The 1951 U.S. Open, played at Oakland Hills Country Club near Detroit, was a battle between the world's best golfers and a course remodeled for the occasion by architect Robert Trent Jones. After dozens of grizzled pros took aim at the pins over four days of competition, and only two were able to shoot rounds under par, observers could come to only one conclusion: the course had won. It took the great Ben Hogan, at the height of his skills, to subdue it. He shot a blistering 67 in the final round, vaulting past fifteen competitors to take the title, all the while muttering at the godforsaken monster Oakland Hills had become. Afterward, Ione Jones, the architect's wife, approached the champion to congratulate him on his victory. Hogan shook his head and scowled. "If your husband had to play his own courses for a living," he told her, "you'd starve."

Such is the fate of the golf course architect. Slice a shot into a pond, and instead of blaming yourself for putting the ball there, blame the person who put the pond there. Over the past half-century, no course designer has been more attacked or acclaimed than Jones, the Frank Lloyd Wright of the fairways. Some of the best golfers have inserted some of the worst epithets into his name. Not that Jones, now ninety-one and as close to retired as he'll ever be, can't handle the critics. His controversial standing in the golf world is due in no small part to the confidence he has in his own architectural abilities. He may look harmless (short, sad-eyed, and rumpled), but he has been known to be downright fiery when defending the severity of his courses or the sanctity of par. So when none other than Jack Nicklaus complained at the 1970 U.S. Open that Jones's Hazeltine National design left too many blind holes, the architect's response was par for the course: maybe, he said, Jack Nicklaus is blind.

"The quality of a golf course is usually in the eye of the beholder. Usually the view depends on the beholder's success that day," Jones writes in his 1989 autobiography, Golf's Magnificent Challenge. "If you built the kind of course the pros would really like, you would have dead flat greens and dead flat fairways, very little rough and very few traps. That kind of course wouldn't require an architect; you could order it from the Sears Roebuck catalog."

Jones was trained to create golf courses much like Tiger Woods was raised to conquer them. He was the first golf course architect who did not start in another profession nor run a golf-related business. Instead, he orchestrated a specific Cornell education so that, from the very beginning, his mission was simply to lay out the links. In the nearly seventy years since, he has built more of them in more places than anyone. In fact, in his ninety-one years on this earth, it is likely that Jones has moved more of it than anyone. His firm, Robert Trent Jones Inc., has designed or redesigned more than 500 courses in nearly every U.S. state and three dozen foreign countries. Of the nation's 100 best golf courses as determined by Golf Digest magazine, Jones built twelve and remodeled another seventeen. And that doesn't include the world-class courses he has built everywhere from Jamaica and Japan to Martinique and Morocco. No matter where he builds a course, his goal is to make its features look as if they belonged there and had always been there. "Walk down a sweeping Trent Jones fairway," claims British golf writer Peter Dobereiner, "and you can imagine that this was exactly the way a residing glacier left the land many millennia ago."

Yet Jones is also known for building beautiful courses in places that seem to have no business boasting sweeping fairways. When he was commissioned to build a course on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia nearly three decades ago, four architects had already inspected the site (steep mountains, rocky cliffs, impenetrable bushes) and decided a golf course was impossible. Jones took on the task. He blasted the tops off the mountains, reduced the boulders to sand and grew grass on it, and turned an impossibility into Pevero Golf Club. Jones also created Mauna Kea Golf Course in Hawaii on land covered by volcanic rock, built Dorado Beach in Puerto Rico on sand that nobody thought would sprout grass, designed Marine Park in Brooklyn on swampland, and constructed Stockley Park outside of London on an old garbage dump.

Along the way, Jones has created his share of originals and superlatives. In the 1930s, he built the first island green, which players reached with a 9-iron and a rowboat. In the 1950s, he built a hole at Camp David for Dwight Eisenhower, as well as the White House putting green. In the 1970s at Turnberry Isle in Miami, he built the biggest green in the world&emdash;47,936 square feet, more than an acre of putting surface.

After sixty-eight years of moving earth and roaming it, Jones doesn't get around like he used to. He still can be found chipping balls occasionally, but he's traded his cane for a wheelchair and a walker. He continues to travel extensively, but at nowhere near the frantic level that used to carry him 300,000 miles a year. He goes to work every day, holding court in his office off the seventeenth fairway at Coral Ridge Country Club in Fort Lauderdale, but his designs have become joint ventures, his input primarily philosophical. Yet his company is thriving. A half-dozen years ago, Robert Trent Jones Inc. finished the largest golf course project ever attempted in the world, a dazzling collection of 324 holes in seven locations throughout Alabama, collectively known as the Robert Trent Jones Golf Trail. And just last year, the firm completed designs as far away as the Dominican Republic and Wales. They say the sun never sets on a Jones design.

Like golf itself, Jones was an import from across the pond. Born in Lancashire in 1906, he emigrated with his parents to East Rochester, New York, at the age of three. By the time he was twelve, Jones was working as a caddie at The Country Club of Rochester. As he was walking toward the club one day, a handsome, black-haired man roared past him in a white Packard roadster. It was Walter Hagen, the reigning U.S. Open champion who had once been a caddie in Rochester himself. Known as much for his swinging lifestyle as for his swing, he was Babe Ruth in knickers. "I knew right then," Jones says, "I had to somehow get involved with golf."

Jones learned to play the game using a mid-iron he bought for fifty cents. By age sixteen, he was the most promising young golfer in the Rochester area, but a stomach ulcer prevented him from playing competitively for two years and effectively put an end to his hopes of athletic glory. By then, he had dropped out of high school and was working as a draftsman for Merchant's Despatch Transportation, a railroad refrigerator car company. Still, golf dominated his thoughts. On the side, he landed a job as the golf pro at the Sodus Country Club, which had a nine-hole course overlooking Lake Ontario. No longer believing he could defeat golf courses, he dreamed instead of designing them, but he had no idea how to go about learning the business. "There were no technical schools for it," says Jones, "and you couldn't go to a university and major in golf course architecture."

Or could you? Jones discussed the subject with Ray Humburch '09, the head of the engineering department at Merchant's, who thought his alma mater might provide the opportunity. A Sodus Country Club member drove Jones to Cornell in his limousine. After being tutored in the summer of 1926, Jones entered Cornell as a special student and designed his own curriculum. He studied landscape architecture, agronomy, and horticulture in the Ag college, hydraulics and surveying in Engineering. He took economics, chemistry, public speaking, journalism, business law. "Because I was a special student, of course, I did not receive a degree from Cornell," he says. "But I got what I wanted&emdash;the education, the knowledge to design and build golf courses."

When Jones finally set out to do that, however, it was 1930, not the best time to begin a career building playgrounds for the prosperous. His first major assignment was to design a course for Rochester's Midvale Golf and Country Club, which called in well-known Canadian architect Stanley Thompson to look over his shoulder. In those days, they used slip-scrapers drawn by teams of horses to shape the greens. It was a laborious process. It was also the early stages of the Great Depression. Midvale filed for bankruptcy just before the course was completed, and Jones never collected his fee.

Still, some good came of it when Thompson asked Jones to work for him, and they soon became partners. As the economy worsened, golf course architecture became almost nonexistent, but Jones managed to build five public courses as part of the Works Progress Administration. When World War II came along, Jones worked as an airfield consultant for the government, but he did manage to complete a few golf projects, including one close to his heart. He built the first nine holes of the Cornell University Golf Course in 1941. The second nine were completed thirteen years later. Eventually, the full eighteen were renamed in his honor.

The war's end marked Jones's beginning, a start he remembers with specific affection. "Often it is difficult to pinpoint the event, the circumstance, that launches a career, or even accelerates it," he says. "For me, the moment is relatively easy to determine. Peachtree did it." Peachtree Golf Club in Atlanta was Robert Trent Jones's chance to collaborate with Robert Tyre Jones, the man the world knew as Bobby, the greatest amateur golfer in history. The men played nine holes together in 1945, and it was then that the architect decided there could only be one Bobby Jones in Atlanta. "From now on," he told his playing partner. "I'll be Trent Jones." Peachtree made the name prominent in golf circles. Completed in 1948, the course was supposed to embody Bobby Jones's golf philosophy; instead it came to represent the unveiling of Trent Jones's architectural philosophy. Its features became his signatures: enormous tees, expansive and undulating greens, cavernous bunkers, strategic and scenic water hazards.

By altering pin placement and tee marker locations, Peachtree could be played an infinite number of ways. It was a product of Jones's contention that a course should have the flexibility to be made less punishing. "I don't build golf courses just for the pros. I worry more about the duffer," he says. "The higher handicap players support the game. They are the game." Peachtree led to an invitation for Jones to remodel Georgia's famed Augusta National Golf Club, home of the Masters Championship. He reshaped several greens and redesigned both the eleventh and sixteenth holes. The latter, one of the most acclaimed holes on the world-renowned course, so captured First Golfer Dwight Eisenhower's fancy that he created an oil painting of the view from the tee. It was then that Jones was retained to redesign Oakland Hills for the 1951 U.S. Open. Afterward, the victorious Ben Hogan announced, "I'm glad that I brought this course, this monster, to its knees." That analysis, says Jones, "made me famous or notorious, depending on whose opinion you want to entertain."

The timing was perfect. With the U.S. entering a period of prosperity and leisure, charismatic stars like Arnold Palmer coming along to mainstream the sport, and modern earth-moving equipment revolutionizing construction, Jones's business boomed. By the mid-Sixties, his name was even recognizable to people who didn't know a 5-iron from a waffle iron. Jones became known as the "Open Doctor," as he was hired to do corrective surgery on several world class courses for major championships. While Jones expressed some qualms about changing the work of late, great architects, he understood that golf courses must keep up with the game. "The Mona Lisa will never be altered," he explains, "but she wouldn't win the Miss America contest today."

Jones's sons, Bobby Jr. and Rees, joined the firm in the early Sixties. Bobby established a West Coast office in Palo Alto, California, and Rees supervised the East Coast office in the Joneses' hometown of Montclair, New Jersey. The two became famous designers in their own right, but philosophical differences led them to start their own firms a decade later. For a while, the competition between father and sons for clients and recognition was more adversarial than familial, but the trio has since reconciled. Each of the Jones boys, like his father, is a past president of the American Society of Golf Course Architects, making Trent Jones quite literally the father of modern golf course architecture.

To many, he's a godfather as well. Paul Albanese '90 used to be a member of the Cornell golf team. Now, he's a senior designer for Raymond Hearns Golf Designs in Plymouth, Michigan. "Robert Trent Jones definitely had an influence on me because the Cornell golf course was one of his earliest designs," says Albanese. "Being on the golf team and reading about him while I was an engineering student, I realized I wanted to build something every day that I enjoyed being around."

Of course, designing eighteen holes is no walk in the park. The architect must be well-versed in a variety of disciplines. He (or, increasingly, she) must be a salesman, able to attract financing for multi-million-dollar projects. Jack Nicklaus, a renowned designer in his own right, once marveled at Jones's ability to "meet a group of developers at an airport in Spain, sell them a course by sketching one out on a paper napkin and take the next plane home." The architect must be politically astute and environmentally aware, sensitive to restrictions regarding housing, land ownership, soil erosion, irrigation, flood plains, wetlands, wildlife, and pesticides. He must also be a visionary, able to walk along a stretch of land and picture a fairway bunker here, an elevated tee over there.

And if Jones had his druthers, the ultimate designer would also be a heck of a golfer. Bobby Jones himself said that his friend Trent was the best golfing golf architect he ever encountered, a fact supported by this anecdote: After Trent remodelled the 194-yard, par-three fourth hole at New Jersey's Baltusrol Golf Club for the 1954 U.S. Open, a critic told him it was too difficult. Jones led a handful of observers to the tee and proceeded to make a hole-in-one. "Gentlemen," he said, "I think the hole is eminently fair."

Historically (that is, pre-Jones), there were two primary schools of golf architecture&emdash;penal and strategic. Penal courses extracted penalties from players who failed to execute sufficient shots, yet all players, regardless of ability, were forced to shoot over hazards. Strategic design was the opposite. There was no way over the hazards; golfers had to think their way around the course to avoid them. Then came Jones, who began writing about a third "heroic" school of golf architecture. He described it as "a concept that demands a heroic carry or gamble for the better player to get into position for a birdie, but one that always leaves an option for the lesser player to take the safer route." Essentially, it combined penal and strategic, in keeping with his philosophy that every hole should be a difficult par and an easy bogey and that good golf provides the excitement of meeting your own challenge.

Beyond philosophical elements, the golf course architect must deal with countless other considerations. First, of course, he must determine if the land can be fashioned into a golf course at all. Then the architect must ask for whom the course is intended. Is it a municipal operation? A private layout? A resort? A tournament host? Part of a housing development? Even the basic routing of a course is more than just envisioning eighteen holes. Jones has described the task&emdash;creating a course of moderate length with each green leading to the subsequent tee and with the first tee and the last green somewhere in the vicinity of the clubhouse&emdash;as similar to "putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle." The challenge is to complete the puzzle without leaving yourself a 750-yard, uphill, par-seven eighteenth hole located in a different county.

The course must also be balanced&emdash;the right mix of length (usually ten par-fours, four par-threes and four par-fives), variety (straight holes, doglegs), and contouring. Within each hole, questions beget more questions. What shape should the fairway be? Where should the hazards be located? What kind of foliage and grass should be planted? Should the green be elevated? Mounded? Terraced? Tilted? Where can the pin be placed? The architect must also consider such factors as climatic conditions, prevailing winds, elevation, even air density. But in the end, Jones contends, "making golf holes is more art than science."

The architect, Jones says, is there to follow the land's lead with as little interference as possible. Indeed, Jones, a member of the Cornell Athletic Hall of Fame and the first living course designer enshrined in the World Golf Hall of Fame, has long held that "God is the best architect." But, as one observer pointed out, "he says it in a way that makes one suspect he's just feigning modesty."

Brad Herzog '90 is a frequent contributor to Cornell Magazine.

Published in Cornell Alumni Magazine. Used by permission.