47 been in the golf business since the age of 13, when he was tasked by his father in 1954 to measure the length of drives during that year’s US Open at Baltusrol, to provide accurate information on distances for future championship redesign projects. Like his father, Rees has gone on to work on a large number of courses that have held major events. Rees went to college at Yale. “My mother wanted me to go to Yale to get a liberal arts education to decide what I wanted to do with my life,” he says. “After my sophomore year, I decided to go into the golf course design business, even though it wasn’t very lucrative at the time. In my junior and senior years, I took courses that enabled me to get into Harvard School of Design, where I met classmate Cabell Robinson and later helped him get into golf course design.” After completing his education, Rees went to work for his father. “I had a great life working with him,” he says of the early years. “In the post-World War Two era, people were coming out of the Depression and were limited on what they could do or afford. There wasn’t much money in golf course design then; it was a real labour of love. Bill Baldwin, who was the head of my dad’s construction crew, took me under his wing, and taught me that I couldn’t implement a design if I didn’t know how to get it built.” Elder brother Bobby went solo in 1972, and Rees followed suit two years later. “It was the right time to go on my own,” he says. “I’d worked for my dad for ten years. I quickly got the Arcadian Shores design assignment in Myrtle Beach, which made the Golf Digest top 100 list and helped establish my reputation. Golf architecture goes in cycles, as the economy does. When I went on my own, we were in a downturn, but it was a good time to establish my name. I was hired to design three courses for Hilton Head Plantation, a major real estate development at the time, which led to additional work elsewhere. “There weren’t as many burgeoning golf course designers in those days, because we were coming out of such a slow economic period. Most of the new designers had worked for Ross, Maxwell or others. I was accepted into the ASGCA the same year as Bill Amick and Ed Seay. Photos: Rees Jones Inc Jones and design associate Bryce Swanson (second right) at their first project in Japan, the 2011 redesign of the West course at Ibaraki Country Club
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