Donald James Ross was born in 1872 to Murdoch Ross, a stone mason by trade, and his wife Lillian Campbell. Their first child had died soon after birth that same year so Donald became the eldest in the family, followed in subsequent years by three brothers and two sisters.

Murdoch was a member of a masonry crew that worked on the New York State capitol building during the 1870s so he was away from home on the other side of the Atlantic when his son was just a toddler. Who’d have guessed Donald would later follow in his father’s footsteps to find fame and fortune in the United States?


At the age of fourteen, he completed his formal studies and took up an apprenticeship with carpenter Peter Murray, who had an arrangement with the local Dornoch Golf Club to build the wooden boxes for holding sand on every tee.

 at St Andrews in 1893 then spent part of the following season at Carnoustie before returning to serve under the Dornoch club secretary John Sutherland for six years as head professional, club maker and green keeper.

In 1899, Ross took a steamship to New York then a train to Boston to join up with Robert Wheeler Willson, an American professor of astronomy who he’d spoken to the year before about starting a new life in the New World. Within a year of his employment at Oakley Country Club, Ross had reworked the club’s original Willie Campbell-designed course.

He returned to Scotland in 1904 to marry Janet Kennedy Conchie, from Moniaive in Dumfries and Galloway, who he’d met in Dornoch before heading abroad. They would go on to have one child, Lillian Grace Wilson, named after her paternal grandmother.

Though not as good a golfer as his brother Alex (who won the US Open in 1907), Donald could play a bit too, evidenced by his two victories at the Massachusetts Open (in 1905 and 1911). He also competed in seven editions of the US Open, with a best placed finish of 5th in 1903 at Baltusrol. At the 1910 Open in St Andrews, Ross finished joint 8th, ten shots behind the winner, James Braid.

Shortly after taking up his position at Oakley, James Walker Tufts, the owner of the newly opened Pinehurst Resort in North Carolina, engaged Ross to serve there during the winter months as golf professional, caddie master and club maker but he was soon helping superintendent Frank Maples with maintenance and construction duties.

By 1907, the old ‘Pyramids of Pinehurst’ – chest-high chocolate drop fairway mounds – had been removed from the property and the 18-hole No.2 course was in play, measuring just over 6,000 yards with a bogey score of 80 (closer to a par of 72 by modern standards) and sand putting surfaces in operation – grass greens didn’t arrive at Pinehurst until the mid-1930s.


Ross remained at Oakley for eleven years before moving thirty miles northeast to Essex Country Club. Of course, he immediately set about redesigning the club’s course, retaining only two holes, but the project wasn’t completed until 1917, four years after he’d left the club.

As Ross’s architectural work expanded during World War I, he hired J.B. McGovern then Walter B. Hatch as design associates to assist with the ever increasing workload. Walter Irving Johnson, a draftsman and engineer, was assigned the task of drafting final plans. Ross’s brother Aeneas also worked as a construction supervisor from 1922 to 1932 before returning to Dornoch. All told, it’s reckoned Ross was involved in around 400 projects during a thirty-five year design career which ran in parallel with his responsibilities at Pinehurst.

In fairness, it’s reckoned Ross only personally visited around two-thirds of all the courses he’s attributed with, which proves he must have had great faith in his associates to ensure that high standards were maintained across the board in a consistent manner.

At the height of his design powers in the 1920s, Ross oversaw one of the biggest landscape contract operations in the country, with around 3,000 men working on his jobs through sub-contacted companies. How he managed to juggle his architectural workload with his Pinehurst responsibilities is anybody’s guess.

Eric Nelson, Ross’s long-term personal secretary (who succeeded him as general manager at Pinehurst Country Club in 1946) was the man who, from late April to late October every year, would follow Ross out of Pinehurst to wherever he was staying in New England. He’d then continue to look after the day-to-day operations of the design company, handling accounts and correspondence, as well as organizing train travel for the many site visits that had to be made. Without this administrative assistance, Ross would have really struggled to keep on top of things.

Frank Maples was Ross’s golfing right-hand man at Pinehurst. Joining the resort in 1902, he eventually became the director of grounds and maintenance, a position he held until he died in 1949. It was Maples who put the Donald Ross plans for the No.2 course into practice, with no drawings or formal plans required. His first son Ellis became a designer in his own right and a second son, Henson, joined his father in 1940 at Pinehurst, where he stayed for thirty years.

Ross’s wife Janet died of heart failure in 1922. Donald's granddaughter Elizabeth picks up the story:

"In the spring of 1923, Donald was engaged to Susie Aldridge of Rome, NY. She died on August 31, 1923 of breast cancer. My sister Susan was named after her as my mother had adored her.

DJR then married widow Florence Sturdy Blackinton of North Attleboro, Mass. a few years after Janet died and about two years after Aunt Susie had also died. Florence was a widow of Roswell Blackinton, owner of a silver items manufacturing company.

They married at the home of a friend which was located in Framingham, Massachusetts. Donald had been taken to that home as he had fallen very ill with a throat ulcer. He was expected to die. My mother Lillian was brought to him from her school, Emma Willard in Troy, NY. She had just turned 15. He recovered there and married Florence in that home while sick.

In a letter he wrote to his brother, he revealed that Florence would be a “good guardian” should anything happen to him.”

Donald Ross suffered a heart attack on 25th April, 1948 and died in Moore County Hospital the next morning. The following week, he was buried next to his first wife Janet in Newton Centre cemetery, Massachusetts and both his daughter and son-in-law were laid to rest in the same plot after they died in 2000 and 1982.

Donald Ross was a founding member of the American Society of Golf Course Architects which held its first meeting (on home turf for him) at Pinehurst in December 1947. Members of the society have worn red plaid jackets at formal gatherings since 1973, when the distinctive Ross tartan was adopted as a tribute to their honorary first president.


From architect Kris Spence, who specializes in restoring Ross courses: “Ross realised he was introducing a new populace to the game and felt a responsibility to teach the game in a balanced manner and examine a player’s ability to hit a broad spectrum of shots. His use of bunkers to direct a player to the proper line of play or suggest a shape of shot spoke to the player’s abilities.

Ross didn’t force the player around the course; he gave them multiple options and let them choose. Often the shortest route was fraught with danger but the longer route was more visible and comfortable. The approach from each would present a different requirement and difficulty.

His work is so unique because he designed and routed what he was given. His courses seldom look alike due to the way he connected each and every hole to that piece of property. He designed holes by visualising golf shots and knowing how the ball would react on the ground. He placed bunkers and angled his greens to interact with what he perceived the ball movement, drainage and other factors to be.”

“When I was a young man in Scotland, I read about the American businessman absorbed in making money. I knew the day would come when the American businessman would relax and want some game to play, and I knew that game would be golf. I read about the start of golf in the United States, and knew there would be a great future in it, so I learned all I could about the game: teaching, playing, club-making, greenkeeping and course construction. And then I came to America to grow up with a game in which I had complete confidence. Golf has never failed me.”

From Ron Whitten in the Introduction to the book 

“Ross was both a playing and teaching professional, but by 1910 he had made golf course architecture his primary occupation. Within ten years, Donald Ross had become the first superstar of American golf. His name was a designer label and appeared in advertisements for resort courses, calendars, grass seed and other turf products. He designed a set of signature golf clubs, produced by Bristol Golf Equipment.

No architect in his day had more influence on his craft. When Ross really started devoting his energies to golf architecture, the job was still considered to be that primarily of an engineer. The competition at the time – C. B. Macdonald, Devereux Emmet, Willie Park Jr. – were competent at supervising golf holes onto sites, but the results were startling artificial.

Ross transformed golf design into an art form and the profession into one for an artist. He produced marvellous routing plans that merged golf holes comfortably into the landscape. The small details were as important to Ross as the grand, design, especially the finesse shots around the greens.”

, made this comment when profiling the architect: “Donald Ross was the first American-based golf architect to advocate and create naturalness in the construction of courses. Incorporating a design philosophy similar to that of 

, Ross’s routings took full advantage of each site’s best, natural features. His greens were bold and full of variety, not unlike those at his home course in Dornoch.

However, and perhaps more tellingly, Ross paid as much attention to a green’s surrounds as he did to its internal green contours. Ross believed in moulding green contours seamlessly into the existing terrain; and his green sites almost always put a premium on short, recovery shots.”

Discovering Donald Ross: The architect and his golf courses

writes: “Throughout his work, Ross’s golf courses were to embody a particular vision and brilliance. This has allowed many of them to stand out 75 or more years after their inception. Nor did his work remain static or formulaic. A close appraisal reveals a modest if discernible evolution that might even be interpreted as following into phases or stages.

His early work includes a number of quirks or oddities that, while distinctive, appear to be the result of certain design and construction limitations. It’s not that Ross should be faulted; rather, these works, built basically between 1900 and 1918, suggest a designer who was conscious of certain site limitations and who was struggling to accommodate his designs within them.

In many cases, he was able to compensate for constraints in routing with bold and creative putting surfaces. During this period he experimented with or deployed a number of unusually shaped bunkers that by no means can be said to look formulaic or predictable. This period might be termed his “’Formative Era.’

Among the representative works of this era that remain in relatively pristine form today are Essex Country Club (MA), Rhode Island Country Club, Wannamoisett Country Club (RI), Brae Burn (MA), White Bear Yacht Club (MN) and French Lick Springs Golf Course (IN).

After World War I, Ross developed a more mature, flowing style in which features were more carefully integrated – ‘floated out’ in the parlance of construction shapers, whose task it would become to ‘tie in’ contour lines that adhered to natural topographic features.

This work was greatly aided by hiring of design associates Walter B. Hatch and J. B. McGovern. Ross’s plans also became more technically adept thanks to the professional engineering and drafting provided by Walter Irving Johnson, who came on board in October 1920. The lines are smoother, more economical, and incorporate more mechanical construction.

Again, at the risk of oversimplification, we can call this his ‘Mature Phase’. Representative works that still embody these features would include Broadmoor Country Club (IN), Franklin Hills (MI), Holston Hills Country Club (TN), Salem Country Club (MA), Seminole (FL), and Mountain Ridge (NJ).

These works of the 1920s are more elegant, with smoother transitions from fairway into the green and fewer bunkers but more strategic in nature. There is a certain grace to these layouts, reflected in the more carefully fashioned contours of the greens and their positioning so that they were visible from a standard area of approach.

Ross’s workload, the busiest in the country through the 1920s, quieted dramatically the last 15 years of his life. What work that did come his way was sporadic, and done with greater concern for economy of production than for aesthetic effect. This can be termed his ‘Functionalist Phase’ – a concern more for playability and maintainability that with a particular aesthetic or strategic effect.

His works during this era really bridge two different modes of building. In the 1930s his work consisted largely of municipal projects that were impressive feats of construction. After World War II, Ross found more work – for two years or so, until his death in April of 1948. The few projects he designed throughout this era do not readily show the same attention to detail of his Formative and Mature phases.

How could they, as Ross was limited in his travels, and he has also slowed down physically and mentally owing to ageing and declining health? This work was almost entirely taken up by J.B. McGovern, with assistance from Frank Maples’s son, Ellis. That Ross’s work was in such good hands helps explain the substance and elegance of Raleigh Country Club (NC), the last course he ever did.”

 commented as follows in the foreword of Bradley S. Klein's book 

: “The mystique about Donald Ross starts with his marvellous routings. When I see Ross courses, and I mean the ones he was seriously involved in, I’m amazed how he could take an old topographic map and route the holes with such variation. Many of the Ross courses that we’ve heard about and that have come into national recognition were on good pieces of ground to start with. They were all on self-contained lots, where you didn’t have to cross roads or walk around areas that you couldn’t build on.


He was the first designer to make the opening shot play one way, then switch the kind of play needed on the second shot. Whatever he had done on the first hole, he’d flip on the second. He might set up a bunker on the right-hand side and expect you to cut your tee shot. He would then reverse that around the green and expect you to draw your approach.

That’s the thing about Ross courses: for all their genius, they vary. He designed them one way, but the builders had to be really skilled at construction to interpret them correctly. It often depended on who was hired to build them. Some of his courses are good because they were built by people who got their hands dirty and made his plans come alive. Other Ross courses look different and are a little extreme because they were built by people who weren’t very good at making sense of his sketches.

I wonder what Mr. Ross would say about the game and the about how his courses play today. I wonder if, or how, he would have changed his designs. In some ways, design was easier for him because there wasn’t such a big difference between good players and average resort players. Ross could also count on firm, fast fairways back then, but today’s courses are much more lush. Which means it’s become a different game, and the difference between midrange golfers and professionals is bigger than ever.”

From Ron Forse, another Ross restoration expert, in a 

 interview, November 2020: “Donald Ross didn’t do the same architecture his whole career (people make a fatal error of logic by thinking an architect’s career was monolithic and did not evolve). His first era we call primitive, which was marked by arbitrary features and sometimes and sometimes a slightly clumsy but fascinatingly quirky design. The period is from the early 1900s to 1919.

His second era was from 1920 to WWII. We call this his mature work. It is now very strategic in nature. This period is also more beautiful in that the features blend better with nature. Ross has evolved beyond the primitive. His third stage of work was his Post War Era, which was very short – 1945 until his death in 1948. At this time his associate J.B. McGovern did most of the work.

Essentially, this era was marked by what looks like a blending of 1920s Ross with the architecture of William Flynn. The bulldozer was being used and bunker design had sand flashed in many cases all the way to the top of the feature (McGovern built courses for Flynn at times as well as working for Ross).

As a designer I think he was a very quick study, an instinctive architect. Ross could be a very good artist as well. His mounding features and green complexes were simply beautiful. And his bunker artistry is on display in old photos of Seminole in Florida, where he had plenty of time to work his craft due to the onslaught of the Depression.

His field notes for changing Wannamoisset were done in one day in June 1927. He said this was his best course and was yet still making improvements. This is instructive about the man. He was also flexible. At the Sagamore in upstate New York he allowed himself to route the first hole into the morning sun because the layout was so spectacular.

James Harrison of Pittsburgh who worked for Ross as a young man at Edgewood Country Club remembered Ross as being somewhat quirky in that he liked to go to the 5 and 10 store and look at the little trinkets (I don’t know how identifying this would be of his actual character).

Ross’s humility was shown in his acceptance of Jim Harrison’s criticism of his routing at Edgewood. Holes 13 through 18 all have out of bounds on their right hand side. Harrison thought he should have routed them in the opposite direction and told him so years later. ‘Well maybe you are right,’ Ross replied.”

From Richard Mandell in the introduction to the book 

Great Donald Ross Golf Courses Everyone Can Play: Resort, Public and Semi-Private

: “Donald Ross strove for originality in all his work, and knew that originality comes primarily from utilizing the lay of the land to its utmost potential. How else can one maintain that unique quality within such a long list of works? As each piece of property is original to the world, so too does each Donald Ross course fit the needs of its location.

The more Donald Ross golf courses one plays, the more this originality and variety in design precludes the categorization of his work into tight confines. Surely many are familiar with his more-famous layouts, such as Seminole or Pinehurst No. 2, yet the many other courses that are more accessible to the everyday golfer truly demonstrates Donald Ross’s unique place in golf history.

He was a great advocate of public-access golf, and knew that success lay in the universal appeal of the game to players at all levels. His designs reflect those tenets very well by leaving the lavishness to others and simply revealing the attributes of the ground itself in each golf hole, being sure to give the golfer a myriad of options.

Donald Ross weaved rhythm into his designs: long holes followed by short ones, left-leaning holes followed by right-leaners, or a bunker to carry followed by one to avoid altogether. Sadly, all this artistry can be easily destroyed over time by exuberant renovations in the name of ‘modernisations.’ That is why it is vital to preserve his works, allowing golfers not only the opportunity to enjoy the simplicity of his designs, but also the realization that a round of golf can be a round of pure pleasure.”

Golf Has Never Failed Me: The Lost Commentaries of Legendary Golf Architect Donald J. Ross

, a collection of short essays by Ross written between the two world wars but not published until 1996

Discovering Donald Ross: The Architect and his Golf Courses, 

, published in 2017, by Paul Dunn and B. J. Dunn

World Golf Hall of Fame – Class of 1977: In the words of Jack Nicklaus, Donald Ross designed golf courses led to positive thinking: “His stamp as an architect was naturalness.” Ross was, and still is, considered the Michelangelo of golf.

Donald Ross

Donald Ross worked with Old Tom Morris at St Andrews in 1893 then spent part of the following season at Carnoustie before returning to serve under the Dornoch club secretary John Sutherland.

Gil Hanse attended secondary school at Hunter Tannersville High school in Tannersville, New York before gaining his undergraduate degree from the University of Denver. Hanse then earned a Masters degree in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University in 1989.

During his studies at Cornell, Hanse was the recipient of the William Frederick Dreer Award – the same horticultural award that 

 received five years earlier – which allowed him to spend a year overseas with 

's practice, studying the history of golf course architecture.

He spent a short time working with Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design (Hanse was Doak's first employee) before founding Hanse Golf Course Design in 1993. His long term design partner Jim Wagner joined the firm two years later. Along with Tom Doak, 

, Gil Hanse is regarded as one of the most influential “minimalist” golf course architects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

According to his personal portrait on the ASGCA website, Hanse’s company is “based on the principles of creating a small firm that takes a personal interest in the design and construction of each project. The company's courses are simple and elegant in appearance, yet sophisticated in strategy and interest.”

Hanse quickly established himself as a top restoration specialist, with a portfolio of work during the 1990s that included reworking 

A big break for Hanse came at the end of the 1990s, when he was appointed to design a new 18-hole layout for Crail Golfing Society in Fife, Scotland. There’s no doubt that this commission raised his stature significantly as the Home of Golf hasn’t had too many American architects design courses on its hallowed links turf down the years.

Restoration work for Hanse continued into the new millennium at golf clubs in several other American states, such as Egan’s Waverly in Oregon, Ross’s Oakland Hills in Michigan, 

’s Southern Hills in Oklahoma and Ross’s Aronimink in Pennsylvania.

The architect also conducted a well-regarded renovation of the course at TPC Boston in 2005 which was liked by playing professionals and armchair golfers watching what was then called the Deutsche Bank Championship on television.

More recent high profile renovation work has come the way of Hanse. In Florida, he upgraded the three courses – Blue Monster, Golden Palm and Red Tiger – for Donald Trump at Doral and at Pinehurst in North Carolina he reworked the No. 4 course (co-host along with No.2 for the 2019 US Amateur Championship) to remove more than twenty five pot bunkers and replace them with sprawling, sandy native areas that tie-in seamlessly with their surroundings.

Of course, Hanse is no stranger to working on projects in the public glare, having been chosen to fashion the golf course for the 2016 Rio Olympics in Brazil. He’s also added a third course, the Black, to the highly regarded Streamsong Resort in Florida and he’s now lined up to design the next 18-hole layout that will grace Mike Keiser’s Bandon Dunes Golf Resort in Oregon.

Outside America, Hanse has been involved in a number of interesting golf developments. He began an ongoing restoration plan for Tokyo Golf Club in 2008 before teaming up with Mark Parsinen in Scotland the following year to create the Castle Stuart course near Inverness and he’s since laid out the new course at Trump International Golf Club Dubai in the United Arab Emirates in 2017.

He’s recently finished his first Asian course at Ballyshear in Bangkok and completed his first course in Continental Europe at Les Bordes in France. There’s also ongoing renovation work at Royal Sydney in Australia and Narin & Portnoo in Ireland amongst many other commissions that will keep Jim Wagner and the Caveman Construction company gainfully employed for the foreseeable future. There’s also ongoing renovation work at Royal Sydney in Australia and Narin & Portnoo in Ireland so there are plenty of commissions in the pipeline to keep Jim Wagner and his Caveman Construction company gainfully employed for the foreseeable future.

This edited excerpt is from a short Gil Hanse article entitled “Designing in the Field” which was published in the book 

“There appears to be no small movement afoot to embrace the ideals, principles and characteristics of the golf course architects from the Golden Age of design. We read so much about them and their approaches, and so many architects have adroitly rehearsed all of the catch phrases that can be associated with these magnificent men.

However, as we celebrate their accomplishments, we drift farther and farther from the true heart and soul of their work. We profess to hold the ideals of these architects in our hearts; however, when it comes to practicing these ideals there are only a handful of architects who truly do so.

It is my belief that to do justice to the ideals of men like Macdonald, Tillinghast, Flynn, and MacKenzie, the architect must concentrate on designing in the field. It is only then that the true nature of the golf course site will make itself evident to the designer.

Through their utilization of natural features and their presence on site, the masters created golf holes that were exciting, challenging, and certainly innovative. By being on site for an extended period of time, the architect can mould the land to accomplish whatever effect he desires.

Of course, there are practicalities which need to be addressed like budgets and plans for the golf course. I am not suggesting that designers simply be allowed to wing it in the field. However, I do believe firmly that through constant observation, any architect would be more creative with his design, adding subtle touches that would greatly enhance the interest of the golf course.

By designing in the field the architect is in control of the outcome. The results are not an interpretation of his work, but rather a literal representation of his ideas and creativity. By getting their hands back onto projects, I believe we could again see a renaissance in the beauty, character, and natural splendour of golf courses.

We would also see a dramatic increase in the subtleties and nuances that have made the brilliant designs of the Golden Age so charming, strategic, and above all, interesting to play.”

“During the Rio interview, as Amy Alcott, environmentalist Owen Larkin and I were making our case for why we deserved the project, I noticed rather glumly that the name card on the table stated my name as “Gil Hansen.” I’m quite sure no one on the panel noticed the mistake. When the interview was over, I tucked the card into my briefcase and took it home, where it resides in my office. My wife and kids had it framed and point to it when they feel I’m in jeopardy of my head getting too big.”


Gil Hanse spent a short time working with Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design before founding Hanse Golf Course Design in 1993. Along with Tom Doak, Bill Coore & Ben Crenshaw, Hanse is regarded as one of the most influential “minimalist” golf course architects of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Gil Hanse

Hanse earned a Master's degree in Landscape Architecture from Cornell University in 1989, achieving the William Frederick Dreer Award, which allowed him to spend a year overseas with Hawtree Ltd.

Robert Trent Jones arrived in New York harbor aboard the steamship Caronia from the port of Liverpool on Monday, 29th April 1912, exactly two weeks after the Titanic had sunk on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic. He, along with his mother and younger brother, was soon reunited with his father who had arrived nine months earlier to work as a carpenter with the New York Central Railroad building freight cars in Rochester.

As a boy, Robert caddied at the Country Club of Rochester, while Walter Hagen was still the club professional. It’s said that he saw The Haig drive to the club one day in a white Packard roadster and as the vehicle swept past him carrying the great man in his usual grand style, Jones vowed there and then to “somehow get involved with golf in some big way”.

He entered a 36-hole tournament aged sixteen, shooting a 69 course record score for his afternoon round and finishing as the low amateur, only one stroke behind the winning professional. Thoughts of broadening his horizons as a player soon evaporated though when a duodenal ulcer landed him in hospital for six months, killing off any thoughts of making it big as a player.

Instead, having dropped out of the eleventh grade at East Rochester High School in 1922, Robert started as a draughtsman with his father’s company, though he still hankered for a job in golf. Three years later, while working in a summer job as a golf instructor, he played an exhibition match for the opening of Sodus Bay Heights Golf Club and was offered the all-in-one job of greenkeeper, professional and manager at the club.

One of the wealthy Sodus members arranged for Jones to visit Cornell University, his alma mater, and introduced him to the dean of the school of agriculture, who made arrangements for the budding architect to take classes as a non-degree “special student” but only if he agreed to additional tutoring in mathematics and chemistry. Robert’s benefactor also gave him a generous allowance to help with expenses before he began his studies in the autumn of 1928.

Jones’s first design job arrived in 1931, close to home at Midvale Golf and Country Club in Perinton, to the east of Rochester, while he was still taking classes at Cornell. He wrote to the club’s president to express an interest in designing the new course and it was decided to give him a chance, but only if his work was overseen by a more experienced architect who turned out to be none other than the famous Canadian designer 

This was the start of what was intended to be a mutually beneficial association between both men as Thompson and Jones then agreed to join forces in a partnership entitled Thompson & Jones Inc. – though it was changed in March 1932 to Thompson, Jones and Thompson when Stanley brought his brother Bill into the frame – and their first collaboration wasn’t too successful as Midvale went bust and the club was unable to pay the architectural fees that had been agreed.

It was an inauspicious start for the new design company – but a sign of things to come during the Great Depression – and things didn’t get much better for a good while as Jones scratched around the state of New York, looking for potential design projects. He was fortunate enough to tap into the US government’s New Deal programs (funding public works initiatives) to upgrade a few municipal courses via the Works Progress Administration.

The Jones redesign of Green Lakes State Park Golf Course in 1935 proved to be very lucrative to him. The operation of the revised layout was leased to the architect for a dollar a year in lieu of a design fee and within a short space of time it was making him $10,000 to $12,000 a year, enabling him to get married and move out of his wife’s parents’ house into a home of their own. For the next decade, this was a nice little earner that saw him through the leaner times during the Second World War.

The relationship with Stanley Thompson withered towards the end of the 1930s when it became apparent that Jones no longer needed the other man’s reputation to secure jobs and more business was coming his way via the New Deal schemes. Perhaps his 37-page promotional booklet entitled 

, published in New York City in 1938, helped hasten a parting of the ways with his Canadian colleague.

In this publication, he included quotes about courses designed by Thompson long before his partnership with Jones began and he also printed a quote mentioning the many famous courses his firm had built in North and South America – when it was Thompson who had gone to Brazil three years earlier to drum up business. It probably came as no surprise to anybody when their association eventually fizzled out.

After World War II, Jones teamed up with his namesake Bobby Jones to design the course at Peachtree, in Atlanta. At 7,219 yards in length, it was one of the longest in the country, with greens averaging more than 8,000 square feet in area – the 14,500 square foot 10th was reckoned to be the largest in the country – and enormous “runway” tees that would become something of a trademark.

Because Robert did such a good job at Peachtree, Bobby then invited him to renovate several holes at Augusta National, which he did in stages between 1946 and 1950. He first of all remodelled the green complex on the 18th, softening the transition between the upper and lower levels of the putting surface, then returned the following year to rework the greens on holes 8, 12 and 13, as well as completely reshape the par three 16th.

Around this time, the American Society of Golf Course Architects was formed, with Jones (aged forty) becoming the youngest member by eleven years – perhaps his relative youthfulness was the reason why he was asked to act as secretary-treasurer-minute secretary. Another of the fourteen founding members of an organization with an average age of sixty was none other than Stanley Thompson, despite the fact he lived and worked in Canada.

The Dunes Golf & Beach Club which debuted in 1949 was Robert’s first resort course and it went a long way to establishing Myrtle Beach as a vacation destination. Of course, cynics might think that the practice of inviting journalists to stop off on their way to covering the Masters every year also might have gone some way towards boosting the popularity of the course and its location.

It’s said that Jones received a fee of $8,000 for his design (twice what the ASGCA had just set out as the minimum for an 18-hole course) and also a cut of the $20,500 construction contract given to William Baldwin to build the course. William Baldwin Construction was just one of a number of companies that Jones set up at various times to deal with physically putting his plans into place.

During the period 1949 to 1959, Jones completed eighty-four courses. He had branched out from the Mid-Atlantic region – “only” twenty-five of his projects were in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut and Pennsylvania – into twenty-four different states, as well as constructing layouts in the Bahamas, Bermuda and Puerto Rico.

National recognition of his work probably began with the renovation of the 

-designed South course at Oakland Hills in Michigan for the 1951 US Open, which was one of the most difficult and controversial championships ever contested. Players thought the long, tight set up was unfair but Jones was happy to see the new bunkers, extended tees and hourglass-shaped fairways stiffen the test as intended.

Further upgrading work to other US Open courses was carried out in the 1950s: 

’s Lower course at Baltusrol in New York; Watson’s Lake course at Olympic Club in San Francisco; another Ross layout at Oak Hill’s East course in Rochester; and 

To keep on top of all this booming business, Eileen Vennell was hired as a secretarial assistant and Francis J. Duane, a young landscape architect who’d graduated from the State University of New York, was taken on as Robert’s first design associate. Duane would go on to work with the company for seventeen years, designing or remodelling around fifty courses in the United States and elsewhere.

Into the 1960s and Robert Trent Jones signed off on a hundred and twenty-seven projects during that particular decade, which represents an incredible average completion rate of one a month. Assignments were now arriving from far-flung places like Jamaica, Colombia and Europe – with new courses laid out in Spain (Sotogrande in 1965 and Las Brisas in 1968), France (Bondues in 1967 and 1968), and Belgium (Bercuit in 1968).

Roger G. Rulewich, a civil engineer, had joined the company in 1961 at the age of twenty-five, before either of Robert’s two sons got involved in the company, and he would give thirty-four years of loyal service to the company, becoming not just “a wonderful employee,” but the architect’s “most valued employee,” according to Jones himself. And not just a hired hand for Robert, either, as he became more like a third son.

 quit his post graduate studies at Stanford Law School to set up a west coast office at Palo Alto in 1962 with the intention of expanding his father’s business into new markets throughout the Pacific Northwest, the desert Southwest and across the Pacific to Hawaii and beyond. Eventually, he’d enter into partnerships with a couple of local companies, Daniel, Mann, Johnson & Mendenhall and Metcalf & Eddy, to provide planning, engineering, architectural and economical support for the projects he was working on.

 took over the east office in Montclair in 1965, as soon as he had finished a year of military training. He persuaded 

, an old pal from the University of California in Berkeley, to join the firm in 1967 and his father sent him off to Spain three years later to manage a European office (which lasted until 1987). Rees would be paired with Roger Rulewich, a fellow Yale graduate, for the decade that he worked directly for his father.

If the 1960s had been very busy then the 1970s were not much quieter, with a hundred and eleven layouts unveiled or re-opened for play in twenty-nine states and nineteen foreign countries. Europe was again a popular destination, with new courses created in Costa Smeralda in Sardina, Costa del Sol in Spain and Setubal in Portugal. The RTJ brand also extended further round the globe, to places such as Japan, Morocco and Fiji.

It’s calculated that Robert Trent Jones was flying around three hundred thousand miles a year by the early 1970s but his travel plans were eased somewhat by Pan Am paying him an annual sum of $10,000 to fly with them – thanks to the generosity of the company’s president Juan Trippe, a personal friend of the architect – and TWA affording him free membership of its by invitation only “Ambassadors Club”.

What nobody realized (until much later in April 1982, when a ten-page feature story entitled “The Feud in the Fairways” appeared in a luxury travel magazine), was the seriously troubled nature of the relationship between Robert and his two sons. The author likened the Jones family to that of the scheming Ewing’s in the TV series “Dallas”. At the root of the problem was the perception that Bobby was operating independently whilst still trading under the RTJ brand.

Things had come to a head in 1974 when Rees left the family business at the end of that year. Correspondence had flown back and forth in the months leading up to his departure, and more angry missives would be fired between the protagonists in the months following his exit. Bobby eventually established the Robert Trent Jones II company in 1976 but the blurred lines of Robert Trent Jones provenance were never really resolved.

More than half of the eighty-one projects undertaken by Jones during the 1980s were located outside the United States. Early in the decade, courses were created north of the International Boundary in Alberta and British Columbia, south of the Mexican border in Acapulco and on the island of Bermuda in the North Atlantic. European jobs accounted for a large proportion of the remaining foreign output. France took the lion’s share of the work on the continent, including Chamonix in 1983, La Grande Motte in 1987 and Moliets in 1986-8.

A couple of projects almost bankrupted Robert around this time. The first was at Vidauban in the south of France, which was intended to be the site for three courses, a couple of clubhouses, two hotels and three thousand apartments. After investing heavily in the venture, Robert was bailed out of a bad financial situation by his son Bobby who managed to settle his father’s debts then finish the 18-hole course.

The other enterprise that almost brought financial disaster to Jones was the Robert Trent Jones Club on Lake Manassa in Prince William County, to the west of Washington D. C., where the first of three series of Presidents Cup matches was hosted in 1994. Once again, Jones got involved in a land deal to build a 54-hole complex that never materialized but he managed to pay off his debts to fellow investors with the help of other real estate developers.

Jones was into his eighties when the 1990s came around and his work tailed off by the middle of the decade, but not before his company had a last hurrah with the creation of Alabama’s Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail, funded by the pension fund scheme of that particular state. The aim was to provide upscale public golf at an affordable price for retirees and others, as well as attracting golfers from further afield as golfing tourists.

Roger Rulewich was the man who designed more than twenty courses for the old man over an intense, two-year period (216-holes were ready in 1992 and another 108-holes were brought into play the following year) which saw layouts suddenly spring up from the foothills of the Appalachians in the north to the Gulf of Mexico in the south. Roger, a loyal servant to Jones for 34 years, finally left the company in 1995 to start his own business.

Coral Ridge Country Club in Fort Lauderdale, Florida – which Jones designed in the mid-1950, leased for ten years, then bought with money loaned from an insurance company – served as the family’s winter getaway. The only golf club that the architect owned and operated, it was actually the oldest of the many businesses in which the family was involved, and it was here that the architect spent many of his last years, finally passing away in his sleep on 14th June 2000, six days before his ninety-fourth birthday.

“Robert Trent Jones’s journey from Ellis Island to the Ivy League launched him on the classic narrative arc of the self-made man’s triumph. He managed to rise from caddy to railroad car draftsman to an anonymous do-it-all job as golf pro-greenkeeper-club manager- chief cook and bottle washer at a little 9-hole course on Solus Bay in upstate New York to a position of unrivalled eminence in his profession as the chief author of America’s national championship golf courses.

He was unquestionably the world’s most famous, the most accomplished, golf course architect, and a friend of kings, tycoons, and U.S. presidents. And because his journey was unprecedented, nothing in the history of golf compares with Robert Trent Jones’s epic life story. As dramatic and poignant as are the golf-related lives of Francis Ouimet and Walter Hagen, or of Bobby Jones, Sam Snead, and Ben Hogan, or of 

, or of Tiger Woods, none means more in the history of golf in America and around the world than the saga of Robert Trent Jones Sr."

World Golf Hall of Fame – Class of 1987: Jones spent his final years confined to a wheelchair. After having one stroke, he awakened in his hospital bed to see his two sons at his bedside. “What are you doing here?” he asked. “You had a little setback. You had a stroke,” he was told. “Do I have to count it?” he replied.

Robert Trent Jones

​Robert Trent Jones arrived in New York aboard the steamship Caronia from Liverpool on Monday, 29th April 1912, exactly two weeks after the Titanic had sunk on her maiden voyage across the Atlantic.

Rees was educated at Montclair High School in New Jersey, two years behind his brother 

. He graduated from Yale University with a Batchelor of Arts degree in 1963 then enrolled for a landscape architecture course at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

, a recent graduate in history from Princeton University, who convinced him they should leave Harvard a year into their studies and enter another degree program in landscape architecture at the University of California in Berkeley.

Whilst studying on the West Coast, Rees was due to be drafted into the US Army but chose instead to enlist with the Army Reserves. Following a year of military training, he returned home to Montclair in New Jersey to take over the running of his father’s East Coast office.

Cabell, meanwhile, graduated from the Berkeley program in 1967 then joined Rees for a short time until he was posted overseas to Spain to set up a base for overseeing Trent Jones projects in Britain, Europe and North Africa. He’d be there for seventeen years in total.

Rees worked alongside construction foreman Bill Baldwin and design associate Roger Rulewich, who was five years older. Rees and Roger were both Yale graduates and got on very well together, while Bill became virtually a second father to Rees, teaching him all the practical aspects of golf course design.

Collectively, they worked on more than twenty projects over a ten-year period across thirteen states, before Rees left his father’s company in October of 1974. Disputes between Jones Sr. and his sons on running the business came to a head and Rees felt he had to bail out.

 had this to say about the parting of the ways: “Bobby had been working in the burgeoning Pacific Basin, while I had been spending time in Europe. Rees was doing great work from Texas to Massachusetts.

Each designed some magnificent courses with my firm, and each would get even better after they left. In retrospect, it was good they left. Otherwise they would have had to wait until I died to establish their reputations.”

Over the years, a number of trusted associates have worked with the man who inherited his father’s moniker as the ‘Open Doctor’ – thanks to his redesign of courses in preparation for major championships which include eight PGA Championships, seven US Opens and five Ryder Cups – and these men have more than a century of experience between them.

Keith Evans was Rees’s right hand man from 1979 until he retired in 2011. Indianapolis-born Greg Muirhead joined the company after a short spell with 

 in 1984; Texan Steve Weisser worked briefly with Dick Nugent and 

 before signing on with Rees in 1991; and Bryce Swanson, from Illinois – a graduate from Iowa State University – has been with Rees since 2000.

As a group of architects, the Rees Jones design team has been responsible for more than 200 golf courses, with most of them located in the Mid-Atlantic states of New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania (49 in total) and the South Atlantic region which includes Florida, Georgia, the Carolinas and Virginia (72 in total).

The firm’s overseas portfolio isn’t quite as prolific, with twenty-two projects in thirteen countries. Half of these are located in Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean and the rest are spread far and wide around the globe; a handful in Asia; a couple in Europe; with two outliers in Namibia and New Zealand.

Rees has been a member of the American Society of Golf Course Architects since 1967, becoming secretary in 1976 then president two years later. He’s also been a member of the United States Golf Association since 1967, serving on the Green Section Committee 1979-1980 and 2008-2013.

“We design course generally for people who play golf, not only for golfers. Why take this great form of recreation and turn it into torture? The battle should be fun and fair.”

Another comment, from the same book, attributed to Rees’s father in the late 1980s:

“Rees does not believe so much in length as I do but in smaller, well-fortified targets surrounded by various features. He leaves a lot of his greens open in front, believing that hazards to the side penalize the good player more than the higher handicapper.

He uses grassy hollows and swales around the green, trying to penalize the shot to the degree it is missed, retaining the ball closer to the putting surface if it is only slightly off-line. Many of the greens Rees build sweep up in the front, like those at St Andrews.

His greens are marked by more gentle transitions as opposed to abrupt terraces. Long putts will break, but putts from close around the hole will be relatively easy.

Rees considers himself a multi-themed architect, which means he is constantly seeking variety, trying to give the player a new experience on every hole, not just on every course. As a result, his later courses have become more visually exciting.

He also classifies himself as an ‘architect of definition’ rather than deception. He wants the golfer to know what he has to contend with, and Rees works very hard at showing him the intended target, both off the tee and into the green.”

“Numerous industry voices have seen fit to cite the damaging effect that Jones’s work has had on many classic golf courses; in his effort to toughen the layouts ahead of visitations by the world’s best players. Sadly, this finger-pointing often lands on a specific individual; whereas historic perspective would indicate that evolving modern design principles dictated these changes in golf course architecture, not the vision of one man.

In the same way, Rees Jones’s original designs attempt to set new standards for visual clarity and playability. Clearly influenced by modern design principles and the work of his father, Rees believes that golf holes should clearly dictate to the player where to direct his or her shotmaking; and that bunkers should be visible and indicative of the ideal line-of-play.”

“The best advice I've ever received is that you have to know how to build a golf course before you can design one. This came from Bill Baldwin, my father's construction manager, who knew how critical understanding the land was. When, as a young man, I would come up with an idea, he would say, ‘That's a good idea, but have you ever thought about doing it this way...’ and I knew I was learning from a master.”

by Rees Jones, published by the Urban Land Institute, Washington, D.C. in 1974

“The best advice I've ever received is that you have to know how to build a golf course before you can design one. This came from Bill Baldwin, my father's construction manager, who knew how critical understanding the land was."  Rees Jones

Rees Jones

Rees Jones considers himself a multi-themed architect, which means he is constantly seeking variety, trying to give the player a new experience on every hole, not just on every course.

Michigan

PGA Championship

U.S. Senior Open

U.S. Open

U.S. Amateur

U.S. Women's Amateur

Ryder Cup

Western Open

Oakland Hills Country Club played host to the 2004 Ryder Cup matches between the USA and Europe. Team Captains were Hal Sutton (US) and Bernhard Langer (Europe). The 35th Ryder Cup was the most one-sided contest for a number of years. Europe led America by 11-5 going into Sunday’s singles and when Sergio Gargia rallied to beat reigning Masters Champion Phil Mickelson 3 and 2, the writing was on the wall for the home team. Colin Montgomerie secured the winning point against David Toms but the entire European team played their part in achieving a record-breaking victory, which included rookies Thomas Levet and Ian Poulter scoring their first points. Europe 18 ½ - USA 9 ½. The Ryder Cup was played at 

Oakland Hills Country Club is located on Michigan’s rolling Bloomfield Hills. The club has two courses, the famous South course and the less famous North course.

Donald Ross laid out the South course in 1917 and Robert Trent Jones toughened the layout up ahead of the 1951 US Open, which was won emphatically by Ben Hogan. After his win, Hogan commented that he had “brought this monster to its knees” and since then the course is affectionately known as “The Monster”.

”The most pungent remark made during the controversial 1951 Open Championship at Oakland Hills Country Club,” wrote Robert Trent Jones in 

, “came from that patriarch of professional golf, Walter Hagen: ‘The course is playing the players instead of the players playing the course.’ In this comment, Hagen summed up the psychological shock suffered by the world’s ranking golfers when they encountered the remodelled course, for these modern players had been getting away with murder for years, and didn’t know it. They had been playing over course that, with a few exceptions, had been laid out in the 1920s, or earlier, and which had been tailored for the equipment and the ball and the playing conditions of that era.”

Rees Jones – son of Robert Trent Jones – undertook a series of renovations (mainly bunkering) to the South course ahead of the 2008 PGA Championships and the layout was stretched out in excess of 7,300 yards. Oakland Hills once again became a fearsome test with only three players beating par. Padraig Harrington followed in the footsteps of Gary Player and David Graham who were former Oakland Hills PGA winners (1974 and 1979 respectively). Harrington’s two closing rounds of 66 were enough to give him a two shot victory over Sergio Garcia. But Harrington was perhaps even more pleased to become the first European to win consecutive majors as he followed up his 2008 Open Championship win at 

 by triumphing in the 2008 USPGA at Oakland Hills. 

Gil Hanse has been advising Oakland Hills Country Club on course restoration since 2015. There may now be fewer trees, but with six US Opens and one Ryder Cup under its belt, the South should still be treated with respect. We think that you’ll certainly appreciate the challenge and therefore we recommend that you befriend a member immediately. We also think that Oakland Hills is one of the fairest tests of golf in the land. Do you agree?

Oakland Hills (South)

Lost Dunes

North America

With many holes lined by trees, six US Opens and one Ryder Cup under its belt, the South course at Oakland Hills Country Club should be treated with respect.