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Foreword by Bobby Jones, Jr.
Introduction by Udo Machat
Chapter I The Area
Chapter II The Northern California Golf Association
Chapter III The Designers
Chapter IV The Course
Chapter V Tournaments
EXCERPT FROM "THE DESIGNERS"
The very first golf courses were not designed; they had a beginning - a driving area, and they had a finish - a hole in the ground. No par, no artificially placed and constructed obstacles, no island greens and no real estate developments to finance the development. In fact, it was probably a pasture that one of the players happened to own, and the grass in the fairway was only shorter because the sheep preferred it. It wasn't until the 1880s that someone actually was paid to design and construct a golf course. Today, some of the more prominent architects, whose names will help in the promotional and sales activities of the development, ask for and receive enormous fees. During this evolutionary time however there were men who defined the profession for little pay. Men who had families, and had to earn a living to support them. Since paying for design services was not a common occurrence, these early designers had to be flexible and creative in their ways of educating potential clients about their expertise, and justifying a fee for it. Such a man was Robert Trent Jones. He started caddying at the Rochester Country Club, New York, at fourteen. Not for the love of the game but for the need of hard cash. The love came soon enough when he started to play and play well. He entered the occasional amateur tournament and was named the most promising young golfer in the Rochester area at age sixteen. Sadly, he developed an ulcer, putting his competitive golf on hold for a few years. During that time Trent Jones decided that competitive golf was not for him, and took a job at a golf course in Sodus Bay, New York, as the golf pro. His job description however also included that of greenkeeper and manager of the club. He was a busy young man.
During this time he watched Donald Ross build Oak Hill in Rochester, and thought that this was something he would like to do, since he couldn't play competitive golf. With the help of James Bashford, who was a member at Sodus Country Club, he entered Cornell University, creating a program for himself, a curriculum comprising of the subjects a golf course designer would have to be fluent in: hydraulics, surveying, agronomy, horticulture, economics, chemistry, public speaking, journalism, business law and sketching. During his second year at Cornell he met Ione Tefft Davis, who would become his wife and life partner. He finished his studies at Cornell University in 1930, aged 24.
He managed to get a few remodeling jobs, and then his first major assignment, for which he was not paid since the club went bankrupt before the work was finished. It was to design a course for the Midvale Golf and Country Club near Rochester, New York. Midvale also called in a very competent Canadian architect named Stanley Thompson to share in the design work. Eventually Thompson and Jones formed a partnership that lasted until 1938. They worked on many courses in Canada and in South America. It was post-depression and the times were hard, requiring an inventive mind to promote projects since money was a scarce commodity. Those that had it did not want to part with it. This then was the world that Robert Trent Jones, Jr. was born into in 1939.
Those years and the next several until 1945 were rough with all that was going on in the world at the time. But then "Bobby Jones," the famous amateur golfer from Georgia, chose Robert Trent Jones to design Peachtree Golf Club in Atlanta. This changed his life forever. Giving him his biggest assignment to date and with his involvement with the other Jones, a name change. Robert Trent Jones thought there should only be one Bob Jones and hence chose to be called Trent Jones. Jones' career was off and running and now in his nineties is closing in on 500 courses designed or remodeled. He has built or remodeled many of the courses on which the US Open and the PGA have been contested. Courses such as: Oakland Hills, Baltusrol, Firestone, Bellerive, Oak Hill, Olympic Club and Hazeltine.
Bobby, Jr., as the son came to be called, had by all accounts a quite normal childhood. The family home was in Montclair, New Jersey, where Bobby at age seven had the weekly grass cutting chores. One day his dad came home and gruffly told his son that he had lost out on a possible assignment because the lawn, which his prospective client had seen, had not been groomed well enough. This may have been Bobby's first brush with the golf course design business. He attended Yale, and graduated in 1961. He was a member of Yales' Eastern Intercollegiate Championship Golf Team. On to Stanford Law School, for a year. Just long enough to find out that the law was not for him, so he joined his dad's firm in 1962. His younger brother Rees also joined the firm two years after that. During the next dozen years, the firm was very busy. Bobby co-designed quite a few courses with his dad. They had opened a west coast office, in Palo Alto, and Bobby worked on Spyglass Hill Golf Course on the Monterey Peninsula.