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sporting elite. That pioneering spirit continued after World War II. His invention of the elongated or runway tee, which he designed not only to meet the challenge of the players who were hitting the ball farther—the professionals—but also the begin- ners, by giving them forward tees, thus democratizing the game.” Jones Sr.’s design philosophy was


that every good golf hole should be “a difficult par but an easy bogey.” It was Jones Sr. who set the standard for just how tough golf needed to be on major tournament championship courses, notably the U.S. Open. “Michigan’s Oakland Hills in 1951


was really the first time a course was redesigned to host the U.S. Open,” Rees recalls. “The 1951 Open at Oakland Hills was the first time a course was made into a truly premier examination, one that would crown the absolutely best player, which it did in Ben Hogan. Hogan may have finally brought “the monster,” as he called it, to his knees, but his winning score was still 7-over par.”


Not just Hogan, but many of the


golf professionals of the 1950s and 1960s decried Jones’ courses as too harsh. “The pros were more vocal in those days,” Bobby explains, “They were not constrained by PGA rules and etiquette to always be polite. They said what they thought. Some didn’t like all of his work, partly because he was seeing where the game was headed, to longer and longer tee shots, to higher and more controlled shotmaking.” But Trent wanted his courses to


be enjoyable to average players. “One thing that Dad did that I’ve followed in designing championship courses,” Rees asserts, “is he created a very rigorous examination for the elite golfers, but then by cutting the rough, widening the fairways, and taking the speed out of the greens, he could give the course back to the members as an enjoyable facility.” As pioneering as Jones Sr. was in defining the shape of the modern golf course, at heart he was in many ways a


traditionalist, especially when it came to his views on the truest character for a golf landscape. “‘Follow the land, follow the


land’—that was always my father’s mantra,” Bobby remembers. “‘Don’t change the land.’ Back when he learned how to design golf courses, during the Depression, there was no money, and the technology wasn’t there to do much even if the money had been. So the routing was every- thing; the land itself was supreme. Today, more and more of us are going back to the old ways, to the principle that the land should be first and last.” For his many pioneering contri-


butions to golf course architecture, Robert Trent Jones Sr. became, in 1987, the first architect inducted into the World Golf Hall of Fame. He was also a founding member and an early president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects. He was the first recipient of the ASGCA’s Don- ald Ross Award, an award that Rees also received, in 2013.


Robert Trent Jones Jr.’s Chambers Bay is the youngest course to ever host a U.S. Open. Jones Sr.’s Hazeltine National previously held that distinction when it hosted the 1970 U.S. Open.


SPRING 2015 / NCGA.ORG / 45


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