Tour
February 4, 2020 - 4:00 am EST 5 years ago

Euro Pro Rips Playing Partner For Slow Play, Poor Etiquette

Chris Chaney Chris Chaney

South African Justin Harding has forged a continuous path up the Official World Golf Rankings over the last two years climbing from No. 734 in February 2018 all the way inside the top-100 in the world currently.

Featuring prominently in the early rounds of major championships in 2019, the 33-year-old Harding has made his way onto the periphery of golf fans’ consciousness, and his adamant call-out of a deliberate playing partner at this past week’s Saudi International will only ingratiate him more to those looking to stamp out the game’s slow-play issues.

Harding shot rounds of  68-73-67 in the first three rounds to put himself in position to pick up some solid Race to Dubai points as well as a nice chunk of change with a good final round, but his pairing alongside Adrian Otaegui was seemingly enough to throw Harding off his game.


Otaegui is known as one of the slowest players on the European Tour, and Harding went nuclear in a series of tweets following his final-round 4-over par 74 dropped him 29 spots down the leaderboard into a tie for 56th

“Turtles should be monitored AT ALL TIMES European Tour,” Harding wrote on Twitter. “We as players who don’t take an age should not be responsible for them. Nor should our round be affected by their inconsiderate behavior. Pretty simple really.

“F1 doesn’t say to [driver] Lewis Hamilton… ‘Hey pal just slow down because the guys behind can’t keep up.’ If the other 120 players in the field act properly why are we as players forced to play with these guys if they couldn’t give a s**t. Week in week out same story, same guys.”

Harding didn’t call out Otaegui by name in his tweets, but he didn’t hide who he was talking about by retweeting a pair of other posts that name and shamed the Spanish pro.

 

Asked if he was doing alright by European Tour legend Thomas Bjorn, Harding replied not-so-cryptically that he was recovering from a “long” day on the course, and that he was tired from running in front of a referee all day.