At the 2026 Open Championship, golf fans witnessed conflicting realities when it comes to slow play in pro golf. On the one hand, Ryan Fox put on a fast-play clinic on his way to winning on Sunday at Royal Birkdale, which Jon Rahm called “eye-opening.”
On the other, some pros suffered through rounds on Thursday and Friday that stretched to 5 hours and 40 minutes.
Ahead of this week’s LIV Golf U.K. event, Rahm tackled both seemingly contradictory ideas in his pre-tournament press conference. But he also identified the biggest issue with slow play in pro golf and suggested a simple solution.
Rahm says slow play rules need to be ‘stricter’
Rahm presented his idea for controlling pace of play on Tour when addressing a different issue entirely: new code-of-conduct policies at majors.
The two-time major champion was given a code-of-conduct warning at last week’s Open following a club slam during the second round.
“Now that you bring up pace of play, I can give you an idea,” Rahm began. “If you get a warning for code of conduct on Thursday, that warning stays for the whole week and it doesn’t reset. You can be slow on Thursday; your group gets warned; you have time to catch up. Then you get put on the clock, and once you’re on the clock you get one more warning before you get penalized. So you get three possible bad times amongst many others, and then when you tee off on Friday, you start from zero again. That doesn’t seem very fair to me.”
Rahm continued by arguing that pro golf’s governing bodies should either loosen the rules on code of conduct or change the pace of play rules to make warnings last for an entire tournament instead of a single round.
“How come one which is a present issue in the game that can cause slow play and affect other people, you get so many breaks, and it’s completely looked over, and then in code of conduct, you don’t know where the line is. You have no definition of what you can or cannot do, even though we understand where the limit may be, and that warning stays with you for the whole week,” Rahm said on Tuesday. “I know the different things and why they’re doing it, but either make one of them a lot more stricter or the other one a lot looser. Whatever you choose. But it would be nice to see them on the same line. Don’t care.”
But if Rahm were making the decision, he would choose to change the pace of play rules.
“I think make pace of play stricter,” he said.
Why Rahm thinks slow play issue has been ‘blown out of proportion’
While Rahm acknowledged that slow play is an issue in pro golf, he also argued that the problem has been overstated. Why? Because slow rounds are just a reality of tournaments with big fields and difficult setups, especially on Thursdays and Fridays.
“It gets to a point where you can only do so much, but when you have — like last week, for example, a hole like 14 where it’s reachable but the green is really hard to hit as a par-5, very few people are going to hit the green, now your ball is running off the green. It’s a difficult chip. It’s just going to take time. As people hit the fairway, slowly it will delay and delay and delay, and by the end of the day it’s going to be quite a wait. It is the nature of the game,” Rahm explained.
He backed up his argument by noting that tournaments with smaller fields, such as the Masters, don’t typically see issues with slow play.
“I think the pace of play has been blown out of proportion a little bit as of late,” Rahm said. “I think most people only fall back to playing slower simply because the group in front is slow, and you only see a small part of the whole narrative, when the truth is I think when you have a smaller field, it rarely, rarely becomes an issue.”
Rahm praises Ryan Fox and top pros for fast pace of play
As for Fox’s lightning-fast play on Sunday at the Open, Rahm was not surprised, having played with the longtime pro many times. Though he did admit he was shocked at just how quickly Fox hit his winning birdie putt on 18.
“I think what was surprising was taking 22 seconds from the moment the last putt from Sam [Burns] goes in until Ryan hits his putt to win the championship. I think it shows more than just a fast routine, how confident and how good he was feeling that day,” Rahm said.
He also said Fox’s success while playing fast could be “eye-opening” for the golf world and provide players of all types with a good example to follow.
“I’ve played a lot with Ryan [Fox], and obviously I’m not surprised since I know how fast he is, but I think it’s eye-opening to the world when you get to see every single shot he hits that day and how quickly he truly plays.”
But Rahm also noted that while slow players get the most attention, many of the best pros are fast players. He name-checked Rory McIlroy and Brooks Koepka specifically to demonstrate that Fox’s example was not out of the ordinary.
“Another player that’s incredibly fast is Rory McIlroy. Always has been. Brooks [Koepka] as well. There’s a lot of people that have won great events that are super fast. It’s just never been talked about because I think it’s easier to focus on the other side of the coin, right,” Rahm argued. “But there’s a lot of people out there that have achieved a lot being really fast.”
While Rahm spoke at length about pace of play in his Tuesday LIV press conference, he stayed tight-lipped about LIV Golf’s tenuous future. When asked if he expected to be playing on LIV Golf in 2027, he said simply, “I’m not going to share anything that I can’t share with you guys right now.”
