The crackdown on slow golfers is finally here

“Playing without undue delay, as the rules and the game’s traditions dictate, is an essential skill of golf at all levels," Ridley said. “Respecting other people’s time, including, importantly, the fans who support the game, is a fundamental courtesy."

Every weekend hacker knows the pain of interminable rounds of golf. When tee times are scrunched together at the local muni and the group ahead spends every hole scouring the woods for errant tee shots, an entire day can go up in smoke.

The same phenomenon has also increasingly created tension among the best golfers on the planet—and among fines who are tired of watching them stand over the ball for what feels like eons.

Now, the long-awaited crackdown is here.

This week, the PGA Tour is launching a test-run on the second-tier Korn Ferry Tour that makes it far likelier for players to receive penalty strokes for slow play—similar to the approach baseball took when it tried a pitch clock in the minors before implementing it in the majors. The PGA Tour’s next few events will also allow players to use distance-measuring devices, known as rangefinders, in order to help them shave off time.

And beginning next year, the PGA Tour’s will shrink its biggest fields from 156, which it hopes will reduce logjams and shorten rounds by about 15 minutes.

It isn’t just the men’s game, either. The LPGA recently instituted lower thresholds for players to get fined and penalized a stroke for taking too long.

The widespread action isn’t a coincidence. It’s the result of mounting feedback from fans and even some players who are tired of the sport dragging to a halt—and organizers are finally doing something about it.

“Those players who may have slower average stroke time, they tend to be disruptive to the overall flow—and that’s what we’re trying to address," says Gary Young, the PGA Tour’s senior vice president of rules and competition.

The pace of play issue was one of the key takeaways from a survey the PGA Tour conducted recently of more than 50,000 people to make its product more fan friendly. But speeding up the action isn’t so simple.

One complication is that two things fans love to see are directly at odds with one another. They may want quicker golf, but the longer courses that also make it more exciting and more challenging for modern players who pulverize the ball also turn rounds into a slog.

“Tough conditions make it play slower, no matter what," two-time major champion Collin Morikawa recently said.

The problem for organizers is that their previous solutions for penalizing plodding play have been largely toothless.

As it stands, players on the PGA Tour are sent data every week about their average stroke time, and anyone whose time is seven seconds or more above average for a given week receives an infraction. It takes 10 of those over the course of a season before earning a fine. Not only do they take months to add up, but those penalties can seem perfectly worthwhile when a single shot could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money.

It’s no wonder, then, that players have been perfectly happy to play at a leisurely pace. They stare at their yardage books, take countless practice swings and even step away from the ball if they don’t like the wind. It all adds up over the course of a round.

That’s why organizers are shifting to a ramped-up model that focuses on penalizing players in real time, and with something that should incentivize them even more to pick up the pace: their scores. The PGA Tour does already have a way to ding them, but it hasn’t been enforced in years because it’s such a drawn-out, four-step process.

First, a player is warned if he’s out of position and over time. Then he is put on a timer by officials. The first time he’s recorded taking too long, it’s a freebie. Only the next one produces a penalty stroke. (Excessive time is considered 50 seconds for the first player in a group and 40 seconds for the following players.)

What the PGA Tour is experimenting with on the Korn Ferry Tour is eliminating that freebie to get to the penalties quicker. The LPGA has implemented something similar and the idea behind both is hurting a player’s score is the best way to motivate them to pick up the pace.

“Clearly, our fine system wasn’t moving the needle," says LPGA player president Vicki Goetze-Ackerman. “Our warnings didn’t have any effect on people."

The far too casual pace was clear at the Masters last week. Over the first two days, some rounds exceeded 5.5 hours, or nearly the length of two NFL games. In some instances, players didn’t tee off on the fourth hole until an hour into their rounds.

When play grinds to a halt, it’s become common among fans to point fingers. They blame certain golfers for appearing to play notoriously slowly while lauding the likes of world No. 5 Ludvig Aberg, who has a reputation for stepping up to the ball and promptly letting it rip.

But soon, fans will have more than reputations and anecdotal evidence at their disposal for identifying the worst culprits.

One of the PGA Tour’s next steps will be releasing the data on just how fast—or slow—everyone plays.

Write to Andrew Beaton at andrew.beaton@wsj.com