Robert Trent Jones Sr.

Robert Trent Jones Sr. was a golf course architect, born on June 20, 1906 at Ince-in-Makerfield in Lancashire, England. The family crossed to the United States when he was about five, and he grew up at East Rochester in New York State. As a boy he caddied at the Country Club of Rochester, and he later became the first golf professional at Sodus Bay Heights Golf Club. He was thought promising as a player, but a duodenal ulcer kept him away from the game for a long stretch, and that was what turned him towards design.

At Cornell University he assembled a course of study of his own, putting together the subjects he needed in landscape work and course design. It is held to be one of the earliest cases of a man building a university programme for himself in order to learn golf course architecture. While a student he designed nine holes of the university course, and he laid out the remaining nine in 1954. After graduating he worked in partnership with the Canadian architect Stanley Thompson, and set up on his own at the end of the 1930s. Much of his work through the Depression years was on courses built with labour from the Works Progress Administration (WPA).

The turn came after the Second World War. His name became known through Peachtree Golf Club in Atlanta, opened in 1948, which he designed together with Bobby Jones; it was around that time, to keep himself apart from the great player of the same name, that he began to use Trent as a middle name. The remodelling of Oakland Hills in Michigan for the 1951 U.S. Open was the work that settled his reputation. He moved the bunkers to meet the distances the players of the day were hitting, and the field struggled on the course that resulted; Ben Hogan, who won, is famously said to have brought the monster to its knees. His creed in design was that par should be hard and bogey easy on every hole. Building into a course the choice of being rewarded for taking on risk came later to be called heroic design, and it set the tone for course architecture in the second half of the twentieth century.

Counting new work and remodelling, he had a hand in more than 500 courses in 45 U.S. states and 35 countries. Spyglass Hill in California, Firestone in Ohio, Hazeltine in Minnesota, Baltusrol in New Jersey and Oak Hill in New York State are among the best known. Abroad there are Real Club Valderrama in Spain, which he designed in 1974 and which staged the Ryder Cup of 1997, and the Cashen course at Ballybunion in Ireland (1984). Late in life he laid out the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, 468 holes across eleven sites in Alabama, which opened in 1992. Because he took on so much work tightening classic courses for the U.S. Open, he was also known as the Open Doctor. He was inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame in 1987 and received the Old Tom Morris Award in the same year. The line of architects passed to his sons: the elder, Robert Trent Jones Jr., helped his father with Spyglass Hill before setting up on his own in 1972, and the younger, Rees Jones, became an architect as well. He died at Fort Lauderdale, Florida on June 14, 2000, at the age of 93.

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