Robert Trent Jones, Sr., Golf Architect

Robert Trent jones Snr. MArbella, Spain

Robert Trent jones Snr. MArbella, SpainRobert Trent Jones moved to the United States with his parents in 1911. He became a scratch golfer while still a teenager and set a course record at the age of sixteen while playing in the Rochester City Golf Championship. Jones attended Cornell University, where he followed a course of studies personally selected to prepare himself for a career in golf course architecture. At Cornell he designed several greens at the Sodus Bay GC in New York.

 

Robert Trent Jones Sr., Golf Architect, Spain

Shortly after World War II, Jones got his first big assignment designing the Peachtree Golf Club in Atlanta in collaboration with golf legend Bobby Jones. Despite the similarity of their names, the two men were not related. In fact Robert began using the middle name “Trent” shortly afterward to avoid confusion.

 

By the mid-1960’s Robert Trent Jones had become the most widely known and probably the most influential course architect in history. He served as architectural consultant to numerous courses hosting major championship tournaments, many of them courses of his own design. By 1990 he had planned over 450 courses in play in forty-two states and twenty-three countries and had remodelled many others, logging an estimated 300,000 miles by air annually in the process.

 

In addition to the 21 golf courses that have hosted the U.S. Open, he has worked in another 12 which have been hosting the PGA Championship and in another 6 hosting the World Cup. Jones also has designed the Valderrama Golf course, venue of the Ryder Cup in 1997 and the Golf Club Robert Trent Jones in Virginia – home of “The President’s Cup in 1994 and 1996. Mr. Jones also worked at Augusta National by reforming some of the most famous holes, especially on 11 and 16.