48 It was a significantly smaller group of individuals in those days.” Rees’s career really took off in the 1980s, when he was hired to do design work at The Country Club in Brookline in preparation for the 1988 US Open. That event had two major consequences: he became the go-to architect if your course was hosting a major championship (eventually becoming known, as his father had before him, as the ‘Open Doctor’). Also, his proposal for Brookline was very radical for the time, restorative in essence: the project played a substantial role in spawning the movement to restore classic golf courses, now so popular. “I was hired by The Country Club because I knew the history of the club, the US Open and Francis Ouimet. The USGA in part wanted to go there to celebrate the 75th anniversary of Ouimet’s victory. I interviewed for the job with other architects; some of whom wanted to dramatically change the course. I wanted to restore it. I could see how the greens had become rounded and shrunk during the Depression. I had an eye for what it should look like, having grown up playing and working on classic courses. We studied the old photos, and when we restored a bunker, we dug a hole and found sand and we knew we were in the right location.” Not far from Brookline, Rees was involved in another famous US Open, the 2002 championship at Bethpage Black, the first ever to be played on a true publicly owned course. The USGA executive director, David Fay, conceived the idea of reconstructing the Black for a future US Open and organised a group of 12 people to visit and play the course on 1 May 1995, to assess its potential. Rees was among them. The group decided the idea was a sound one, and Rees was hired to restore and rework the golf course. “I was embedded in the project from the beginning,” he says. “That year, the Open was to be held at Shinnecock Hills, and someone saw me REES JONES Jones restored and reworked Bethpage Black in preparation for the 2002 US Open, and made further tweaks in advance of the 2009 US Open, 2019 PGA Championship and 2025 Ryder Cup
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