In Golf Course Field, It’s Hard to Keep Up With the Joneses : Now, He Is a Junior in Name Only

The man who will design and build the first golf course in Russia since Nicholas II was, uh, disposed of, is digging deep into his wallet for another former government type, this time, Andrew Jackson of $20-bill fame. This being the United Nations of wallets, it’s a long search.

Let’s see, there are some English pounds from who knows when, a few French francs from the Grenoble trip, some Swiss francs and, yes, there they are, some greenbacks with nothing better to do than change homes.

Robert Trent Jones Jr., the world’s busiest golf architect, the guy who spent 291 days on the road last year, the designer long outside the shadow of his famous father, reaches for the cash when his pal and client, Tom Rohr, changes his mind. “I’ll take the Swiss francs instead,” Rohr says. A wager being a wager, Jones plunks the Swiss version of a 20-spot into Rohr’s outstretched palm.

Some round this has been. Steamed about a newspaper story that says deposed Philippine leader Ferdinand Marcos wants to return to Manila--and will pay $5 billion for the privilege--Jones, normally an 8 handicap, skulls and slices his way to 9 over par after just seven holes. His mind isn’t on his swing, but on his close friend, Philippine president Corazon Aquino, whom he met in the mid-1960s while building a course in that country.

Then arrives one of the assistant greenskeepers for The Links at Spanish Bay, Jones’ gorgeous 6,820-yard course nestled next to the ocean and site of the Rohr-Jones friendly bet. Turns out the greenskeeper needs a pep talk, so Jones, 49, pops out of his golf cart--he hates the things, anyway--grabs a handful of irons and his putter, and walks slowly up the fairway, dispensing advice the whole way.

Wommmmppppp! Just the world’s busiest golf architect, the Soviet Union’s newest hero, taking one of those irons and slamming it against the fairway when his ball sails low and left of the green. A patch of thick fescue grass, so long you could comb it, gobbles up Jones’ shot.

And then it happens. Jones’ swing, the one he used to captain the Yale golf team some 30 years ago, returns. Drives fall gracefully into the middle of fairways. Approach shots roll within arm’s length of the pin. Putts drop. Rohr sweats.

Sixteenth hole: 157 yards of yawning traps, pot bunkers galore--enough sand to film an Annette Funicello flick. Jones walks away with a hard-earned par. Rohr, however, sends a long birdie putt to the bottom of the cup. Jones, who despises losing only slightly less than he despises the late Marcos regime, manages a smile. Barely.

Two holes later, he’s doing his currency search.

“Hell of a golf course, Bobby,” says Rohr, as Jones closes his billfold. And just think, it cost only 20 Swiss simoleons for the compliment.

Jones can afford it. He has more projects going than you can shake a 3-wood at. Perth and Brisbane, Australia; Osaka and Nagoya, Japan; London; Grenoble; Barcelona; India; Taiwan; South Korea.

Here in the States, more of Jones’ work will soon be seen in Palm Springs (oddly enough, his first course there), Coto de Caza’s South Course (the North Course is his, too), Kauai, Hawaii; Madison, Wis., and so on. For those keeping count, Jones now has designed or re-designed 150 courses in 20 countries.

Or, put it this way: If you play golf, you’ve probably sworn on a Jones course. And if not on a Bobby Jr. course, then maybe on a layout designed by his younger brother, Rees. Or maybe on something done by the legendary old man, himself, Robert Trent Jones, who gave golf Spyglass Hill and the back nine at Augusta National, among others.

But Bobby Jr.’s most prized project is in a country where they don’t know a dogma from a dogleg.

That will change as soon as Jones’ bulldozers start toiling away in a place to be called the Nahabino Golf Club, located about 20 miles from the Kremlin walls.

As courses go, it won’t be the most challenging or picturesque Jones has ever designed--Joondalup Country Club in Perth or Pebble Beach’s Spanish Bay, which he designed with golfer Tom Watson and former United States Golf Assn. president Frank (Sandy) Tatum, see to that--but Nahabino will be his most satisfying. After all, Jones only had to wait out Breshnev, Andropov, Gorbachev, detente , a mini-Cold War and now glasnost .

Just 15 long years of sitting at your drafting table, waiting for the Soviets to decide if they wanted to wear plaid Bermuda shorts and chase a little white ball around open fields.

On June 1, in the midst of the Moscow Summit, they made up their minds. Fore! The Russians were coming.

“It’s a weather vane,” Jones said of the Soviets’ decision. “And the weather’s changing.”

Sure, everything is real toasty right now, but just days before an agreement was signed, Jones figured he was getting the Cold War shoulder. The Summit was in full swing and every Soviet diplomat seemed to have better things to do than wonder how long Nahabino would play from the blue tees. Jones thought the deal was dead--again.

Even Moscow visitor Armand Hammer, the famous industrialist, goodwill ambassador and the person who first suggested the golf idea to Breshnev back in 1974, was losing hope.

“(Jones) thought it was going to be put on the shelf,” said attorney Blake Stafford, a longtime friend of Jones who assisted in the Nahabino negotiations. “The Foreign Ministry people were occupied entertaining Reagan. We’re in the Minsk Hotel in Moscow. Bobby was deflated, very discouraged. He felt that the thing was not going to make it. No preparations had been made for the announcement.”

Wouldn’t it figure. For days, Stafford and Jones had met with assorted Soviet organizations. Sometimes negotiations would get so heated that lunch was forgotten.

Or how about the work it took to get to the negotiating table in the first place? Jones and Stafford had to convince the U.S. Department of Commerce, responsible for this sort of thing, that they weren’t giving away any technological secrets to the Soviets.

Then Jones’ hotel phone rang: The Russians were calling. They read Jones the diplomatic schedule for June 1. Sure enough, time had been set aside for the formal signing of documents calling for the Soviet Union’s first golf course since Leningrad was called St. Petersburg.

Jones was overjoyed. He called his wife, Claiborne, at the family home in Woodside, near Palo Alto.

“I think things are going pretty well,” Jones told her. “I think it’s going to happen.”

That’s it? Things are going pretty well?

Actually, Jones thought somebody might be listening in.

“He doesn’t like to talk about really important things like that over the phone,” Claiborne said. “But you could hear the excitement.”

The price for this sort of thing isn’t quite clear. Depending on the amount of work involved, your normal big-time golf architect earns about $400,000-$500,000 for a job. Jack Nicklaus reportedly gets about $1 million a project. For that kind of money, he’d better cure your shank, too.

The Soviets, though, according to those familiar with the agreement, won’t be footing the bill alone. The U.S. government and Hammer will chip in. Still, the Soviets will be forking over most of the rubles for an 18-hole layout that, if everything goes according to plan, will grant its first tee time in the fall of 1990.

And don’t mention this to anyone wearing an “I Love the KGB” button, but Jones said he probably would have done it free. That’s right, gratis. Not a red cent. Besplatnyi . That’s how badly he wanted the deal to go through.

“He’s a very political animal,” said Bob Murphy, chairman of the 1987 U.S. Open at San Francisco’s Olympic course. “He loves the intrigue, the jockeying. He had the patience to stay with it 15 years. Armand Hammer, George Schultz, the Summit. I think that he is fascinated by it.”

“It certainly didn’t have anything to do with money,” Jones said.

And Jones isn’t dumb. He knows a public relations bonanza when he sees one. You don’t think this Nahabino project adds a little more luster to the family name?

According to Jones’ father, Robert Trent Jones, the plan back in the 1970s was to pique the Soviets’ interest by creating golf specialists: the best putter, the longest driver. “They’d all want to be the longest driver in Russia,” said Jones Sr. from his Montclair (N.J.) home.

That was years ago. “Things are changing in Russia,” said the elder Jones. “They’ll be in golf in a big way.”

About a year ago, Jones Jr. was told that seven Soviet diplomats--two based in Washington and five from Moscow--wished to see an American golf course, preferably one under construction.

Jones contacted a pal, Bill Pollak, a former member of the Carter administration, who belonged to the Avenal TPC course in Potomac, Md. Pollak showed the Soviets Avenal’s new irrigation system. He took them to nearby Congressional Country Club--remodeled, by the way, by Jones Sr.--to see an old-time clubhouse. Then he took them to a putting green.

“I put a ball down and took a putter out,” Pollak said. “The interpreter asked, ‘Is that the club you use on greens?’ ”

Pollak said it was and handed the putter to one of the diplomats. About 18 feet away was the cup.

Using the wrong grip, putting with an awkward stroke, the diplomat tapped at the ball and then watched as it trickled across the green and fell into the hole. Remarked the interpreter: “It does not appear to be too difficult.”

Oh, yeah? Wait until you’ve got a 2-ruble Nassau riding on it.

And wait until Jones pulls out his sketch pad and starts drawing those undulating, contoured greens--a Jones family trademark.

The greens, Jones Sr. always said, are the spine of any golf course. Build them with character and strength and the course has a chance to become special. Make them ordinary and lifeless, and it becomes the Quad Cities Open, where everyone finishes 130 strokes under par.

Bobby and Rees listened. And learned. Jones Sr., now 82, calls Spanish Bay “a great piece of work.”

Meanwhile, Rees remodeled The Country Club at Brookline, Mass., home of the most recent U.S. Open. The brothers are doing so well that Rees’ 14-year-old daughter, Amy, heard something strange during the television broadcast of the Open.

“Dad, they’re not saying, ‘the son of Robert Trent Jones anymore,’ ” she said.

“They did it on their own,” said Jones Sr.

What do you know, the first family of golf course design finally has grown up. Didn’t take long, either, just a few decades or so while the three of them worked the kinks out of their egos. Now ask a touring pro, or a big-time greenskeeper, or a course designer to list his top five modern golf architects and it reads something like this:

The three Joneses, Pete Dye and Jack Nicklaus.

Not bad, three out of the first five--six, if you squeeze Tom Fazio’s name onto the list. Then again, this is quite a family, the Jones clan.

Jones Sr. always knew he wanted to become a golf architect. Jones Jr. thought he wanted to try politics or law, going so far as to attend Stanford Law School for a year.

Rees seemed to lean toward golf course design, but not with the same fervor as his father.

Somehow, they ended up under Jones Sr.’s office roof and began receiving their real education. They learned to look at the land, close their eyes and see a finished golf course. They learned the mysteries of a green and that fine line, as Rees says, between great and impossible. They learned about the politics of golf, the competition for jobs, the games people played inside a meeting room.

“I didn’t try to make them competitive in a nasty way, but I told them all life was a competition,” Jones Sr. said, “just do it in a nice way.”

The arrangement may have been hardest on Jones Jr., who was as feisty, persistent and driven as his father. “He demanded a lot of me,” Jones Jr. said.

In 1962, Jones made broke from his father. He opened a West Coast branch in Palo Alto. Later, he began his own business.

“Bobby and myself wanted to express our own ideas,” said Rees, whose own offices are just two blocks away from his father’s Montclair headquarters. “We weren’t able to because Dad was our mentor.”

Said Don Knott, a designer for Jones Jr. since 1973: “For years, early on, he was struggling to get out of the shadow of his dad. Now I think both of them are at the point where they’re accepted in the profession in equal standing with their dad. But when I first came to town, most people didn’t know there was more than one Jones. They’d come to our office and assume that there was just one guy. Later, they’d find out there was a father and a son.”

Jones Sr. and Jr. dismiss the rivalry as nothing more than bad press, well-placed rumors and harmless disagreements seen in any family. “An unfortunate story that was run several years ago,” said Jones Sr.

Jones Jr. is less diplomatic. “Dissent and discord mean a family is alive,” he said. “When your competitors want to use it for their own purposes, nothing could be more unifying.”

You commission Jones Jr. to do a course, you get the whole package: the personality, the competitiveness, the vanity, the commitment, the name and the knowledge that your course will fit the surroundings, not the other way around.

You get co-existence between father and son, mentor and student. Knott predicts that Jones Sr. will die in a plane headed to a golf project somewhere. In a strange sort of compliment, he says the same fate awaits Jones Jr. So similar are their paths.

And you get honesty. Lots of it. For instance, ask Jones about the competition and you get this:

“I think there are about five good architects: Fazio, my brother and father, Dye and Nicklaus, if he would just stop being such a jerk. He has such an ego.”

Say what? The Golden Bear? A jerk?

“I’ll give you a very brief description because I don’t want to get into a thing with him,” Jones said.

“His courses vary from straightforward to egocentric. I’ve known Jack since we were 15 years old. He is the consummate borrower of other people. He is a trial-and-error person. Ultimately, because he’s so persistent, he gets there. When he’s involved personally--he obviously has great golf sense--he can revise a course as he sees it after it’s half built to have good design.

“To him, unfortunately, it’s just another business. I don’t blame him for that. But I think Nicklaus is dedicated to the game. I don’t have any doubt he’s interested in what he does.”

On Pete Dye, creator of PGA West and the modern railroad tie look: “PGA West, the gulag golf course of penal colonies. I’m just teasing. I actually respect Pete Dye. He has what I call golf sense. He still does. It’s like card sense. When you have a winning hand, you know how to play it.”

Nicklaus, in Vail, Colo., wasn’t available for comment, and Dye was out of the country.

Jones isn’t as gracious when it comes to part-time architects from the pro tour. He tells the story, a true one he insists, of the ultra-famous golfer who plugs lots of products, including golf courses. Came opening day of the course he supposedly designed himself, the pro stepped off the first green, turned to his playing partner, another pro, and whispered, “Where’s the second tee?”

Don’t get the wrong idea: Jones doesn’t draw every line, sketch in every green that bears his office’s name. He has four designers who do much of that work. But Jones usually adds his touches and personality during the construction phase of a project.

Even during his match with Rohr at Spanish Bay, Jones was fussing, talking about moving this tee box here, changing that green there, watering this, altering that. He never stopped.

“He’s very defensive of his designs, very protective,” said Jim Bertoni, golf course superintendent at Coto de Caza. “He’s receptive (to change) as long as you give him an explanation and it clicks in his mind as the thing to do.”

In Jones’ back yard are two sprawling, majestic oak trees. Jones calls the larger, a 300-year-old tree, Robert Trent Jones Sr. The 250-year-old tree is named Robert Trent Jones Jr.

“And they’re both thriving,” Claiborne said.

The trees and the Joneses.