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Robert Trent Jones, Sr.
BIOGRAPHY
 Robert
Trent Jones, Sr. has surely earned a place in golf's pantheon. Over a
period spanning seven decades, he has designed (or re-designed) some 500
golf courses in over 40 states and 35 countries. It is not only the
quantity of his work that impresses, however; it is also the number of
enduring golf courses he created, and the fact that he never tired of
turning them out.
He was born in 1906 in Ince, England, a town on the Trent River - from
which his middle name derives. He came to the States in 1911 and settled
down in East Rochester, New York. A fine golfer in his own right, he
held a few jobs as club pro and teacher and even competed in several
professional events. He became the first person to study expressly for a
career as a golf course designer. He fashioned his own program of study
at Cornell University, drawing upon courses in landscape architecture,
agronomy, horticulture, hydraulics, surveying, public speaking and
economics.
Just as he was ending his studies in 1930, however, the course design
business ground to a halt thanks to the Depression. Trent formed a
partnership with Canadian architect, Stanley Thompson, and helped on two
of his most famous projects, Capilano in Vancouver and Banff in the
Canadian Rockies. Trent also did six low-budget courses on his own that
incorporated W.P.A. labor. The partnership ended in 1938, but it was not
until after World War II that Trent's work flourished. Along the way, he
and his wife, the former Ione Teftt Davis, had two children, Robert,
Jr., in 1939, and another son, Rees, in 1941.
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Robert Trent
Jones-designed Fox Hollow Golf Course -- Hole 5 |
Trent was a founding member of the
American Society of Golf Course Architects in 1947. Beyond his
considerable abilities as a visionary of golf land, he acquired a
well-deserved reputation as a brilliant salesman and promoter. He had an
uncanny ability to meet the right people and to cultivate relationships
with the giants of industry, and in some cases, the kings of countries.
Trent made his reputation after World War II with a handful of
high-profile projects. He worked with Bobby Jones on Peachtree (1948) in
Atlanta, a course that launched the broad-shouldered, heavily sculpted
power golf look that defined the postwar years. Trent also worked on
Augusta National, transforming the 11th and 16th holes from indifferent
to bold and memorable. And he became a national celebrity in 1951 owing
to his complete redesign of Oakland Hills-South Course for the U.S. Open
that year. While retaining Ross' routing and his green sites, he filled
in all of Ross' fairway bunkers at Oakland Hills, moved them back to the
230-270 yard range off the tee, and created "a Monster" out of what had
been a much more modest, if always sound layout.
Trent's reputation was made. He became "The Open Doctor" - the man to
whom clubs turned in prepping their course for a U.S. Open. In quick
succession, he worked such major venues as Baltusrol-Lower Course,
Olympic-Lake, Southern Hills, Oak Hill, and Congressional.
When it came to employing earth-moving equipment, Trent held nothing
back. If the site was completely flat, such as with the course he came
to own in Fort Lauderdale, Coral Ridge CC, he simply created massive
lakes on the property and used the excavated earth to elevate tees and
greens. At Mauna Kea in Hawaii, he routed a course through an ancient
lava flow; there he invented the method of crushing the lava to make the
soil, a method that was copied by others working in Hawaii. He built
Dorado Beach in Puerto Rico on nothing but a base of sand. And on the
Italian island of Sardinia, he literally broke new ground, and defied
expert advice in the process, by pulverizing the on-site granite and
using it for topsoil.
Ref: sportsillustrated.cnn.com
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