Cost of Golfing Too Slow? $240K for This Guy

Cheaters may or may not prosper, but dawdlers apparently don't prosper nearly as much as they could. Golf.com reports the tale of semi-woe of Adrian Meronk, who took home a tidy little paycheck of $508,750 this weekend in Saudi Arabia's LIV Golf Jeddah tournament—not a bad haul for a couple of days hitting the links, and about $95,000 more than he's brought home before. But, had the world's 50th-ranked golfer stepped up the pace a bit, the payday would've been a lot greater. What went down:

• Things were going well: As the Wall Street Journal reports, the 30-year-old Meronk was on the final hole of the tourney and eyeing a birdie that would move him up on the leaderboard to a richer prize. He nailed the shot.
• But there's a but: Meronk took his sweet time lining up that last shot and was hit with a slow-play penalty that cost him a stroke. That dropped him from a birdie to a par 5, which sent him from a two-way tie in fifth place to a six-way tie in sixth place. "On the second stroke of the 18th hole, Adrian Meronk ... received a time exceeding two minutes for his stroke," says an LIV release. "This exceeded the allotted time per the policy."
• The cost: A mere $241,250, reports the Journal.

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