RJ Advocate;
I should probably leave well enough alone, but I am somewhat uncomfortable with being viewed as part of some effort to favor or bash any particular architect, or be part of some online reputational rehabilitation.
Rees Jones has been a golf course architect for almost 35 years. His resume of courses should speak for itself at this point, both pro and con. He has designed many, many courses, and I've played 11 of his original designs (including 2 he did under his father's name), and 6 he either redesigned or restored.
I've also been critical of many of those courses in the past for various reasons, many of them purely aesthetic. He went through a period from about 1984 until recently where I frankly couldn't understand how a guy with such exposure to the world's greatest classic courses seemed unable to bring those experiences into anything remotely close in his original designs. We all know about what those designs entailed; row upon row of symmetrical containment mounds, overdone shaping elsewhere, really unnaturally ugly bunkering (tons of circular pots and squiggly amobas), and generally mundane green complexes, and it didn't matter if the course was in the mountains, desert, parkand, glades, or whatever, they all had the exact same look and feel.
It frankly made me wonder if he indeed had the innate ability to be creative, original, or even had any aesthetic sense of using natural landforms in design.
Thankfully, I've seen enough of his newest courses to feel that he's made a number of VERY promising changes in his style. His newer courses seem considerably more willing to take design chances, to work with each project as an individual site, and to attempt to utilize and enhance natural features there.
That is the way I prefer to judge courses...on a case by case basis, and not with preconceived biases or any type of favoritism or critical negativity towards ANY architect.
Of recent courses I've played, Huntsville is very good and Olde Kinderhook is excellent. I'm heartened to hear the positive assessment of friends who've played Ocean Forest and Atlantic.
Rees Jones gets a lot of work on some very good sites and I am encouraged that he seems to be willing to adapt. His most recent work is proof positive that he has the ability to design superb original work, and I hope he builds another hundred or so of them.
