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On the evening of Jan. 13, 1986,
Robert Trent Jones Jr. yanked a golf cap over his eyes, strolled
off a plane at Manila International Airport, and gambled that
Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos was just too busy trying to
suppress a revolution to remember that he had marked him for
assassination.
``I was expecting all hell to break loose,'' recalls the
chairman of Robert Trent Jones II Golf Course Design LLC, a family
owned architectural firm that since 1931 has built or refurbished
570 of the 30,870 golf courses around the world.
``I'd built six courses in the Philippines, and Marcos
cheated on every one of them to keep a phony 7 handicap,'' Jones
says. ``He used barefoot caddies, who curled their toes around his
bad lies and moved the ball into the fairway.''
Why Marcos wanted the marquee architect of the $24 billion-a-
year golf industry dead had nothing to do with his refusal to
design a course that could accommodate the military dictator's
woeful slice.
Since 1975, Marcos knew that Jones was serving as the global
point man to raise money and political support for the island
nation's pro-democracy People Power movement led by Benigno Aquino
and dozens of Jones's Filipino golf partners.
A frequent witness before U.S. congressional committees
investigating Marcos's human-rights abuses, Jones had privately
lobbied for regime change in the Philippines while playing golf
with Georgia Senator Sam Nunn, U.S. Secretary of State George
Shultz and other senior officials in both the Reagan and Carter
administrations.
Jones the Courier
What Marcos didn't know was that Jones had been shuttling
messages between Reagan administration officials and People Power
leaders while playing golf with both groups in the U.S. and the
Philippines.
``Bob is a really good golfer and very competitive in
everything,'' Shultz says. ``I wasn't in the Philippines. Bob was,
and he was an influential voice. He was a good and trusted back
channel, and he kept me well informed.''
Adds Jones, ``I didn't need a cover story. I really was in
the Philippines building golf courses.''
Two weeks before Marcos's Aviation Security Command on Aug.
21, 1983, assassinated Benigno Aquino as he stepped off a plane in
Manila, Jenetta Sagan from Amnesty International phoned Jones in
Hawaii with instructions to warn his friend of the plot that
awaited him upon return from a three-year exile in the U.S.
``I told Benigno and his silence was overpowering,'' Jones
recalls. ``He knew, and there was nothing I could do to prevent
him from going home.''
A Warning
On Aug. 23, two of Marcos's henchmen in San Francisco blocked
Jones from entering the Commonwealth Club for lunch.
``They told me not to go back to Manila, ever, or I would
`follow my friend's fate,''' Jones says.
And then Jones went back to the country, with instructions
from Shultz to assure widowed People Power leader Corazon Aquino
that the U.S. would recognize her new government if the uprising
proved successful.
``I'm here to build a golf course and play a few rounds with
my partners,'' Jones told the Aviation Security Command agents
before climbing into the car Aquino had sent for him.
Jones shut the door. People Power organizer Jose ``Peping''
Cojuangco Jr. handed him an AK-47 assault rifle.
``Marcos will torture all of us for the information you're
carrying,'' Cojuangco said. ``We must not be taken alive.''
Reaching for one of the clubs piled on the backseat floor
atop golf balls and ammunition clips, Jones selected a 3-iron and
tapped Cojuangco on the shoulder.
`Where It Lies'
``Bobby looks me in the eye and calmly says, `Peping, you got
a 7-iron back here? I'd be much better with a 7-iron,''' the 70-
year-old Cojuangco recalls over lunch with his sister, former
Philippine President Corazon Aquino.
``Bobby put his life at risk for us more than once, even
though I never played golf,'' Aquino says as the laughter turns
solemn. ``There's no doubt you used the game of golf to influence
U.S. politicians to support me instead of Marcos,'' the 71-year-
old Aquino tells Jones. ``You helped me become president.''
Jones sips lemonade and brushes the praise aside. ``It was
the honorable thing to do,'' he says. ``Golf is an honorable game.
You play the ball where it lies.''
Politics and Poetry
Robert Trent Jones Jr. is 65 years old and has no physical or
mental fear. Detail fascinates him, particularly when sculpting
raw land into environmentally friendly golf courses or indulging
in his other passions: politics and poetry.
His constitution is extraordinary; he sleeps only a few hours
a night, catching ``combat naps'' as he commutes between each of
the no more than 10 bespoke golf courses he builds annually.
His client list is global in scope and currently includes Kim
Jun Ky, chairman of the South Korean industrial conglomerate
Dongbu Group; Jackson Ling, chairman and chief executive officer
of Enhance Holding Co., the world's largest maker of neon signs;
and John Tyson, chairman and CEO of Tyson Foods Inc., the world's
largest meat-packer.
And the cost of a signature RTJII course runs from $950,000
to $1.2 million. The price doesn't include construction.
``Anything more than 10 is production architecture by a
computer and a committee,'' Jones says. ``I don't do that. When my
name is on a course, you can be damn sure it was designed in my
head and that I built it with my own hands.''
Jones learned the craft from his father, a second-generation
Welshman who began his career as a teenage caddy for Eastman Kodak
Co. founder George Eastman at the Rochester Country Club in New
York. ``Dad left the caddy shack and started to play, then he
learned how to design,'' Jones says. ``Eastman taught him how to
run a business.''
`Tank' Traps
Trained from birth by his father to continue the family
legacy of building ``masterpiece'' golf courses (``Dad threw a
rattle in my crib and showed me how to grip a club,'' he says),
Jones has spent his entire life turning everything from the
scrubby semi-deserts of the Middle East to the swamplands of
Thailand into championship golf courses.
He spent 20 years bulldozing through the Soviet bureaucracy,
finally convincing President Mikhail Gorbachev that the bunkers he
intended to build at the Moscow Country Club in Nakhabino --
Russia's first and so far only 18-hole golf course -- were not
Pentagon-inspired tank traps to slow down Russian armor during any
armed confrontation with the West.
``I invited a group of Soviet Central
Committee members to the Bohemian Club in San Francisco,'' Jones
says. ``They were the first communists ever to visit the club. We
sang songs and read poetry in the dining room.''
Carter and Deng
In 1979, the White House called Jones away from a course
construction site on the Japanese island of Hokkaido to fly to
Seattle for a meeting with President Jimmy Carter and Chinese
leader Deng Xiao Ping to discuss what ultimately became the 7,025-
yard, par-72 Shanghai International Country Club.
``Carter and Deng didn't play golf, but they both understood
that golf was a great way to attract investment,'' Jones says.
``We finally made it to Shanghai in November 1983,'' says
Blakeney Stafford, Jones's attorney. Accompanying the duo was
President George H.W. Bush's brother, Prescott Bush Jr., who
arranged for a group of Japanese investors to underwrite the
course.
``Shanghai was a dust bowl and we were absolutely the only
foreigners in the city,'' the 62-year-old Stafford recalls. ``We
went to the zoo with thousands of Chinese to see the pandas, and
we were the most exotic animals in the place.''
Three months after the Chinese government's crackdown on
protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989, Jones, Stafford and Bush
returned to Shanghai and built the course.
Two Gloves
``There's always a lot of deal fatigue and lost time building
a course in a politically sensitive country,'' Stafford says of
the 10-year project in Shanghai. ``We charged the Russians
$387,000 for Nakhabino and lost a bundle, but Bob views these
courses as political labors of love and doesn't care how long they
take.''
``Bobby is a living brand in China and the man who single-
handedly brought golf to Asia,'' explains Robert Theleen, a former
U.S. Central Intelligence Agency officer and now chairman of
investment capital firm ChinaVest Inc. in Shanghai.
``The greatest gift an American doing business in China can
give to any government official is two golf gloves, and Bobby is
responsible for that tradition. The politicians don't want anyone
to know they play golf,'' Theleen explains. ``They all use two
gloves so both hands won't be tanned by the sun.''
Ling's Course
Today, Theleen says China boasts 200 golf courses, with 100
more being built -- so many courses that the government has
slapped a three-year moratorium on all new construction.
``I'm going to have Bob build me a course alongside the Great
Wall, anyway,'' says Enhance Holding CEO Jackson Ling. ``The
economy is like water and it can't be stopped. Golf is essential
to doing business in China.''
Ling has invested $85 million in the RTJII course now under
way at the Anting Enhance Golf Club in International Automotive
City, northwest of Shanghai.
The 7,200-yard, par-72 course is the centerpiece of a 120-
square-kilometer (46-square-mile) industrial patch that Allen
Matis, chairman and CEO of investment bank Oriental Development
Ltd., describes as the ``boomtown home for the Chinese automotive
sector and 20,000 foreign manufacturing firms.''
Indeed, Ling is so enthralled with having Jones as his
personal golf-course architect that he has lined the road between
Shanghai and International Automotive City with billboards
festooned with a picture of Jones and the RTJII logo.
Bush's Note
Smoking a Cohiba and piloting his Mercedes S600 like a tank
over the unfinished bunkers along the monster 620-yard 18th hole,
the 52-year-old neon-sign mogul says he doesn't care how much
money it costs for an RTJII championship course.
``Shanghai is flat, so I need to spend money on lots of
bunkers,'' Ling explains, stepping on the accelerator.
``I threw up my hands, told Bob I wanted the best and that
price wasn't an issue,'' Ling says as the car blasts over the
fortification and slaps down on the fairway. ``Business over golf
is a way of life in China and a lot of people cheat. I find out
who cheats on the golf course.''
In Washington, Jones's willingness to play risky shots while
partnered with the likes of Gorbachev, Jack Nicklaus, Deng and
Tiger Woods spurred President George W. Bush to give his golf
companion the nickname ``Renaissance Man.''
``I am practicing but don't seem to be making much progress -
- how about a lesson?'' reads the handwritten note Bush sent Jones
on April 18, 2001, and is now taped above the coffee machine at
RTJII headquarters in Palo Alto, California.
Golf and Diplomacy
``Reagan didn't like to play golf,'' says Jones, who built
the putting green on the south lawn of the White House. ``Ford was
a keen golfer. Nixon hacked around,'' Jones says. ``I've hit balls
with all of them, and all of them recognized the importance of
golf as a diplomatic tool.''
Jones, a card-carrying Democrat, says his global view was
forged on fairways that weren't necessarily built with American
soil.
``My family for over 70 years has been into globalization and
using golf for regime change,'' Jones says. ``Golf is an honorable
game that must be played by honorable men and women,'' is his
guiding principle, and friends say Jones can turn furious with any
politician or businessman who mocks this deeply entrenched
conviction.
``Bobby is one of our most important operatives,'' quips
House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California during a
late afternoon lunch at a restaurant on San Francisco Bay on the
eve of the 2004 U.S. presidential election. ``He builds golf
courses for Republicans.''
Hitting with Jones
Jones doesn't smile at Pelosi's description of his status in
the Democratic Party.
``Look at it this way,'' he tells the congresswoman. ``Both
Bush and his father like to play a fast round. Clinton likes his
mulligans.''
As for status, it's hard to beat your own golf course. Tyson
calls the one Jones built for him ``an OK goat yard.''
Standing on the practice tee of his 7,506-yard, par-72
Blessings golf club near his corporate headquarters in Springdale,
Arkansas, Tyson says hitting a golf ball is a ``secondary
function'' in any outing with Jones. ``Bob gives you a walking
lecture on golf design and global politics, and you learn how his
mind works,'' Tyson explains.
He says Jones has a willingness to take risks and believes
any challenge can be overcome by the disciplined application of
the rules of golf.
Outperforming the Competition
Tyson says that Jones, like the game of golf, has a knack for
humbling people quickly.
``Golf is the definition of diplomacy,'' Tyson explains.
``The parties are together on the same ground, going in different
directions to reach a common goal. After 18 holes, all the parties
are exposed and all the baggage disappears.''
The American Society of Golf Course Architects counts 166
members on its rolls, and 30 of them have worked for the Jones
family.
Although golf legends such as Nicklaus and Gary Player charge
from $400,000 to $2.2 million to build 18 holes, a 2003 analysis
by the Golf Research Group in Dallas showed that Jones's courses
outperform the competition in generating green fees, membership
sales and the attendant value of real estate connected to the
course.
``It is noticeable that the value of the memberships at the
courses designed by RTJII have endured better than at courses by
other designers'' such as Nicklaus, Player, Arnold Palmer and Tom
Weiskopf, the report said. ``RTJII memberships are roughly double
their launch price today, while memberships at other courses are
roughly half their launch prices.''
`Jones Is the Man'
In the golf industry's fastest growth area of Southeast Asia,
for instance, the report said Jones's 80 courses there annually
generate about $56 million in green fees as well as membership
sales and dues. Nicklaus finished third with $37.5 million; Player
bottomed the field with $18.4 million.
``Jones is the man,'' explains Peter Walton, CEO of the
International Association of Golf Tour Operators, a 900-member
industry group that caters to the desires of the world's 50
million golfers. ``His name is magic. When Jones creates a
signature course, customers literally come running with their
clubs and wallets,'' Walton says.
Pouring wine in the Dongbu Group corporate dining room in
Seoul, 60-year-old Chairman Kim Jun Ky says the epiphany came to
him in 2002, after putting out on the 18th green of the Four
Seasons Resort golf course on the Caribbean island of Nevis.
Find Jones
``I went right to the clubhouse, called my office and told
them to immediately find Robert Trent Jones Jr.,'' Kim says. ``I'd
discussed Mr. Jones building a course for me in 1987 and 1990, but
decided on a Japanese architect. Then I played his course on
Nevis. I finally realized it is easy for someone who has played
golf for 30 years to score par on other courses, but not so easy
on one built by Mr. Jones.''
Kim walks to the giant floor-to-ceiling windows that encircle
his penthouse, raises his glass and offers a toast to his guest.
``Mr. Jones, you are an honorable man,'' Kim says through his
interpreter.
Jones thanks his host for the compliment, but warns the
tribute might be fleeting. The architect says the mountain he's
about to spend a year sculpting into a 7,200-yard, par-72 golf
course, with 55 lakes and waterfalls, is severe, and that Kim will
have to ``think and play well'' to survive the championship
challenge.
Near the DMZ
``I must explore the prevailing winds and how the light falls
on the land to create tight tee shots and tight fairways,'' Jones
tells his new client. ``But I must also apply Korean culture to
the course, and to accomplish that I still have much to learn.''
Kim grows excited, and interrupts his interpreter.
``As of now,'' Kim announces to the senior Dongbu executives
gathered for the celebratory dinner, ``the course will be named
The Robert Trent Jones Jr. Golf Course.''
The following morning, Jones is juggling a pair of golf shoes
and a plate of toast in the back seat of a truck sliding down a
hill near the summit of Mount Soori, site of the bespoke 7,400-
yard, par-72 course he's now completing for Hyundai Cement Co. and
in mortar range of the demilitarized zone that separates North and
South Korea. On the other side of the mountain is Jones's Oak
Valley Golf Course.
``That's the one where I had to incorporate poles on either
side of the fairways so the army can stretch out cables to prevent
North Korean troop gliders from landing at night,'' Jones says.
``Whoa, stop the truck,'' he barks.
Picasso and Golf Courses
Yang Kim, managing director of the Hyundai Sungwoo Resort,
nestles the vehicle alongside a boulder. ``These are diamonds,''
Jones says, climbing out of the truck and scooping up a handful.
``Silica sand, baby, made by volcanoes, easy to shape and the best
soil you can have for a golf course.''
Jones fills both palms with dirt. ``The only difference
between investing in a Picasso and a great golf course is you
can't move the golf course,'' he adds. ``Michelangelo preferred
Carrara marble, I'm the silica sandman.''
Still, Jones says geology confronts him with an often
insoluble dilemma not faced by other artists. All golf courses
start with the practical consideration that their design is
limited by what the Earth has to offer and, more important for
Jones, who the client acquired the land from.
``It's frequently a life-or-death situation that has nothing
to do with green drainage,'' Jones says. ``The golf industry is so
big with money, power and superstars that everyone forgets we play
an agricultural peasant game. Before I work on land, I want to
know where it came from. You can't just go around filling in
somebody's rice paddies.''
Golf Balls and Mushrooms
Indeed, a 1997 Smithsonian magazine review of the ecological
hazards attached to golf-course construction described Jones's
method of design as ``a case study of how a golf course can have a
surprisingly low impact on even a sensitive environmental area.''
Shortly after the 1994 opening of the Moscow Country Club,
for instance, Jones discovered that villagers were shagging tee
shots and trying to sell the balls back to the players. In
response, club officials blocked off much of the course, built on
land that for centuries had been the region's richest ground for
mushroom picking.
``The villagers didn't know about golf and I didn't know
about the mushrooms,'' says Jones, who helped broker a compromise
that left the balls in play and the mushrooms available for the
skillet.
``Where fairways come from is a serious political issue,''
explains Alan Timblick, senior vice president of InvestKorea, a
South Korean government agency with a mandate to attract foreign
investment to the country.
Paddies to Greens
``Much of the world perceives golf as a rich man's sport, and
right now the government here is about to stop subsidizing
thousands of peasant rice farmers and plans to move that
agricultural land into the golf leisure industry.''
The 61-year-old British banker, the highest-ranking foreigner
in the South Korean government, says the shift from paddies to
putting greens is essential to stop South Korean golfers from
leaving the country with $571 million each year to play on Japan's
2,400 courses or along the 82 courses in the Philippines.
``We don't have enough golf courses,'' Timblick rues. ``You
can't have a business hub without golf. Golf is necessary to
remain competitive in attracting direct foreign investment.''
At the same time, Timblick says South Korea's 4 million
golfers, who currently vie for tee times on 195 local courses,
must employ camouflage to describe their sport.
`Field Research'
``In South Korea, golf must be referred to as exercise or
field research,'' Timblick explains. ``It's too ostentatious and
politically incorrect to say you're playing golf.''
Jones says politically motivated disaffection with the golf
industry, once begun, acquires a momentum all its own.
``I've spent over 20 years putting the Reds on the greens in
Russia and China,'' Jones says. ``The only argument that works is
to explain that golf is not slash-and-burn capitalist agriculture
and that the entire community must share in the economics of the
sport. That's what I told Deng and that's why the Chinese
government gave us one dilapidated bulldozer and 3,000 stoop-
laborers to build the Shanghai Country Club golf course.''
Asian operations director Michael Kahler harbors no doubt
that Jones's poetry also helps seal politically sensitive deals.
``Never seen anything like it,'' Kahler says. ``You're
sitting around a conference table, discussing a multimillion
contract with clients and government officials, and Bob pulls out
his poems and starts reading them. He gets applause.''
`Greens'
During his meeting with the chairman of Dongbu Group, for
instance, Jones explained the mission of RTJII with two lines from
his poem ``Greens'':
Creating great greenscapes now,
Green lungs against the urban plow.
In Beijing, during a meeting with Hu Jian Guo, vice chairman
of the China Golf Association, Jones read verses from ``Sixty on
the Seventh of September,'' a poem dedicated to Russian Deputy
Foreign Minister Ivan Sergeev, the director of the Soviet state
company that helped him battle the communist hardliners to build
Nakhabino:
Celebrate the essence of Nature
Not the victory of temporary games.
It's wintry and after midnight on the Old Course at the Royal
& Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews where locals on May 14, 1775,
reckoned all courses should be 18 holes long because there are 18
``jiggers'' of whisky in a bottle of Scotch.
`The Ultimate'
It was along this 6,609-yard, par-72 pasture that shepherds
600 years ago boiled gull feathers and stuffed the downy porridge
inside a spherical leather sack to first play golf with jerry-
rigged farm implements. As Woods said after charging to victory
here at the 2000 Open, ``to win at St. Andrews is the ultimate.''
Peter Dawson, secretary of the game's rulemaking body, says
Jones's courses tap the spiritual energy of the game as it was
first played on the Old Course in the Scottish seaside town.
``Bob is very high on the list of great golf-course
designers,'' the 56-year-old British engineer says on the balcony
of his office at the R&A. ``The Old Course is the game's sacred
yardstick, but not all golf-course architects look at these 18
holes as such. Bob does,'' Dawson says.
Walking the Old Course blindly alongside Jones is not an
experience easily forgotten. He is swept up by the occasion and,
for him, it is a ritual now in its 40th year. His body is immune
to the cold, his voice firmly solemn with every word.
`Spiritual Place'
``This is a spiritual place,'' Jones says as a bitter North
Sea wind slaps against the invisible flagsticks.
``To build a great golf course or play a great game of golf,
you need to feel the land,'' Jones adds, running his fingers
across the consecrated turf.
Even at 52 pounds ($97) a round, the Old Course is an elite
tabernacle. Only 44,000 visiting golfers by lottery each year win
starting times on the Old Course and the links are closed on
Sunday.
``Demand outstrips supply by a margin we can't even
calculate,'' Old Course Superintendent Gordon Moir says, pointing
to a street of multimillion-dollar row houses strategically
clustered alongside the 18th green. Much of the real estate is
foreign-owned, giving titleholders residency status and the right
to take advantage of the 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. starting time reserved
for locals.
``A holy place?'' Moir asks. ``For a golfer, this is God's
proving ground.''
Jones's golf partner, William Swing, the Episcopalian bishop
of San Francisco, reckons there's no blasphemy in viewing the game
as the Lord's work.
Complicated Game
``Ninety percent of the events that happen in the Bible take
place outdoors,'' the 68-year-old prelate reasons. ``Golf gets you
back in the direction from which we came. The game is complicated
and you must be accountable. There's redemption, and a great deal
of grace,'' Swing says. ``You can hit a horrible shot and still
have a great result. That is life.''
Sitting in his owner's suite at the Old Course Hotel in St.
Andrews, Herbert Kohler, chairman and president of the global
plumbing and engine supply giant Kohler Co., puts down his drink
and scratches his white beard.
``Is Jones really a good golf architect?'' asks the
proprietor of the 2004 PGA Championship course Whistling Straits
near Kohler, Wisconsin, and the 35 million-pound Dukes Course in
St. Andrews.
The 65-year-old Kohler points toward the early-evening snow
flurries outside. It's dark and cold and a foursome is playing the
18th hole.
`Good God Amazing'
``That's the Road Hole, the most famous hole in golf, and it
was built by grazing sheep,'' Kohler explains. ``For a course to
be called great, every hole must try to be as memorable as that
one. The Old Course is a fluke of nature and remains the
touchstone for greatness in all modern golf-course architecture.''
``Toilets or golf courses, you must make the best,'' he says.
``Jones built one of the great golf courses in the universe, The
Prince, in Hawaii. There are 15,000 golf courses in the U.S. and
The Prince is one of the very few where every hole meets my
definition of great,'' he adds. ``That doesn't make Jones a good
architect, it makes him good God amazing.''
The day was hot and showery, with a tricky pitch shot to the
green on the 212-yard, 17th hole at St. Elena. Majestic trees
surrounded Jones with a canopy of branches ready to wreak havoc on
any chance of a par 3. A short backswing, a clean follow-through
in the rough, and the ball plops down on the Philippine green
looking at a bogey.
``I made this hole too darn hard,'' says Jones, putting out
on the 7,170-yard-long course he carved through the jungle in
1994. ``Right, I know what's coming,'' Jones says, tugging the
ever-present golf cap over his brown eyes. ``Everyone's going to
ask what's my favorite place to play golf. The answer remains the
same: the next hole.''
--Editors: Ahearn, Henry.
To contact the reporter on this story:
A. Craig Copetas in Paris at (33) (1) 4910-9920 or
ccopetas@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Bill Ahearn at (1) (212) 893-4197 or
bahearn@bloomberg.net
Story reproduced with permission of A. Craig Copetas
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