Is Rory McIlroy right to suggest that golf should be speeded up?

The Slow Food movement began in Rome in 1986 when a man called Carlo Petrini objected to the building of a McDonald’s near the Spanish Steps. Outraged that the franchise should colonise the Eternal City’s abiding symbol of romance, Petrini wrote a manifesto in praise of the principle of special things coming to those who wait. That instinctive reaction against the fast-forward, time-poor compulsions of modern life has subsequently colonised many other spheres: there are, for example, thriving philosophies of Slow Travel, Slow Parenting, Slow Technology and – obviously – Slow Sex that collectively aim to promote the virtues and pleasures of simplicity, to champion patience over instant gratification, to argue for space to breathe over breathlessness. In his book, In Praise of Slow, the bible of craftsmen and amblers everywhere, Carl Honoré, makes the argument that “some things cannot, should not, be sped up. They take time. When you accelerate things that should not be accelerated, there is a price to pay.”

There is, as yet, as far as I know, no Slow Sports movement, but I’m guessing that it is only a matter of time. Last week, golf, perhaps the only game in which strolling is traditionally encouraged, was the latest sport seen to be in a crisis of tempo. Figures suggest that in 2013 the game in America lost about half a million regular players compared with the previous year. In Britain, the number of young people regularly playing the game almost halved between 2010 and 2013. The latter fact was put forward as one reason why Rory Mcllroy lost to Lewis Hamilton in the popular vote as sports personality of the year. When Mcllroy was asked about some of this by the BBC he suggested that the fall-off in players was most likely down to speed. “Gone are the days that you could spend five or six hours on a golf course,” he said. “Everything’s so instant now, and everyone doesn’t have as much time as they used to.” His solution, when pressed, was to suggest the need for “some way of speeding the game up … I don’t think they need to alter tournament-play formats”, he said. “It’s the grassroots – definitely not at our level.”

Despite the fact that television viewing figures for golf have risen in Britain in the same period, the argument sounds a lot like a contemporary truism: boredom thresholds are plummeting, better hurry the thing up, keep them interested. It is the same argument that led – successfully – to the creation of Twenty20 cricket and, lately, the effort to accelerate tennis with the inaugural International Premier Tennis League – strapline: “break the code” – in which the Indian Aces, led by Roger Federer and Pete Sampras, triumphed over the UAE Royals of Novak Djokovic and Caroline Wozniacki. The tournament, organised by the Indian former player Mahesh Bhupathi, promised “to change the manner in which the world enjoys the sport”, to bring “NBA-style entertainment” to tennis fans. To this end, in a six-player-per-team, five-set format, perceived frustrations such as deuce points and tie breaks were eliminated, along with much in the way of concentration or intensity. There were frequent substitutions and the introduction of “happiness power points” that counted double. A big clock counted down time between serves and quietness (that other perilously dull quality for sporting entrepreneurs) was inevitably outlawed in favour of thumping bass lines and raucous crowd “participation” between points. Some players were being paid more than a million dollars a day to take part; one of them, Federer, called it “a crazy, but fun” event, one likely to become an annual fixture.

Every sport, it is routinely said in such contexts, has to move with the times. By which we are to understand that it has to eliminate longueurs to compensate for the growing attention deficiency in its audience. It has to be more immediate, more exciting. To argue anything else would be to misunderstand the pressures on players and spectators alike, the competing claims on time, the commercial realities brought about by increasing restlessness and increasing choice, and to risk charges of elitism and snobbery.

Charges that were, of course, levelled at Petrini when he decided there should be more to life in Rome than a Big Mac on the run, but that didn’t make his instinct necessarily wrong. One of the great fascinations and pleasures of watching and playing sport surely lies not in relentless pace, in constant frenzy, but in rhythm. Tension, in tennis and golf and cricket, is derived in large part from the extreme contrast between action and inaction; the in-built pauses in the way the game is played are often the moments of greatest drama. The cliché that sport is played in the head only makes sense if it includes time for a degree of contemplation, a space for determination and for doubt.

Mcllroy may be correct in his belief that one way to increase participation in golf is to make changes to the Royal and Ancient code that would speed the game up – though it is quite hard to imagine what those changes would be beyond pitch and putt or running between strokes – but he is perhaps naive to believe that will have no impact on how the game is played at the highest level. As cricket is still discovering, the qualities that created the Test match game – concentration, stamina and doggedness as well as skill and technique – are often directly opposed to those needed to thrive in the Big Bash.

Would speed golf work? There is no clear evidence to suggest that the modernisation of sports, the breaking of codes, results in greater participation in them. In fact, the converse seems likely. The more sport becomes, in that dread phrase, “part of the entertainment industry”, something that is readily formatted to be channel-surfed or consumed in clips on smartphones, the more it comes to resemble everything else in our lives: something to be speed-read before moving on.