'A Difficult Par' by James R. Hansen

By: Jeff Shelley


For better or worse, modern golf-course architecture owes more to Robert Trent Jones Sr. than perhaps any other person. Over a remarkable 70-year career dating from 1930 to 2000, Jones designed or redesigned more than 400 courses across the U.S. and in 28 countries.

"A Difficult Par" is an expansive study of the life and work of Jones - the so-called "Open Doctor" for his work in beefing up U.S. Open venues, and it is authoritative and meticulously researched. That should be expected from the author James R. Hansen, a history professor at Auburn University who also wrote a best-selling biography on astronaut Neil Armstrong.

This is not a glossy coffee-table book; it's 500 pages long and contains a mind-boggling amount of text, as in textbook. There are a few black-and-white photos, including those in an eight-page center section. Though a bit overwhelming for casual golf readers, for golf course architecture aficionados it is a revelatory - and perhaps ultimately - exhausting dissertation.

Instead of focusing on Jones' design philosophies - the title comes from his mantra that golf should be "hard par, easy bogey" - the book unveils the central figure's personal life, one that is chronicled in historical records at Cornell University's archives, and the lives of his sons, first-born Robert Trent Jones, Jr. and the younger Rees Jones, both successful golf architects in their own rights who began work with their father but who famously clashed and went their separate ways, which Hansen dutifully reports.

Perhaps key to the story is the elder Jones' legacy - despite his idiosyncratic and self-promoting business methods - in establishing golf course architecture as a viable vocation, spawning the subsequent successful careers of designers like Pete Dye, Tom Doak, his sons and many others.

Among Jones' innovations are some aspects of modern golf-course design that are common today: long tee boxes that allow a second (or third, fourth, fifth and sixth) set of tees; contoured greens offering multiple possible pin placements; tree-pinched fairways; significant elevation changes; and bunkers and fairways positioned and shaped to challenge better golfers but which leave lesser-skilled players relatively unaffected.

His designs also incorporated the occasional "heroic" hole into his strategic - though many would term them penal - layouts. The heroic hole, which one can argue was pioneered by Jones, presents golfers with the choice of trying to hit a long, perfect shot or bailing out to a safer position away from trouble but further from the green.

Robert Trent Jones - who early in his career changed his name to differentiate himself from the more famous golfer Robert Tyre "Bobby" Jones Jr. - was an interesting, self-made man who forged a lengthy career despite some bad business decisions that nearly bankrupted him and a reliance on design associates to do the bulk of the grunt work as he sought to expand his ever-growing portfolio of golf courses.

"A Difficult Par," by James Hansen, 2014, Gotham Books, 500 pages, $32.50, ISBN 978-1592-40823-8