The better I play the less I worry about slow play...

I am playing in a Scramble tomorrow and decided to play nine today just for a tune up.  At my home course they have ladies day from 12-2 and then from 5-7 or something like that.  Anyone can golf in that 2-5 gap so I got my tee time for then.  I expected that i would be most likely waiting on most holes since a lot of the ladies day golfers also tee off in that time slot.  Little did i know that it would not be a ladies group that held me up but a pair or men probably around there 70s.  Now this is not a bash on senior golfers (in fact i hope to be golfing when I am that old) but they really couldn't have been more oblivious.  I had to wait on every single hole.  Just for reference a group of four women pulled away from them by an entire hole.

Now when I am playing bad this usually really bothers me, but today I shot a 40 from the back tees for 9, and I didn't really mind waiting.  I just started walking a little bit slower and taking a few more practice swings.  With a clear course I can polish off 9 in around an hour or so but this nine took about 1:50.

There are many things that these guys did that would usually make me quite ticked

1.  Parked their cart in front of the greens.... I would be sitting to hit my second shot and would have to wait for them to walk back to their cart and then drive all the way around to the next tee box.

2.  Excessive ball searching....on the last hole I walked up to the tee box to see one of the men with his head buried in a sewage drain pipe.

3.  Clearly noticed me waiting on every hole and not making the slightest hint of letting me play through

But as I said before today nothing really bothered me because I was paying extremely well.

Anybody else experience this?

Well 1:50 is not considered slow. in fact a 3 hour and 40 min round is a great time.

I'm not sure why you thought you would be waiting on the ladies.  More times than not I have found that ladies are plenty fast. Old men (in general) on the other hand are the slowest golfers on a course 99.9% of the time. As you note, they move slow, they do stupid things and most of all could care less about someone (never mind a single) waiting behind them.

glad you enjoyed some time on the course. good to hear

I noticed the same thing.

The few times I've played behind a group of women golfers, I had no issues whatsoever.  In fact, the ones I've been behind were the epitome of ready-golf.  While they didn't hit the ball very far, it didn't really matter.  It was hit and move, hit and move.  No dilly-dallying at all.  Also, of the 3 times my group has been waved through through this year, 2 of them were by groups of women.

I can't believe you think an hour and 50 minutes for 9 holes is slow. Sounds like the old gents in front of you played plenty quickly. Perhaps they should have waived you thru, but they did not play slow.

I totally get where the OP is coming from: when I'm playing well nothing really bothers me, even slow play.  The question is "does nothing bother me because I'm playing well" or "am I playing well because I'm not letting anything bother me"?  In hopes that it is the latter, I just started reading Deepak Chopra's book on Golf and Enlightenment.

1:50 is a fast time for a foursome but could feel slow to a single, especially one who is playing well and not spending time looking for balls, hacking out of rough, etc.

It's been my experience that the younger the group in front of me, the slower they play.  Typically 20 something macho jock types who insist on playing from the back tees (discussed ad nauseum in other threads)  are the worst offenders.  What I've noticed about ladies (and my wife confirms this) is they have no ego about picking up when they've hit too many and they spend very little time on each shot.  I know this is a generalization, but it seems to hold true regardless of the woman's skill level.

I had a similar (slow play) experience a few weeks ago... I was behind a family reunion/golf tournament.  There were approximately 10 foursomes in the group/tournament.  None of them seemed to have any clue about what they were doing... They were extremely slow.  They let their kids play with toys in the sand traps while they were putting on the greens, etc... I saw several groups of people behind them get so frustrated that they walked off the course (probably cussing.)... However, I was playing well at the time, so I kept playing ... Also, there was a Blues Festival going on at the Fairgrounds next to the golf course and the music was great... I ended up shooting the best round I had shot in about 40 years... Interesting day!... :-)

Like TN94z said, this is really the thing that bothers me the most on a course.  Instead of having a single on your tail every hole, why not let him play through.  They'll hit one shot and you likely won't see them for the rest of the round.  Now if the group ahead of you is waiting on a group ahead of them, then that's another story altogether.

This post brings a smile to my face.  Look what I posted some time ago :-)

http://thesandtrap.com/forum/thread/47414/slow-play-vs-bad-play-also-known-as-can-you-be-slower-if-you-are-good/18#post_614797

He was playing as a single.  1:50 is deathly slow for a single player... that's almost enough time for 18 holes.