer and has never had a caddie carry his bag in tournament conditions.
His methodology was simple. He started the clock the moment a player was clear to play and it was his turn. He stopped it when the ball was struck. He sorted the times by shot type. The averages were instructive.
Tee shots averaged 36 seconds, with a range of 20 to 61. Approach shots also averaged 36 seconds, although the range was wider — 12 seconds to 90 seconds. Short-game shots came in at roughly 20 seconds, with a single outlier at 79 dragging the upper bound. Putts ranged from 15 seconds to a single very long 56-second pre-shot routine.
The overall average across all 100 shots was 33 seconds. The PGA Championship at Aronimink two weeks earlier produced six-hour final rounds.
"If professionals at the PGA North can hit shots in an average of 33 seconds without caddies and ball spotters, tour professionals should be held accountable for why many of them struggle to achieve a similar standard," Plummer wrote.
The conclusion the study points to is not, as some have framed it, that PGA Tour players are uniquely slow. It is that the on-course architecture around a Tour player — the caddie consultations, the laser readings, the wind-checks with the on-course meteorologist, the ball-spotter waiting in the rough — is what consumes most of the gap between 33 seconds and the 50-plus seconds a contending player often takes at a major. Plummer's club pros did not have any of those resources. They walked up, looked at the shot, picked the club, hit the shot.
The Tour's own players have been increasingly willing to put the blame for slow play somewhere other than themselves. Justin Thomas, who picked up a slow-play warning in the second round of the PGA Championship and then disagreed with it on the record, took the position that the conditions of the day — wind, pin positions, course speed — should rule out a single fixed pace benchmark.
"What is time par? How can time par on this course be the same, when it's blowing 25 and the pins are tough?" Thomas told reporters. "We were behind. That wasn't our issue or being annoyed by it, it's just the fact that we weren't holding up the group behind us."
"We just didn't agree with it, to be honest," Thomas added.
Scottie Scheffler, who won the 2025 PGA Championship and finished inside the top ten at Aronimink, made a related point about the pins themselves.
"Most of the pins today were, I mean, kind of absurd," Scheffler said after one of the slower rounds. "They were just so far into the areas where we thought the pins were going to be."
Scheffler's argument is that a six-hour round is, in part, a function of a championship setup that punishes any shot that is not perfect — a setup that forces players to consult more, to walk off more lines, to take more practice swings before pulling the trigger. He went further on the question of the governing body's control over scoring.
"I truly believe they could have the winning score be whatever they want it to be," Scheffler said of the PGA of America.
The Plummer study lands awkwardly inside that conversation. It is not a claim that club professionals are better players. They are not. The PGA North field he watched contained players who shoot in the high 60s under tournament pressure but who would be utterly outclassed by a PGA Tour cardholder over four rounds at any of the 2026 venues. What the data set says is that the act of selecting a club, settling over the ball and hitting a shot takes 33 to 36 seconds when the player is doing it himself, on his own clock, with no caddie input. Whatever extra time the PGA Tour version of the same player takes is overhead.
The Korn Ferry Tour, perhaps not coincidentally, made each player's individual pace-of-play data public earlier this week — the first time any major professional tour has done so. The PGA Tour has so far declined to follow. Whether that changes is the next data point in a conversation that, on the evidence Plummer collected at Sand Moor, the players are losing on the merits.