What About Bobby?

IT'S FASHIONABLE IN COURSE ARCHITECTURE CIRCLES TO ELEVATE A FEW GOLDEN BOYS OR TO WAX NOSTALGIC ABOUT GOLDEN-AGE ICONS. ROBERT TRENT JONES JR. IS COOL WITH THAT-AS LONG AS IT DOESN'T MEAN DIMINISHING HIS BODY OF WORK OR DIMMING HIS FAMILY LEGACY.

- JOSH SENS

The junior and senior Joneses in the mid-1960s, collaborating on world-class Spyglass, where Bobby got a formative education in course design.

In its Cliffs Notes version, the story of American golf course architecture goes something like this: The field enjoyed a glorious run in its Golden Age of the early 1900s, only to lose its way after World War II, with excessively penal and overwrought designs, before finding itself once more in recent decades, when it learned to tread lightly on the land again.

If you've bought that script, Robert Trent Jones Jr. might like to have a word.

"It isn't just an oversimplification,' Jones says. "It's also factually incorrect."

It's an autumn afternoon at CordeValle, a rolling course he designed in the southern foothills of the Silicon Valley, and Jones is shuffling through the rough "" of a long par 4. At 83, wearing gray slacks and a mustard-colored sport coat, bushy eyebrows framing his cherubic face, he calls to mind a Hogwarts headmaster dressed for an Ivy League faculty lunch. In lieu of a golf club, he is carrying a cane, which he uses to point out features in the landscape.

"Look at the lacy filigree of that oak," he says gesturing toward a tree with ancient tangled roots. "And see how the contouring behind the green mirrors the outline of the hills? I'm following Mother Nature's lead, and I learned to do that from the best."

When you're hanging out with Jones, it helps to have a pocket Webster's within reach (filigree: an ornamental work of fine wire formed into delicate tracery). Passing knowledge of Renaissance painting, iambic pentameter and environmental policy come in handy too. Jones is fond of holding forth on all of the above.

The architect, extra sporty, in October ¹22 at Northern California's CordeValle, one of his lush home bases.