Five-time PGA Tour winner Sam Burns has revealed he quit the PGA Tour's Speed of Play Working Group after growing frustrated that rules officials kept penalizing entire groups instead of the individual players actually slowing down play. Burns detailed the episode during an appearance on the Fore Play podcast, according to AOL.com.
Burns joined the Speed of Play Working Group when the PGA Tour formed it in April 2025, alongside fellow players Adam Schenk and Jhonattan Vegas. The group was created to work with the Tour's player advisory council on improving pace of play, with the stated goal of rewarding faster players and punishing slower ones. But Burns said the system backfired on him personally, as officials repeatedly put his entire group on the clock even when he was not the one causing delays.
"When slow guys play with me, they are just like, 'This is the greatest thing ever, because I can be slower and he can make up for it,'" Burns told the Fore Play podcast. "And then we'd have rules officials coming up to our group and put our group on the clock. I was like, 'Dude, no! Don't lump me into this.' It happened like two or three times, and I finally told them, 'Take me off the committee. I'm out. This is a waste of time.'"
According to Burns, he repeatedly asked Tour officials to target individual slow players rather than issuing group-wide timing penalties. "I keep telling you, 'Don't put the group on the clock,'" Burns said he told officials. "Put the player on the clock, who is slow. They're like, 'Okay, yeah, yeah.' And then it happened again; I said, 'Alright, I'm out.'"
Burns is not alone in his frustration over the Tour's pace of play, a subject that has drawn increasing scrutiny across professional golf. AOL.com noted that Ryan Fox won this year's Open Championship while playing at a notably brisk pace, drawing praise as a contrast to the sport's broader slow-play problem. Veteran Colin Montgomerie has also weighed in publicly on where the Tour's pace is headed as rounds continue to stretch longer, often pointing to lengthy conversations between players and caddies as a contributing factor.
Fellow PGA Tour player Kevin Kisner backed Burns' preferred approach of targeting individuals rather than groups. "Individual timings would change a lot. If they were just old enough to yell at the slow players," Kisner said, according to AOL.com's report on the podcast.
Burns made clear he does not see himself as part of the slow-play problem Montgomerie described, particularly when it comes to on-course chatter with his caddie. Instead, Burns said his frustration boils over while waiting on notoriously deliberate playing partners. "Just tell my caddie I can't believe this guy is slow," Burns said when asked what he does while waiting on others. "Like this sucks. What is this guy doing? Why has this guy not picked a club? He has been standing there for two minutes. Like it's a 7-iron or 8-iron, just hit one of those clubs. I don't care. Hurry up."
Burns' comments arrive at a moment when his own game has been trending upward, giving added weight to his complaints about lost time. He finished in serious contention at both the U.S. Open and the Open Championship this season, results that have raised his profile and, by his own account, made the hours spent on committee matters feel less worthwhile.
During the same wide-ranging Fore Play appearance, Burns also weighed in on a separate, lighter story involving world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, according to Yahoo Sports. Podcast host and golf content creator Frankie Borrelli recounted how he had spent roughly two years texting congratulatory messages to a phone number he believed belonged to Scheffler, only to never receive a reply. Borrelli said he finally confronted Scheffler about the silence during the FedEx Cup playoffs, at which point Scheffler revealed he had switched numbers before the 2022 Masters specifically to avoid tournament-related distractions.
According to Borrelli, Scheffler explained that a random person now has the old number, and that plenty of people mistakenly text that number believing it belongs to the world No. 1. Borrelli said that when he then asked for Scheffler's current number, Scheffler brushed him off, telling him, "You don't even want my new number. I don't respond," and, "You don't even want it."
Burns, listening to Borrelli recount the exchange, reacted with amusement. "Wow, dude. He played you hard," Burns said. "My God. That's hilarious."
Yahoo Sports noted this was not the first time Borrelli has told this story on the podcast; he raised a similar account in 2024, saying at the time that he had worried Scheffler simply did not like him before eventually learning the mix-up was just about the changed number. At the time of the podcast conversation, Scheffler was tied for 22nd at the FedEx St. Jude Championship after an even-par second round, still chasing a second win of the season despite becoming, once again, an unlikely source of off-course entertainment.
For Burns, the two stories captured on the same podcast appearance reflect two very different sides of life on Tour this summer: one a genuine grievance over how the Tour manages pace of play, and the other a lighthearted moment shared among peers about golf's most dominant current player. Whether the PGA Tour revises its approach to pace-of-play enforcement in response to Burns' criticism and Kisner's suggestion of individual timing penalties remains to be seen, as no formal changes to the Speed of Play Working Group's methods have been announced.
