Robert Trent Jones, Jr., has been designing golf courses for most of his 67 years. The son of the legendary architect who built Peachtree in Atlanta and remodeled Oakland Hills in Michigan, Jones branched out on his own in the 1960s. Since then, he has made his name with courses like The Links at Spanish Bay in California, Blessings in Arkansas, and literally hundreds more. (Click here for an article on Blessings and its Marlon Blackwell-designed clubhouse.) His sculpted landscapes can be found in China, the UAE, and on the White House lawn, where he fashioned the putting green for President Clinton. He recently took some time from his still-frenetic design schedule to speak with Austin Kelley about landscape, environment, and the connections between golf architecture, Beethoven, and World War I.
Your father was a pioneer of golf course design, and you apprenticed with him. What did you learn from him?
First of all, I learned the love of the game of golf. I'm a player first and a golf architect second. It's kind of like a football player who plays both ways. But I'm more like a goalie because the ball is coming at me, so to speak, and I'm thinking of different defenses and tactics to challenge the players' thoughts and athletic skills.
What is your favorite course that you've designed?
There may be ten that I remember the experience of doing that are very significant. They would include Princeville in Kauai, Spanish Bay in California, the Moscow Country Club in Russia — the first course ever built in then the Soviet Union, now Russia — Blessings, Chambers Bay in Tacoma, Washington, Tamarack in Idaho, and Sunday River in Maine.
Which are your favorites designed by others?
I'm a member of Pine Valley and San Francisco Golf Club. One was designed by [A.W.] Tillinghast. The other was designed by Harry S. Colt. Those are beautiful golf experiences, the whole experience, not just the course. It's real golf.
Do you ever re-visit a course you've designed and wish you'd done something differently?
We revisit courses we've designed, and we do update them 20 or 30 years after. Golf is played on living turf. It's growing every day so I might be Beethoven with music, but it might be a jazz musician who's maintaining it. So I've got to get back to first principles and/or if there's some change that's been made adopt them and update them.
You are a poet and a poetry fan. Are you inspired by other artistic disciplines?
I use other art forms, particularly music. I use it for rhythm or cadence. In golf architecture you have a certain rhythm to a golf course. You get into the spirit of playing it, and you can't wait for the next tee. If it's a disjointed rhythm, you don't look forward to the hole.
What particular music inspires you?
I like to say the first hole at Poppy Hills is harder than Beethoven's Fifth. It's a joke, but it tells you you're there to play golf. Dum dum dum dummm. Right away you know you're in for some strong music. My friend Nolan Gasser, who's a composer, is setting some of my poems to full symphonic music, three of which have already been performed.
What did you learn from the translation from one genre to another—poetry to music?
I've learned so much about the art and theory of music. There are a lot of mathematical relationships in music and other arts. There are specific reasons why something is beautiful to the ear or to the eye. We call it the principle of harmony in art and landscape architecture, where you use a silhouette in the far-ground and replicate it in the foreground in another way. If you think of Beethoven's Fifth, you can see how he used [a certain theme], and he kept repeating it.
