David:
Did you find the book interesting? Did you learn much?
I found it moderately interesting but I learned a ton. It is first an American success story. RTJ was an immigrant who came through Ellis Island as a five year old and before his career was over he was working for and with men like Juan Trippe, Laurence Rockefeller President Eisenhower and the King of Morocco (with whom he was briefly held prisoner during a coup attempt) and was the preeminent practitioner in a field he almost single-handedly professionalized. If he had a genius it was in his ability to realize his lofty ambitions.
There is a lot of information about how his various projects came to be, who were the owners and how Jones was hired but less information on the designs themselves. It was interesting to me how virtually all the course owners and members would defer to Jones on basically all decisions. It was in that way that he most reminded me of Robert Moses. Preserving the courses he was hired to renovate took a distant second to Jones' ideas on making the courses "modern and demanding" and it seems that RTJ didn't spend much time thinking about original design intent. Like the NYC neighborhoods that were in the way of Robert Moses' highways, if some of Maxwell's greens at Southern Hills were too severe for modern green speeds or Ross' holes at Oak Hill couldn't defend par against the best golfers in the world for 4 days each decade then they had to go.
There family stuff was interesting but not particularly compelling. Jones might have been a great salesman but he was a pretty poor businessman and it was his wife who was really responsible for building and running his business. As his wife aged and then passed away the family kind of came apart. It basically boiled down to RTJ and RTJII vs. Rees and RTJ's wife and it was never really settled in RTJ's lifetime.
If the last part is true, then that's three things Mr. Dye and Mr. Jones had in common -- strong women who helped run their businesses.
I had dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Jones in 1983 or 84, a couple of years before she passed away. She certainly didn't seem much like Mrs. Dye, at least not the golf background part, but she was obviously a devoted spouse and fully engaged with her husband's career.
Your notes made me think how different it is in our day and age. My generation would never expect our spouses to be so involved in our careers, but that is one thing that some of the older generation had to their advantage [an advantage that Hogan and Nicklaus had over Tiger Woods, as well]. Also, it seems that much of the family stuff must be based on personal correspondence, and the odd part about the "information age" is that without a subpoena for emails, you probably won't find much personal correspondence for generations going forward.
I do find it odd that a career golf course architect gets the full celebrity treatment, including invasion of privacy -- I guess it goes with the territory of fame now, but I'm not sure where one crosses the magic line in a business like ours.