Jones was born in Montclair, N.J., in 1939, just before the U.S. entered World War II. As Jones tells the story, his father used a baby rattle to teach young Bobby how to grip a golf club, carefully positioning the newborn’s fingers around the handle of the small wooden toy.
With his career on the rise, the elder Jones traveled for much of the time, crafting golf courses in one part of the world or another, and leaving Bobby and his brother, Rees, to be raised largely by their mother, Ione. She was the practical one, who instilled both boys with a lifelong love of learning and an appreciation for hard work, traits that would pay off when both ultimately were accepted to Yale University. Their father, though, was the shooting star, the one with the audacity to dream of things that didn’t yet exist, and the genius to make them a reality.
As the boys grew older, it became clear that Bobby, in particular, shared both his father’s ambition and artistic eye. When the elder Jones was home, he’d take the boys out to the golf courses he was working on and let them work an excavator or help shape a bunker. They played together every chance they had — Bobby became a state champion at Montclair High and played competitively at Yale, representing the United States in an international junior championship.
Golf, at the time, though, was hardly a high-profit endeavor. Rather than pursue a professional career, Jones traveled across the country to Stanford University to study law and pursue a career in public service. About the same time, his father began working on Spyglass Hill Golf Course at Pebble Beach, and offered his eldest son the chance to apprentice his design. Dissatisfied with law school, but in love with the West Coast — “The East is where good fences make good neighbors,” he says, “while the West is where land wars are fought over any fences at all; being open is fundamental” — Jones jumped at the opportunity to stay and work in his new home. A second apprenticeship, at Mauna Kea, soon followed, and before long, Jones had convinced his father to open a West Coast office — with Bobby in charge, of course.
“The game, at a high level, was spreading West,” Jones recalls, “and my job was to go and find work.”
Find work he did — to the point that, in 1972, Jones decided to break out on his own and start his own company, RTJ II Golf Course Architects, headquartered in Palo Alto. Free-thinking, liberal California was a perfect fit for Jones, and its influence soon began to show up in the golf courses that, for the first time, bore his name and his name only.
Where the elder Jones was notorious for making longer, tougher courses — after winning the 1951 U.S. Open at RTJ’s recently remodeled Oakland Hills Country Club, Ben Hogan famously quipped, “I brought this monster to its knees,” immediately making a star out of the man who had crafted it — the younger Jones quickly built a reputation for designing holes whose challenge lay not in length or excessive hazards or bunkering, but in choosing the angle of attack that best suits the conditions, pin placement and skill level of the golfer, then executing that plan.
Likewise, where younger brother Rees accepted commissions from numerous country clubs up and down the East Coast, crafting the land into whatever shape he desired, Bobby sought out opportunities to design public courses, and allowed the land to speak for itself, adapting his style accordingly.
“The very best courses are those where nature has provided the canvas; my job is to discover her secrets and reveal them,” he says. “I try to design golf courses that will fascinate people so they’ll want to play them many times and learn the depths and meanings of the courses’ stories, their subtext, their poetry.”
Of his style, Jones says that it’s “complex, eclectic, and wide ranging — like a jazz musician — like Waller or Gillespie. It’s got hints of Tillinghast, McKenzie, and Ross, but it’s still my own.”
Where does it all come from? I asked myself of Jones’ unique personality on that day at The Dolphin. The answer, of course, is from everything — from his father’s idealistic self-confidence and his mother’s strong pragmatism; from an East Coast childhood and a West Coast adulthood; from an upbringing that taught the value of a formal education, yet also demonstrated the significant rewards to be gained from life experience, from launching one’s self head-first into the unknown, with nothing but the vision to dream and the tenacity — at times, stubbornness — to achieve it.
Jones’ 270 courses span 40 countries over six continents — and if you don’t think that he won’t be the first to bid when the RFP goes out for a course on Antarctica, then you vastly underestimate his ambition. Many are ranked among the very best those countries have to offer, some among the very best in the entire world.
As he sips his mai tai on this warm Kauai afternoon, however, only one course is on his mind, one that he matter-of-factly calls one of his few “master works” — and one that, in just a matter of weeks, will be squarely on the mind of the entire golf world.