This here is what I was telling everyone about. This viewpoint is out there.
There are so many things wrong with this.
1. You are conflating two issues. This is not slow play, a rules situation is completely separate from how quickly or slowly someone is playing, and has always been treated in golf as such. The R&A is perfectly capable of handing something like this, if it was an issue. They warned the group to pick up the pace earlier in the round and if they deemed what happened on hole 13 was a problem towards that, they would've been on the clock. But they weren't, so they clearly separated the two issues.
2. Those are two of the options, but that wasn't the only option. The range was in play, and gave him his best chance to make a 4 or 5 as the contact out of the rough would not be the best and going back to the tee is farther from the hole to be playing shot 3 from a tee. If you actually assess what happened, most of the time that elapsed was because the R&A was unprepared for a ball to be played from over there, despite deeming that to be in bounds from the start of the Championship, so thats poor preparation on their part. They had a big TV camera in the sky that they had to move, they had to move the gallery, the walking rules official was in over his head and had to call in his boss because he was unable to deal with it. You can blame Spieth for playing slowly during the round, but what happened on 13 was not about him playing slowly, he knew his options quickly and it would've taken a much shorter time if the R&A was better prepared. The only things Spieth took any time on himself were quickly assessing his options, the yardage, and taking relief from the TIO. That itself is probably 10 minutes, all the waiting around is mostly on the other stuff that comes with this situation, which adds at least the same amount of time to it.
3. Its no farce at all. The rules were followed completely to the letter of the law, the governing body doesn't consider the wait to have anything to do with slow play by the player. You essentially added a new rule into the sport, of which I think would have next to no support to ever be instituted. If golf had a shot clock that completely misses all context of the situation with two strikes and you're out, there would be less people playing it and the sport's impact on professional sports would be significantly less.
