8 Dec 2011

Immediately following the Presidents Cup at Royal Melbourne, where ‘master architect’ Robert Trent Jones II appeared as an honourary observer, I was given an opportunity to sit down with the prolific designer to discuss his family, his career, the work of his associates and the content of his somewhat opportunistic Green Proclamation. I was promised an engaging chat with a charming adversary, and wasn’t disappointed – especially as discussions led us to castle building and why post-WWII, rather than pre-WWII, was really golf’s Golden Age.

Darius Oliver - I wanted to start, if you don’t mind, with your family background. Your father was the most prolific designer of his generation, I wonder how you view his design career and how you think history will judge his portfolio of courses?

Robert Trent Jones II - Well you’ve asked a question that requires an essay to answer, but first of all he was my father so I was close to him and he taught me the game and architecture. So I have a great debt to him personally and in many, many aspects of my life. But in terms of, if I were to step aside and step back from it, and now having practiced architecture independent of him for 35 years or more, except at the end of his life where we did a couple of projects together, I would say that his architecture will be seen as ‘of its time’, which is essentially post WWII, through to the 80s.

And yet like all musicians, Beethoven was built upon Mozart and people don’t realize that, and others were built upon Beethoven. There is a continuum in the composition qualities of golf architecture too. So I would say he will be seen clearly as one of the great golf architects, I mean he already is by most people. Comparing him to others who are long gone and dead I don’t think is a fair comparison. It’s like again saying, ‘who was your favorite musician Mozart, Beethoven or The Beatles?’ They were all great.

 

DO - So you clearly don’t view that period between WWII and the 1980s as the dark ages like some others?

RTJ - No to the contrary, it was a renaissance time. I don’t concur that the 1920s was a golden age, I completely disagree. That’s just a retrospective look at a time when land was more available, when good land near the sea was more available. If there was a golden age it would be the earliest linksland courses, which weren’t designed by anybody. So that’s the real golden age. The 20s was the beginning of crafting architecture, and there was also a lot of money available, and more importantly it was a time when the game moved out of the British Isles and began to move beyond the empire to other cultures, primarily English speaking cultures.

 

DO - You don’t believe that those 1920s courses, built on good land as you say, were better than the ones that followed?

RTJ - I don’t see that either. Everyone works in their own era, and there were no constraints back then, no environmental issues, no planning issues. Golf was considered a benign park and isn’t that wonderful we can have a park. In fact if you think about it, the game of golf probably saved Scotland from becoming a housing development, all the coastal lands were preserved because of the game of golf.

But having said that, there were some wonderful architects and some wonderful courses and for the most part the architects that are now been talked about from that era were showman. They were Hollywood stars. MacKenzie, if you look at his picture in his kilt and he lived in California, was one. On the other hand he didn’t design that much, he designed not that many courses. He had a great sense of routing but he left it to others to complete the work. As we know Royal Melbourne wasn’t him. He did one of the two courses - not both. Kingston Heath is a beautiful routing and the concept within it, especially the bunkering off the tee, I think are very equitable, which are his basic ideas and again the idea of options. But of that era, my favourite architect is Tillinghast, because as a player I understand what to do. With MacKenzie it’s a little bit random, and maybe the randomness is coming out of the previous era of the links courses, which are random by nature. So if you want clear definition then go to Tillinghast and not MacKenzie, of the shotmaking requirements.

 

DO - Your Father’s courses were also fairly easy to understand. On established courses that he altered, do you recognize areas where perhaps he went overboard with difficulty over quality?

RTJ - Yes and no, but it’s very hard to be a retrospective historian. It would be like saying the International team should have won (Presidents Cup) if they hadn’t lost the Foursomes. It’s easy to say what if.

But here’s what he did differently from his predecessors. You must remember there is a long break in the 1930s due to the world depression and wars. Not much happened. What he did is he said, ‘OK what happened in the meantime? We no longer have wooden shafts we have steel shafts. We no longer have a Niblick out of a bunker, we have a sand wedge, which Sarazen invited with a flange on a Niblick. And therefore I have to think differently in terms of the defense of par, or the defense of the golf course’.

All games have attack and defense. The golf course itself is the defender and those people who take care of it and set it up are all part of the defense team. So the architect he was, and we all are, like castle builders in the medieval times. So if the castle builder essentially had used a parapet and boiling water to stop the marauders coming across the parapets and suddenly gun powder showed up from Marco Polo’s visit to China and they could shoot stones into it, then you have to have a new defense. So a water hole, build a moat. It’s a new way of thinking.

So what he did was he said, ‘look bunkers are no longer fearful and therefore not severe penalties so I’ll use water’. So his introduction of water, particularly at well-known courses like Augusta and Peachtree, was a new kind of defense, and ahead of its time. Second thing he did, was he had the long runway tee. Before there were simple small tees, you might have had the women’s tee and the men’s tee but there were no championship tees. So he said, ‘look the game is democratizing, the young, strong pros with their steel shafts are hitting much farther so I’ll go back, but at the same time we are democratizing the game because we are introducing many people who haven’t played golf, both men and women, so I’ll go forward’. So long runway tees. Why did he do that? Well he was a runway builder during WWII, and he knew how to do that. He also recognized that it cut less trees and made a corridor out of which you played and was easier to maintain with mechanical mowers. That was a distinct departure from his predecessors.

 

DO - You talk about the architect being judged in the context of the era within which he has worked, so I wonder if I can fast forward to today and look at the modernization of your father’s championship courses by your brother. Do you have a view on the work Rees has done at places like Hazeltine, Congressional and Atlanta Athletic Club?

RTJ - You’re really getting into controversial areas. In terms of architecture he has done some updating of the course for its time, as my father did before him of great architects preceding him, such as Donald Ross at Oakland Hills where he surrounded the greens with bunkering, so this was a continuum.

From my point of view, updating for championship level is a specialty. It’s basically saying, OK what are the experts doing now, what would they like to be doing but what are they doing and should we defend par. Now I personally would abolish par, as well as time zones too…but from my point of view each hole has its own character, it depends on the wind of the day and many invisible parts of the hole and if you don’t have any pars and you can play the hole and whoever has the lowest score wins. But that’s not what’s going on and the way the courses are presented for television…and in that sense the clubs get very concerned that their course is outdated, outmoded and so on.

The easiest thing is to get a crook in your neck looking for a back tee. That’s the easiest way to defend. I don’t think it’s the correct way. I think making the courses so long that only the young limber backs can win and the chipping, putting and the hand game is out of the game.

I give you that as a background. So what do I think of what’s been going on? Some of the courses that have been updated, and by the way my father updated his course at Hazeltine twice before my brother did a couple of little minor tweaks so while he was alive he did his own work. And it’s a little bit retrospective for Rees to say he did this work, he didn’t. He was there, he understood what was happening. Maybe he helped a little, I don’t know I wasn’t there. And he was part of the team. But my Dad it was his concept. The bones of his course, the routing is essentially the same at Hazeltine as after he changed it himself after the 70 Open, which was criticized. He took the doglegs out of it and straightened the holes.

So the routing is essentially the same, and what Rees did was lengthen it and take the bunkers farther out and he is re-positioning the hazards, which is not a new idea. In the early days of the British Open, after each rota the committee of the R&A would gather the leading players and ask them which bunkers were in play over the four days and which were not. Lets just say it’s Hoylake, they would say since we last played here ten years ago we can all fly those bunkers with the new Haskell ball or whatever and they would literally fill in the bunker and move it ten yards out. This is not a new idea.

 

DO - The criticism that others and I have of the work done by your brother on some of your father’s courses, is that he makes golf very one-dimensional by narrowing fairways and surrounding them with penal hazards on both sides. At places like Atlanta Athletic Club the architect dictates how each of the holes are to be played.

RTJ - I myself worked on that course with my Father. I wrote the letter to Bobby Jones, which my father signed. It was a 27-hole course, there was a lot of water on it, which was typical of him, and the routing went down to the river and then worked its way back. What Rees did, or Rees and his team, was they reversed two or three holes in the bottom land and they, as you said, bracketed the targets very severely so it changed from strategic, optional shots to penal. Death or glory. That’s what he did.

Now from my personal perspective, that’s not what I would have done and it’s not what I do. I think you have to leave players of different shotmaking abilities, left handed, right handed, even at the highest level of the game, a way to work the ball and to think. That was my philosophy.

 

DO - You are maybe the only person in the world who can answer this question, but do you think your father would approve of it becoming a long, narrow, penal test of execution?

RTJ - No, he would have preferred to have options.

 

DO - I know that your associate Jason Blasi worked on Chambers Bay, and Don Knott was heavily involved here at the National. In your view how much credit do those guys deserve for the courses they’ve worked on?

 

RTJ - It’s far different from the way you look at it. My effort is, we work together and it’s an endless collegial experience. If they deserve credit so do unsung heroes like the shapers. Ed Tarnow deserves far more credit than Jason Blasi does because he actually shaped the design and then reshaped the holes and shaped them again. And the same here (at The National) with George Munn.

So at the end of the day…isn’t it amazing how many great things you can get if you don’t seek credit. Credit comes, good, bad or indifferent, from people like you and that’s fine, but it’s more like, have we served our client? have we served the game and in so serving the land we serve our client? That’s the way I look at it. And in terms of who gets credit, everybody should get credit but it’s amazing how victory has a thousand friends and defeat none.

 

DO - Has your involvement in each project lessened as you’ve aged?

RTJ - It depends on the project. Chambers Bay I was there all the time, because I knew it had the opportunity to be a masterpiece and it’s relatively close to where I live.

You know I’m a hands-on architect. I learned this from my father, and the way I learned was I rode a bulldozer for a summer and that’s how you learn how to talk to the guys and how they can shape and how you can form a dialogue with the guys and they with you.

When you look at Royal Melbourne, they say it’s a classic or it’s an old fashioned course, and it is but not in the way many people mean, because I’m looking at that and I’m looking at great shaping and great shot values and how the ball reacts. They are looking at, is the bunker white? They miss the whole point in my opinion. So it depends, in the end, how the shot works and how you as a player, you know when you hit a good shot that you’ve hit a good shot and if it reacts properly then you’re satisfied and the course should yield to good play and good thinking and not yield to poor play and poor thinking and that’s my basic thinking. And I think to do that have to go out to the site quite a bit and if anything we edit each other, it’s a constant dialogue. And then we get experts like Mike Davis who very much has an architects eye and he kept adding tees everywhere (at Chambers Bay) and as far as I’m concerned you can add tees all day, I don’t care. When you get into the bunkering and around the greens you don’t have to use the tees. So the USGA thinks of length, I think of width and complexity in the greens.

So in answer to your earlier question, even with the USGA Mike Davis should deserve as much credit as Jason Blasi, Ed Tarnow and me. And Bruce Charlton, who did most of the work, not Jason. Bruce was doing the drawings and the contractor work, and the contractor deserves credit as well. I mean they all do.

 

DO - Can I ask whether you are interested in the Olympic Course? (note asked prior to the Olympic finalists being announced)

RTJ - Absolutely, yeah.

 

DO - And you are part of the process?

RTJ - We’re trying, I’m learning how to Samba. Why, what have you heard?

 

DO - Only that there were problems with each of the architect submissions received for the project.

RTJ - Lets put it this way. We submitted 193 pages, and we answered their multiple questions in the confines of the space on the page. It was very specific, like an engineering project for a bridge. To say that we all made an error was silly. I think what happened is, the people who didn’t make an error, from their perspective, weren’t the people they really wanted in the process. That’s my gut feeling, so they threw them all out.

 

DO - Did you submit a proposal to do a Robert Trent Jones II golf course, or did you come up with a gimmick or an angle for the IOC?

 

RTJ - I submitted a proposal to do an Olympic golf course. I don’t care about the credit, this is important to the game, to rejoin the Olympics in a way that is healthy for the youth of the world to aspire to be Olympic contestants. My grandfather and Rees’s grandfather ran in the first Olympics in Athens. He ran the 200m and 400m sprints. He was there, he was one of the 19 Americans to be there. He had to shovel coal to get there in a boiler but he was there. His name was Harrity Davis on my mother’s side, from Cincinnati Ohio. So I always had an interest in the Olympic movement and sports at that level. I was on the LA committee, I’ve gone to 10 or 12 Olympics and I know people in the Olympic movement, and I’ve tried to lobby for golf to rejoin the Olympics and finally it did.

So win lose or draw, it’s an Olympic golf course, it’s not a Robert Trent Jones Junior golf course. But to answer your question directly, we will collaborate with whomever the local people want simply to get it done. Because they need our help, or they need somebody’s help that’s competent because they are running out of time. And in that sense we’ve talked to Mario Gonzalez, the icon who is in his 80s. He’s not interested in design, he is interested in an institute for people to learn how to be greens keepers, how to be caddies…it’s not about design per se.

 

DO - Is it true that years back you and your brother agreed to split the world in half and not compete against each other?

RTJ - No, my brother and I never worked together, ever. It was an agreement between my father and me, that when I set out and established my own practice in 1973, 74 that I would not compete with him. It was more, ‘I’m in the West, I’m working the Asia Pacific, you don’t like the food in Japan so do you want to go to Japan?’ ‘No I don’t want to go to Japan’, so I said all right, I will not come east of the Mississippi River and I will not go to Europe. That was in the 70s and 80s, and lasted for about a decade. But my brother was still working for my father at the time.

 

DO - How do you react to criticism Rees has received recently for his design work?

RTJ - Well I don’t think there are any bad courses, there are bad farms that are not yet golf courses.. How do I react to it? I see, as you mentioned earlier, that his courses are a very penal test of golf, it’s death or glory everywhere. Is that good, bad or indifferent? Well I think the membership decides. There are probably some people who would say the National is over the top, so that’s a matter of opinion.

But I think the work that Rees and his team have done lately at places like Mauna Kea with the bunker faces, is not popular, because people tell me that. And the reason isn’t because it’s a championship course, because it’s not. It’s because he has tried to continue, or they have tried to apply the difficulty, the sternness of the test to a resort course. It’s not attracting the patrons that are the sponsors of the course. So in that sense I think he’s not listening carefully to the needs of the art, or those people would be there. And in a way that’s because the magazines rank courses according to difficulty, for the most part, instead of interest. And owners demand that (difficulty) of we architects, and I already see that but other architects, including my brother, find that important.

Coolum is a very straightforward, honest golf course but it’s nothing like this (The National) or Joondalup. Those courses were built during what I call my Aussie period. I was working in Australia, New Zealand, South Pacific, Hawaii, big lands that the TV world hadn’t caught up with yet. There were no iPhones, and we were building bigger courses because we were given the land and that was what I would call my very strong, manly period of architecture in the 1980s and early 90s.

 

DO - I want to touch now on your Green Proclamation, and ask whether the talk of sustainable development and of the need to conserve water is a response to a more environmentally aware industry or is that something you have always believed in?

 

RTJ - Well I had the privilege of serving on the California State Parks commission in the early 80s, I was appointed by the governor and eventually elected as chair at a time when there were lots of new parks. So once a month we’d have hearings from the public. Well I thought golf was a benign, beautiful park – they thought it was a toxic waste dump. So I was educated by the public on different perceptions and I had to find a way to help my colleagues, particularly in the USGA Greens section, to realize that we were not the benign people we thought we were.

The idea of the conservation of water, to me, is a bit of a misnomer. There the water is right there in the clouds, it comes down on the land, goes into the water table and goes straight up again when it’s a hot day. It’s a cycle, it depends on the timing and it’s the use of the water not the lack of water that’s the issue. I mean it’s economical not to pump. It’s expensive to pump so if you are running a big operation like this club, conserving water is market driven as well as ethically driven. I don’t think water is the issue, I think basically toxic chemicals are the issue.

 

DO - So how do really lush, green courses like Spring City (China) or Southern Highlands in Nevada, with its exotic plants, fit within the ethos of that Green Proclamation?

RTJ - Well that’s a very good question. (pause) It’s a very good question, and again we go back to site specifics, if you don’t have water in the desert then you don’t play golf. A month later it would be desert again. So, you are correct to point out that there is not one suit that fits all people or all climates. On the other hand drainage is far more important in the north where you get too much rain, so it’s more of an engineering issue.

The basic idea of the Green Proclamation was to just join people to help those who are not golfers realize that we are aware of their concerns and trying to minimize any negative impact on the overall landscape.

Back to News
0 Comments


 

More News

Report reveals golf's $3.3 billion contribution to Australia

AGIC report reveals total annual benefits to the Australian community, economy and environment from golf.

Cape Wickham Links – The Inside Design Story

Co-designer Darius Oliver reveals the truth behind the design of Australia’s premier modern golf course

Have your say on the future of Moore Park Golf

Golfers unite – another one of our cherished public access golf courses is under threat

Cameron John wins The National Tournament by two strokes

Victorian claims breakthrough professional victory at The National Tournament presented by BMW

Tags and Countries