from thedesertsun.com
By Larry Bohannan
7/23/2004
Rees Jones understands the greatest fame he receives as one of golf's premier golf course architects doesn't come from the golf courses he designs from scratch, like his first Coachella Valley design for Andalusia at Coral Mountain.
Instead, it's the courses Jones tweaks, revamps or renovates that have earned him the nickname of the Open Doctor.
"I get that recognition because every year or every other year, the media comes to me as an information source," Jones said. "Many of my re-dos have hosted major championships. Right now I'm on the docket from 2005 to 2011, I'll have redone every one of the PGA Championship venues except one."
Jones, whose renovation work has included famed courses such as Torrey Pines South Course in La Jolla, East Lake Golf Course in Atlanta and The Country Club in Brookline, Mass., also has a thriving business of building new courses.
Andalusia, developed by Drummond Corp., which developed Rancho La Quinta Country Club, could join the dozens of courses that have earned Jones honors, including rankings in the Golf Digest top 100 and earned Jones Golf World magazine's 1995 architect of the year award.
For Jones, whose father was the renowned architect Robert Trent Jones Sr. and who now has nearly 40 years of working for his father and his own work on his resume, experience is the key to building a great course.
"The great thing about my business is the older you get, the better you get because of the experience you have," Jones said. "People look back on the things you did in the past, the things you liked, maybe the things you might want to redo. The more experience you have, the more you know what you are doing with the dirt."
That kind of experience will come in handy for Jones, he said, at a project such as Andalusia. Located in southern La Quinta between Monroe and Madison Avenues and bounded by Ave. 60 to the south, Andalusia is a 545-acre project featuring 600 home sites and plenty of room for Jones' design.
Creating a new course
Construction workers will eventually move more than 4 million cubic yards of dirt, both to sink the golf course below the existing desert floor and to raise the home sites. Geoff Johansen, the superintendent for the new course, said nine to 10 holes will be ready for play by the start of the new year, including bentgrass greens.
The current construction is for 20 holes, including the first and 18th holes of a proposed second course that will be built just west of the current project.
Even with the rugged Santa Rosa Mountains as a backdrop, Jones admits building on the featureless desert floor has been a challenge.
"My feeling is it's a good thing I have a lot of experience," Jones joked. "Because it does really take more imagination when the site doesn't dictate the design. But it gives us a lot of freedom to locate the holes, orient the holes to the mountains. We aren't restricted by topography. We create our topography."
Jones is particularly pleased that Drummond has allowed his wide corridors for his holes.
"I said it in one of the press releases that I've been lucky over a period of years in that I always got the right job," he said. "It's not that I do anything, I just get the right job. This is the right job."
Eye to the future
What Jones hopes to bring to Andalusia are the same qualities that make his renovations of championship courses so successful: an understanding of the complete game of golf rather than just the idea of making a course longer to make it tougher.
"We really stress the strategy more than most architects. We stress the visuals. With the mountains, we have the visuals automatically," Jones said. "We have a lot of bodies of water and the waterfalls are really just an addition. But if you look at the way we laid it out, there are a lot of shot options, a lot of angles, a lot of variety. It will be a good golf course for the higher handicapper, the short hitter, but it's a good golf course for the long hitter."
Andalusia is far from Jones' first visit to the desert. He remembers vividly coming to the desert with his father, one of the first architects who would travel the country to design courses rather than stay in a single region.
The elder Jones would visit desert golf pioneers such as Johnny Dawson and Jimmy Hines at Thunderbird Country Club, the desert's first 18-hole course built in 1951. That was just one year after the younger Jones attended his first U.S. Open.
And what would his father think of Rees Jones' current work at Andalusia?
"My father would not believe I'm building a course on a site like this," Jones said. "But now the game is so popular and we have people who want something special like this."