Another ex-am picks slow road to Augusta
British Am champ forfeits Masters start to turn pro, collects slow-play penalty in Australia
Denmark’s Jacob Skov Olesen made it through DPWT Q-School in Spain (Aitor Alcalde/Getty Images)
These kids today.
The 2025 Masters field lost another amateur qualifier to the professional ranks, but this one might not be the worst thing for pace of play next April in Augusta.
Denmark’s Jacob Skov Olesen, the 2024 British Amateur champion, recently advanced through the DP World Tour Q-School and took up his card on the European circuit, thus forfeiting his place on the first tee at Augusta National. On his very first day of “work,” the young Dane was hit with a slow-play penalty in the first round of the BMW Australian PGA Championship.
Olesen, 25, reportedly took 130 seconds to hit his approach shot into the 10th hole at Royal Queensland in Brisbane — more than triple to amount of time a player is allowed to make a shot once it’s his turn to hit. His par four on the hole became a bogey five en route to a 3-over 74.
Masters fans will recall that the only player to be assessed a slow-play penalty at Augusta National was 14-year-old Asia-Pacific Amateur winner Tianlang Guan in 2013, when late rules official John Paramor hit the teenager from China with a one-shot penalty on the 17th hole of the second round after he’d already received three bad times on the day. Guan ended up making the cut on the number despite the added stroke, setting the record for the youngest player to reach the weekend in the Masters.
There was a lot of outcry on social media from tour pros over Guan’s penalty back then, with some players coming to his defense that Augusta was picking on the kid and making an example of him.
“What a terrible decision to penalize Guan,” tweeted Jamie Lovemark.
“Yeah, maybe he was playing slowly but the kids trying to make history, just look the other way,” tweeted Steve Flesch.
“Worst decision ever in golf!” tweeted another.
The tune has changed somewhat in the intervening 11 years as slow-play has only worsened.
Olesen, a former Arkansas golfer, won the British Am at Ballyliffin in Northern Ireland last summer, securing a start in both the Open Championship at Royal Troon last July and the upcoming Masters. He also had a card secured for the upcoming Challenge Tour season via the newly implemented Global Amateur Pathway Rankings — the same initiative that presented China’s Wenyi Ding with full DP World Tour status that he found too compelling to pass up. Ding, who finished one spot ahead of Olesen in the GAP rankings, also forfeited his Masters invite for winning the Asia-Pacific Amateur to take up his professional status immediately.
With the Masters and Challenge Tour opportunities in hand, the Dane teed it up in Q-School in Spain recently with nothing to lose and pulled off a top-20 finish that earned him 2025 DP World Tour status as well. The was too good for him to wait five months to take up and fall behind just so he could tee it up at Augusta in April. His withdrawal leaves the Masters at 75 qualified players and only four amateurs, with the Latin Amateur Amateur champion still pending in January.
Olesen told Golf Digest that it wasn’t as easy to turn down a chance to play the Masters as the one-day turnaround from Q-School to head to Australia for the DP World Tour season opener suggested.
“Ever since I was a kid and watched tournaments for the first time, I dreamed of going [to Augusta National],” he said in Australia. “But it’s the same with the DP World Tour, it’s a childhood dream to play out here as well. I was a little older for an amateur, [compared] to most. I think it would have been a different, different situation and decision if I was 20. Being 25, I felt like I wanted to get going and it’s hard to turn down a DP World Tour card.”
Olesen won the British Amateur in June at Ballyliffin (Oisin Keniry, R&A via Getty Images)
Like Ding, Olesen believes he has what it takes to eventually earn his way to Augusta as a professional.
“Exactly, it’s not like [it has to be a once] in a lifetime opportunity,” he told Golf Digest. “I have to put faith in myself and my team that one day we’ll get there through the professional route, which probably even more fun.”
That, of course, will take time – something Olesen seemingly has no trouble doing based on his opening day infraction Down Under. Slow play is an issue the professional tours have been reluctant to address in any meaningful way.
The PGA Tour just reduced its field sizes starting in 2026 to make it easier for rounds to be completed in the allotted daylight hours, which does nothing to address the root of the problem which is players taking too long to hit their shots and making the game excruciating to watch as well as play.
England’s Charley Hull, fed up with the staggering glacial pace in the third round of last week’s LPGA event in Florida that took nearly six hours to complete, offered a Draconian solution to the persistent problem.
“I’m quite ruthless, but I said, listen, if you get three bad timings, every time it’s a two-shot penalty. If you have three of them, you lose your tour card instantly, go back to Q-School,” Hull said. “I’m sure that would hurry a lot of people up and they won’t want to lose their tour card. That would kill the slow play, but they would never do that.
“It’s ridiculous and I feel sorry for the fans how slow it is out there. We were out there for five hours and 40 minutes yesterday. We play in a four-ball at home on a hard golf course and we’re round in three and a half, four hours. It is pretty crazy.”
Too bad Hull can’t be global commissioner in charge of all the tours. Every major sport has enforceable rules in place to govern pace of play — Major League Baseball even successfully introduced a pitch clock that has greatly enhanced the speed of the games.
But professional golf remains largely mired in obliviousness to a scourge that is detrimental to the game on both the competitive and recreational level.