Prestwick 12 Golf: Offering less, but faster

It was Robert Browning who brought the term “less is more,” to life in his 1855 poem Andrea del Sarto. Ironically, that poem also included the lines “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,” and “dufus golf bloggers aren’t fooling anybody by leading off their blogs with poetry references.”

Still, heeding the concept of “less is more,” is South Carolina’s Mark Brown. Seems that Mr. Brown is looking for a way to squeeze more money out of golf, and faster.

With the tagline of “Making Golf More Fun for More People” Brown’s Prestwick 12 Golf is a plan to build and promote golf courses that will be based on giving players six holes of golf at a time.

“Golfers have the option of playing any combination of 6 holes, each of which can be played in about 1 hour and 15 minutes. This option provides a solution to the problem of golf taking too much time and money to play,” reports Brown’s Web site.

While it’s not the worst idea in the world – anything that gets people outside and golfing more is, by definition, good – it just seems to be pure marketing strategy, rather than fulfilling any real need.

While there will always be debate over slow play, Brown’s estimates for the length of a round seem to make it more of a problem than it actually is: if there were a clamor from golfers to be able to play a six-hole run, just about every golf course in existence has a six-hole stretch or two that could do the trick. They split into nine-hole runs pretty nicely also.

So while Brown is basing this concept on older 12-hole golf courses in Scotland, his idea isn’t one that is an homage to golf of yesteryear. It is more an homage to fast food, perhaps, as was it Ray Kroc who once said “faster is always better?”

Time is short and life moves fast because we are constantly told time is short and life moves fast. Not everything needs to be compressed and consumed nugget-form – especially golf.