They’re Golf’s Most Feared--by Design

The name of the most feared man in golf? Well, it might surprise you to know that the most feared name in golf is not Raymond Floyd or Lanny Wadkins or Jack Nicklaus or Tom Watson or even Lee Trevino.

The most feared name in golf belongs to a guy who never won a major, never broke 80 at Augusta, never made the cut in an Open and, to tell the truth, never got much better than a 10-handicapper.

The name of the most feared competitor in golf is Robert T. Jones.

Wait a minute! Not that Bob Jones. This one comes in duplicate. I have reference not to the late Robert Tyre Jones, the player, but to the two Robert Trent Joneses, Jr. and Sr.

The Jones boys in their way have done more to frustrate the great golfers of the world with a few buckets of sand, a surveyor’s transit and a bulldozer than all the great shotmakers of history put together.

You have to understand, a golf tournament is not like a prizefight or a tennis match. It’s more like a mountain climb. It’s not man against man. It’s man against nature.

But nature needs help. And that’s where the Joneses come in. They are golf course architects. And they are all that stand between golf and a whole bunch of guys who would destroy it if they could, who would make a mockery of par, who would go around shooting 2s and 3s and 1s if they had their way. They don’t like anyone or anything that won’t let them.

Mention the Joneses to a tour golfer, and the chances are a film will come over his eyes, his teeth will appear to grow, his hair will stiffen and he will begin to pant. He will look like a guy about to have a stroke.

Golf is a never-ending battle between player and topography. And the player seems to be winning.

“He has all the weapons,� explains Robert Trent Jones Jr. “He has the hot golf balls, the square grooves, the graphite shafts, the metal woods, dimpled ball covers.�

Someone has to come to the aid of the golf course or it will become an endangered species, is the view of Bob Jones Jr. He sees the golf course as a city under siege, a Vicksburg, if you will, and himself as the general in charge of defending it.

“They even took the fatigue factor out of the game years ago when someone down in Palm Springs came up with the idea of the golf cart,� he complains.

Courses today are as defenseless, Tom Watson has said, “as a naked lady in a bad neighborhood.�

The players are bigger, the implements are better, the manufacturers may come out any day with dial-a-par clubs, and for courses, nothing seems left but a scorched-earth policy.

But Bob Jones Jr. is not ready to strike his colors yet.

His father and he have designed or remodeled more than 50 of the 130 courses tapped by the Society of Golf Architects as the best in the world today.

A lot of us see golf courses today as modern Pauline Whites, damsels in distress, tied to the tracks with the Limited on time and bearing down.

Bob Jones Jr. sees himself as a guy galloping to the rescue.

“You can’t shrink the hole or go back to wooden shafts or the gutta-percha ball,� he says. “So, you have to find a way to build a course that won’t yield to the caveman approach. You have to have a course that makes the golfer think as well as shoot well. You can’t keep having the kind you can play blindfolded.�

It is not a function of just brutalizing a course, putting pins in sand traps, growing eye-high rough, piping in the Pacific Ocean or cutting in two-story sand traps with the Santa Fe railroad running up the sides.

“That’s not golf, that’s Monopoly,� Jones says. “A penalty golf course, ‘Go back one shot; do not pass Go’ type of thing.�

Anyone can carve out a penal institution, young Jones believes. “You just make all the greens 2,000 feet square instead of 7,000, you have them all fall away at the back and you seed them with fescue so the ball won’t stop. But that’s not design, that’s throwing out the game to save it.�

Jones, who has just built the last golf course--the players don’t believe the O belongs in the word course --in the necklace of them that line the Monterey Peninsula, Spanish Bay, and whose other jewel is the splendid Coto de Caza in Orange County, thinks the trick is to fashion a course that the members can play comfortably but will also challenge the pros.

“The professional goes for birdies. That’s where he’s vulnerable,� he points out.

The ploy is to entice him. Not exactly camouflage the target but make it coquettish to the player. Tease him into mistakes.

“I don’t want a course where you can just bust a drive and an 8-iron, but I don’t want one where you take the driver out of the game for a 1-iron either.�

One of Jones’ techniques is to construct moguls in a fairway, golf equivalents of the humps of snow on a downhill ski slope. These, he says, are more treacherous than traps in a fairway because they tend to deflect a shot landing on them, sometimes out of bounds. They also leave a player with dreaded downhill or distance-costing uphill shots.

Jack Nicklaus, no less, has protested the unfairness of these as a design because a player can hit a perfect shot, splitting the fairway off the tee, only to see it carom far right or left into trouble or worse, out of bounds.

Jones differs. “We offer the player an area down one side of the fairway where he will not have to take that chance. He will get a level lie. We put some challenge in the tee shot. We put position back in golf.�

How many golf architects are there in the business of protecting golf?

“How many golf architects are there?� says Jones, laughing. “How many golfers are there? Anyone who ever broke par thinks he is a golf architect. Anyone who ever won a tournament knows he is.

“You see, in the game’s infancy, a designer laid out a course to suit his game. Was he a right-to-left player? the course went right-to-left. A good putter? Big greens. they gerrymandered a course.�

The players-turned-architects today do the same thing, Jones says. “They build heroic courses--courses for guys who hit the ball high and far.�

Jones wants to build courses that will continue to make the pros gnash their teeth, throw their putters and give interviews that link the Jones boys with all the devils of history. That’s music to Bob’s ears. After all, Napoleon hated Wellington, too.