In the common tell, the design of the golf run has passed from penalties to player -friendly. Forget forced carrys and narrow, Boom-Pinched Doelen-Architects now prefer width and ground play options. According to the standard story, the result is less frustration and more fun.
Rees Jones takes a slightly different picture.
“Now everyone uses these sand brackets,” Jones said. “Most successful architects use that mode at the moment to frame the gaps. Although the Fairways are wider and the greens may not have been bunker so closely, I think it is a more criminal style where they are able to do unlike strategic style.”
The famous architect spoke on one Recent episode of the Destination Golf PodcastIn a wide conversation that included the long scope of his career. Now 83, Jones is the Golf Royalty product. His father, Robert Trent Jones Sr. was a giant of the mid-20th-century course design, known as the open doctor for his surgical procedures at a slate of US Open locations. But he was also famous for his own projects – so much all over the world, even that he liked to say that the “sun never undergoes a course by Robert Trent Jones.”
Decades later, the open doctor inherited his father (including committees, he was recruited to help Torrey Pines and Bethpage Black prepare for national championships), while – as his father – build a thick portfolio of original work. More recently, Jones and his team have been busy with Bethpage again and they serve as course advisors prior to the Ryder Cup 2025, which will be held in September in the renowned Long Island Muni.
Bethpage was built in the 1930s, a Tilling Hast design that remains a bear, for which long forced, wire-the-needle T-pieces and challenging approaches of bunker-conserved greens required. It is punishable, good, but the requirements are different from today’s courses, which, says Jones, has set up fierce defenses of a different species.
What makes today’s designs so difficult?
“The daily player hates sand,” said Jones. There is more than that, and of course, and Jones went further. To hear more from him about the Evolution Natural Design – and a series of other topics – you can listen to the entire episode here.
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