The "total chaos" of a six-hour round of golf at the British Open

How to sell a day of golf that lasts 16 hours?

The first round of the British Open started at 6.35am local time and ended around 10.30pm.

From sunrise to sunset in Saint Andrews, turning the countryside into a highway clogged by rush hour traffic.

The 156 players competing in the tournament completed rounds of six hours and 20 minutes, as was the case with Jon Rahm in the afternoon shift.

The nature of this course of shared fairways and

, with par fours that can be reached in one shot, a very tight round-trip layout, caused a funnel never seen before.

A normal day in a game of three golfers usually lasts about five hours: a little less on the European circuit, much stricter with slow play, and a little more on the American circuit, more permissive.

In Saint Andrews there was extension.

“Total chaos was created,” José María Zamora, the only Spanish referee who regulates the game this week in Saint Andrews, explains to this newspaper.

“In this field it is a bit unavoidable.

Players always shoot to miss to the left, because if you go to the right you can end up out of bounds.

This causes those balls to end up interfering in the matches that come in the other direction, and that forces some groups to wait for the others to pass.

Saint Andrews is the worst course for slow play.

There are par fours that are reached in one shot and par fives that are reached in two, and that slows things down even more because some cannot leave the

until those in front leave the

.

Sometimes we have asked the players to mark the ball and to throw the following ones”, says Zamora.

Saint Andrews is a two-way highway.

The course draws a long straight from hole 1 to 7, from 8 to 11 it turns on itself in a kind of loop and from 12 to 18 it returns in the opposite direction to the first, drawing parallel holes.

Only four

, 1, 9, 17 and 18, are individual, and the rest are shared: 2 with 16, 3 with 15, 4 with 14, 5 with 13, 6 with 12 , 7 with 11 and 8 with 10 (oddly enough, the sum of these pairs always equals 18).

Everything is very tight.

"The players don't know that they have to give way to those who are playing the second nine holes, and we can't be stopping the game to tell them," adds Zamora.

"It was crazy," Rahm said on Friday.

The traffic jam bored both the fan in the field and the viewer on television, a bad thing for the big circuits when the Saudi league offers the opposite: a day of golf concentrated in five hours, simultaneous starts and a succession of shots that greatly enliven the broadcasts.

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