Matt Fitzpatrick has joined former US Open champion Lucas Glover in blasting the PGA Tour over their decision to reduce field sizes with the aim of addressing pace of play issues.
A series of sweeping changes were confirmed on Monday, with the reduction of field sizes a major sticking point. Glover hit out at what he described as 'cool kid meetings' between Jordan Spieth, Patrick Cantlay, Tiger Woods and other big-name golfers.
"I think it’s terrible," he said. "And then hiding behind pace of play, I think, challenges our intelligence. They think we’re stupid.
"Don’t cut fields because it’s a pace of play issue. Tell us to play faster, or just say you’re trying to appease six guys and make them happy so they don’t go somewhere else and play golf."
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Fitzpatrick joined the discussion on X (formerly Twitter), with the 30-year-old adopting a similar stance to Glover regarding the PGA Tour changes.
"He’s so right," wrote Fitzpatrick. "Pathetic that pace of play is spoken about every year and nothing ever gets done."
Gary Young, the PGA Tour's senior vice-president of rules and competition, is adamant the changes will speed up the pace of play despite the protests of Glover and Fitzpatrick.
He told Golfweek: "It’s something that we’ve been saying for years that 156-man fields are too many players. It’s basically 78 players in a wave, 13 groups per side and our pace of play is set somewhere around four-and-a-half hours.
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"You do the math and if they play in time par, which is basically two hours and 15 minutes, they make the turn and all of a sudden the group ahead of them is just walking off the tee because there’s two hours and 12 minutes of tee times.
"It becomes a parking lot. There’s nowhere to go. We asked ourselves: if we were starting the Tour from scratch, what would be our maximum field size?
"As we talked it through with the players on that subcommittee, there was agreement in the room that you would never build it so that groups would be turning and waiting at the turn.
"The whole idea of 144 being our maximum field size, everyone felt that that was the right number, and the mathematics on it worked. You’ll see that some of our other fields have been reduced even further and that’s due to time constraints."
