Robert Trent Jones Jr.
Master Architect In a career spanning more than four decades, Robert Trent Jones, Jr. has designed more than 270 golf courses in more than 40 countries on six continents. RTJ II courses have won countless awards and accolades, been ranked among the best layouts throughout the world, and hosted tournaments on every major golf tour.The Trent Jones name has become a trademark.
Robert Trent Jones, Jr. (Bobby) was born in 1939 and learned about golf at Winged Foot Golf Club from the legendary Tommy Armour, who not only taught Jones the techniques of good golf but also captured his imagination with the folklore surrounding the game.
Jones is a member of the California Golf Hall of Fame; a long-standing member, former president, and current board member of the American Society of Golf Course Architects; and the recipient of many other industry awards and honors.
Commenting on golf course architecture in general, Jones says, “All great courses possess an overall mood or rhythm that engenders feelings of anticipation mixed with nostalgia in most players when they reflect on the course. The architect produces this effect in a fashion similar to the way in which a great composer creates a symphony. Each hole is deftly adapted to the site’s natural attributes. A great course also has balance, which derives from the melding, in a pleasant order, of holes of varying degrees of difficulty. For me the hallmark of a great course resides in a golfer’s ability to remember and visualize all the holes after playing the course once.”
Robert Trent Jones, Jr.’s own golf course designs have scaled mountains, enlivened deserts, ranged across prairies, carved through forests, reclaimed wastelands, and rolled down to the edges of the world’s oceans. Known as the father of environmental golf course design, Jones respects and embraces the land in his work. He describes his courses as “of the earth… for the spirit.” Whether carefully routing holes around ancient holy sites on the lava fields of Hawaiian Islands, or devising drainage systems that help purify water on the site of former oil fields, Jones has made it his signature to listen to the land. An article in Smithsonian Magazine once described his work as “a case study of how a golf course can have a surprisingly low impact on even a sensitive environmental area.” Jones has proved this at courses from California. The Links at Spanish Bay to The Mines Resort and Golf Club, built on a former tin mine in Malaysia.
Like the best writers and artists, Robert Trent Jones, Jr. employs subtext and symbolism, imagery and illusion, as well as a range of other techniques from the verbal and visual arts to express aspects of philosophy, drama, and aesthetics in the golf courses he builds. An RTJ II design is challenging, memorable, and well crafted, blending in with the surrounding topography as if it has always been there.
Jones adds, “The very best courses are those where nature has provided the canvas and my job is to discover her secrets and reveal them. I try to design golf courses that will fascinate people so they’ll want to play them many times and learn the depths and meanings of the courses’ stories, their subtext, their poetry.”
