The Pleasure Of His Company

LEARNING THE CRAFT

Even though he grew up as the younger son of legendary golf architect Robert Trent Jones, Rees likes to say his career is a rags-to-riches story. That's nonsense, of course. He started at least on second base, but his point is that he didn't care much for golf or architecture at first. Older brother Bobby (Robert Trent Jones Jr.) was the golfer in the family, competed in junior events, played collegiate golf at Yale. Rees was more into other sports, though he has improved his game in recent years, enough to win some local tournaments with a Handicap Index approaching 7.

When Rees attended Yale, he was the student manager of the golf team but was called on as a player during a tournament at Duke University Golf Club, which happened to be one of his father's designs. Rees shot qualifying rounds of 93-92, and a headline read, "Dad's Layout Baffles Son." Rees got payback decades later, when he redesigned the course (for free, because Amy was a student there). "I remembered all the places that gave me trouble and took them out," he jokes.

Photo: Peter Gregoire

Academically, Rees was the kind of college student who took copious notes and aced finals by parroting the professor's lectures. With that sort of bathtub mind, he would have made a great lawyer. Until his junior year, he wasn't sure that he would follow his dad into the business. "But then I figured it would be foolish not to," he says.

He graduated from Yale in 1963 and did postgraduate study at the Harvard School of Design. "I have the best of both worlds: a Harvard education and a Yale degree," he says. After six months in the Army -- he also spent 5½ years in the Army Reserve to complete his service obligation -- he joined his dad's company, and as vice president soon was running the day-to-day operations when he wasn't out on some golf-course site.

He produced Trent Jones architecture but didn't entirely embrace it. Instead he admired the variety exhibited by A.W. Tillinghast at Baltusrol, Winged Foot, Ridgewood and Quaker Ridge. "Tillinghast built character into his holes, subtleties, shot options, was very innovative in his bunker building," Rees says. "He'd mix it up, didn't have a consistent style. Each course was an evolution of ideas."

Still, some Trent Jones did rub off. When Rees was 12, he had been put to work by his dad during the 1954 U.S. Open at Baltusrol. "I measured drives so my father would know where to put the bunkers in relation to the pros of the day," Rees says. "[On subsequent designs] he put in a short bunker for Jerry Barber and a long bunker for Sam Snead, and I learned from that."

To this day, Rees places fairway bunkers to catch Corey Pavin and Tiger Woods, but rather than using endless rows of bunkers, as his father did, he'll build one long, serpentine bunker, usually parallel to the line of play. Where his dad would pinch fairways to force long hitters to be accurate, until the last few years Rees accepted the argument that long hitters deserved wider margins for errors. But the equipment revolution changed his thinking, and the most recent addition to Torrey Pines is a bunker that tightens the fourth fairway.

He has also incorporated his dad's approach to green contours. "Dad taught me that contours can be as big a factor as bunkers in protecting pin positions. I like how he built small targets within big targets, separating them with transition slopes. The key today is green speeds. You can have fast greens if you have workable slopes."

His mother, Ione, a magna cum laude graduate of Wells College, was the philosophical parent. Initially she didn't want Rees to be an architect, fearing he would end up like his dad, consumed by the job. Rees pledged to be well-rounded, and today he enjoys discussing politics, films, college sports, fine dining -- topics of little interest to his father.

Ione's influence on Rees is evident in the dozens of handwritten notes he mails to acquaintances each month. "Short notes make long friends," she told him. But he doesn't care for e-mail, finding it too impersonal.

An even more essential lesson from his mother: "Life is people." He has cultivated a lot of lifetime friendships, some that eventually benefited him professionally. He has known Bernadette Castro since they were youngsters (their parents were good friends). When Castro was commissioner of New York's state parks, Rees donated his services in upgrading Bethpage State Park's Black Course to make it Open-worthy. She returned the favor by hiring him to remodel her family's golf course, Golden Hills in Ocala, Fla. Also in Florida, Rees is completing Bonnet Creek next to Disney World for his Yale classmate Bill McArthur.