Ben Crane is a turtle in transition.

Chagrined by his standing as one of professional golf's slowest performers, Crane has come out of his contemplative shell resolved to pick up his competitive pace.

"Did anyone notice that I was in a group waiting?" the winner of the Farmers Insurance Open wondered Sunday at Torrey Pines. "I wanted to say it to (CBS' David) Feherty, but I didn't want to get myself out of the moment too much and start thinking too much about something else.

"I almost walked over and (said), 'Is anyone looking around that I'm leaning on my golf club right now?'"

Crane is sensitive to his image as the PGA Tour's tectonic plate, and he has been sufficiently embarrassed to recently shift his game into a less glacial gear. If this was not readily apparent from the five-and-a-half-hour, two-under-par 70 Crane shot yesterday, this time he was more the victim of sluggish circumstance than its chief culprit.

This time, the weight of the wait was shouldered by the groups in front of the leaders and by the deliberate approach Torrey Pines' stern South Course demands.

This time, for once, Ben Crane was a victim rather than a villain.

The 33-year-old Crane can crawl with the worst of them. His presence atop the leader board was a recurring joke cue in the media tent yesterday, so much so that you would think snails had asked the guy to play through. At least up to the point when he prevented a four-man playoff by sinking a 2_-and-a-half-foot par putt on the tournament's 72nd hole, Crane's defining moment in golf involved grating on Rory Sabbatini's nerves.

During the closing round of the 2005 Booz Allen Classic, tour officials put Sabbatini and Crane on the clock for slow play. Though no PGA Tour player has been charged a penalty stroke for dawdling since Dillard Pruitt was docked at the 1992 Byron Nelson Classic, repeat offenders are subject to fine and prone to frustrate their partners.
    Sabbatini, who prefers to play briskly, registered his objections with Crane's pace by leaving him behind as they played the 17th hole at TPC Avenel in Potomac, Md., putting out after Crane's approach shot, and then leaving huffily for the 18th tee.

Sabbatini was appropriately chastised for this egregious breach of etiquette -- "As inconsiderate as anything I've seen," Paul Azinger called it -- and Crane was appropriately chastened by having been the cause of it. Though the impact of that incident has been, well, gradual, it may have served as time-release shock therapy.

Sabbatini took the hit, but Ben Crane took the hint.

"That was a great thing for me that happened because I realized, 'Wow, I mean, this is a big deal. I'm too slow,'_" Crane said after yesterday's trophy presentation. "I believe God uses all things for good if we allow him to. And that was definitely a good thing for me. That's how a lot of people know me is because of that.

"I'm trying to make some changes that will get me away from that because, yeah, it definitely weighs on my mind, and the better off I am with being ready when it's my turn will take some pressure off for sure."

Those of us accustomed to closing press boxes and irritating editors sometimes fancy ourselves to be perfectionists when what we do best is procrastinate. We embrace the conceit of French writer Paul Valery, who said, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned."

Golfers are susceptible to the same sort of artistic struggle; to the notion that a different club or an alternative target might yield a better result; to the idea that there's always a better idea. During the 2002 U.S. Open at Bethpage Black, Sergio Garcia gripped and re-gripped his club with such apparent indecision that spectators began audibly counting his "waggles" (sometimes into the 20s).

The issue of pace is real, even though enforcement is rare. Last year, at the World Golf Championships-Bridgestone Invitational, Padraig Harrington owned a one-stroke lead with three holes to play when he was told that he and Tiger Woods were being timed. In his haste to atone, Harrington rushed three shots, took a triple bogey and lost the tournament. "I don't think that Paddy would have hit the pitch shot that way if he was able to take his time, look at it, analyze it," Woods said, sympathetically. "But he was on the clock."

Time waits for no man, and few women. Nancy Lopez won the 1985 LPGA Championship despite absorbing a two-stroke slow-play penalty that caused her to finish the first round in tears.

"Golf," she complained, "isn't a cross-country race."

Neither, however, is it an oil painting.

"I need to play 'ready' golf," Crane said yesterday. "I've been too slow in the past, and it's bothered me."

It helps, of course, when you need fewer shots than everyone else.

Tim Sullivan writes about sports for The San Diego Union-Tribune.