Camilo Villegas wants to shame slow players on the PGA Tour: 'There must be consequences'

HONOLULU – Camilo Villegas is convinced the PGA Tour’s pace of play problem will self-correct in 2026 when the Tour implements reduced fields. But Villegas doesn’t want to stop there; he wants to fix pace of play on Tour once and for all.

In a previous interview with Golfweek in November, Tour veteran Lucas Glover slammed the changes that were approved for next season at the Tour’s final policy board meeting of the year.

“Get a better pace of play policy or enforce the one you have better,” he said. “If I’m in a slow twosome and an official came up and said, 'You guys are behind, this is not a warning, y’all are on the clock and if you get a bad time, that’s a shot penalty,' guess who’s running to their ball? That’s what we need to be doing.”

Villegas and Glover both want the same end result but have different ways of getting to speedier play.

"Lucas is one of my best friends. He is very thoughtful and I respect and admire that guy so much, which is why I was a little surprised (by his comments),” Villegas said ahead of the Sony Open in Hawaii on Wednesday. “Let’s hope we can prove Lucas wrong.”

But Villegas acknowledged the Tour’s problem and agrees that slow play must be stamped out. Villegas said he played in a handful of 156-man Korn Ferry Tour events last year and there was no way to enforce the pace-of-play policy. He recalled teeing off in the first group Thursday and reaching the turn, then having to wait behind two groups.

“I’d go into player dining, order an omelet, send (KFT president) Alex Baldwin a picture and say I’m eating breakfast at the turn,” he recalled. She’d send an emoji with hands on head.

“With a 156-man field we can’t enforce pace of play. In 2026, when that is not the case, we need to enforce it. One of the questions I asked is, how many guys are averaging above time on their shots. They gave me a number which I can’t remember.

“The way I see it, those guys are breaking the rules. There needs to be consequences. I think their names should be posted in the locker room in font (size) 30, and (fellow Tour pro) Michael Kim brought this up a little while back, their caddie should wear a fluorescent orange bib. Make them feel bad. That’s not the way this game should be played. The Tour’s never going to do that. I wish they did. We had the balls to do the changes last year so maybe we do have the balls to enforce pace of play a little better.”

Villegas, who served as chairman of the Player Advisory Council last year, is set to replace Jordan Spieth as a player director on the Tour board. He attended the last board meeting in November to get a better sense of what to expect. What did he learn from sitting in on the meeting?

“A lot of the board members had everything printed with notes and everything separated. When we got to that spot, they were ready to discuss and ready to give their input,” he said. “Obviously some of the people sitting in this board meeting are members of many other boards and business people, and they're very involved with sports and different leagues, and I'm really looking forward to learning from them, and I'm really looking forward to just kind of giving my honest feedback, opinion, and adding my two cents.

“When you hear Arthur Blank talking about football and how they do it, I’m like, you know what? This guy has it figured out. Bringing the game back together is needed. But it’s hard. We all want these things to happen and we say, man, this should have happened already, but there’s so much that needs to happen. It’s not as simple as it seems.”

This article originally appeared on Golfweek: camilo-villegas-pace-of-play