![\"f\"](\"http:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2009\/09\/f-300x206.jpg\")
Photo by Taliaferro Jones<\/p><\/div>\n
Behind many of his more than 250 golf designs in more than 40 countries on six continents, stands a man who works on many levels, who welcomes a new challenge, and who sees the game and his pursuit of it as not just a physical– but as a metaphysical– journey.\u00a0 Like the best writers and artists, Jones employs subtext and symbolism, imagery and illusion, as well as a range of other techniques from the verbal and visual arts to express aspects of philosophy, drama, and aesthetics.\u00a0 And his courses tell stories.<\/p>\n
Jones may actually be an even better storyteller than he is a designer.\u00a0 Ask him a question and he\u2019ll string together anecdotes and adventure tales from his travels around the globe, dropping the names of famous golfers, celebrities, and political figures.\u00a0 Yet while he enjoys being the center of attention– whether at a cocktail party hosted by a U.S. Ambassador, or drinking a beer in the clubhouse after a round of golf– Jones is also eager, interested, and absorbed in what other people have to say.\u00a0 He is generous, genuine, and thoroughly likable, if also impatient and strong willed.\u00a0 He also possesses an admirable short game.<\/p>\n
I spent a long weekend with Jones at his Royal Westmoreland Golf Course in Barbados.\u00a0 Our interviews took place at crowded lunch tables, over rum punches on the beach, at dinner parties, and out on the golf course.\u00a0 Playing with Jones provides a view of golf course design the depths of which most people would never fathom.\u00a0 Talking with him provides an opportunity to discuss aspects of the game that don\u2019t receive nearly enough attention in conversation or in print.<\/p>\n
One lasting impression: after hitting a mediocre approach shot on the dramatic quarry hole at Royal Westmoreland, Jones faced an impossible sidehill putt on a slick, sloping green.\u00a0 After studying it from various angles and frowning his displeasure, he looked up from his ball and said: \u201cI designed it, so I\u2019ll have to play it.\u201d<\/p>\n
JCW:\u00a0 Did you learn anything in particular while studying at Yale University that helped in your career?<\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> I learned how to think.\u00a0 During the time I was there, Yale offered a very strict education.\u00a0 I studied geology, which was useful later on.\u00a0 As an American Studies and History major (Liberal Arts), I learned to write and to pursue highly critical thinking.\u00a0 And I learned how to learn– how to go to a source like the library, or an older person, and learn what I needed to know from that source, and apply my own thinking to it.<\/p>\n My education has helped me read golf history with a different eye.\u00a0 I might read about a course in India and wonder what the British were doing there, and why.\u00a0 I learned how to ask a historian\u2019s questions: what motivated them to bring their game there and put it inside a horse paddock?\u00a0 Why were there walls around those places?\u00a0 What was going on?\u00a0 By asking these questions you see how the golf courses themselves were interpreted through the environment they were designed and implemented into.<\/p>\n Golf course design provided a strong connection between you and your father.\u00a0 Did it also provide an opportunity to assert your independence?<\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> My father wasn\u2019t only my father; he was my mentor. At some point in every relationship, a mentor and his student have to separate.\u00a0 They both know that.\u00a0 For me, designing the Navatanee course in Bangkok– where the first World Cup was played– was very liberating.\u00a0 I went all the way to Bangkok in 1969 in order to establish my own credibility.\u00a0 Later, in 1975, when the Vietnam War had just ended, Jack Nicklaus declined to play in the World Cup there because it was supposedly too dangerous.<\/p>\n But nobody had actually thought about it.\u00a0 So I called General Scowcroft, the head of the National Security Council, and asked if it was really too dangerous.\u00a0 I didn\u2019t want to lose this opportunity.\u00a0 And the Council told me that at that time there was no reason not to go.\u00a0 So they played the tournament.\u00a0 Johnny Miller won, the U.S. team won, and I had a good time at the pro-am.\u00a0 Navatanee was my first course used in professional championship play and the tournament was well publicized.\u00a0 That was very helpful in my career.<\/p>\n Your own travels and experiences seem to suggest that the game can serve as a form of adventure– not the first word that comes to mind when most folks think about golf .\u00a0 .\u00a0 .<\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> Any game anywhere is an adventure.\u00a0 But going to distant locations and playing a round of golf in a totally alien context– like in Russia or Shanghai– even though the game is familiar to you, the experience and location will be different from anything you\u2019ve ever experienced before.<\/p>\n Tell us a little more about your own golf-related adventures.\u00a0 What was your wildest experience?<\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> One day in Desaru, Malaysia I walked across a log that had fallen in a putrid swamp, and a snake slithered away.\u00a0 When my guide took out his machete I knew we were in trouble.\u00a0 I asked him, \u201cWhat\u2019s up?\u201d\u00a0 He said, \u201cIt\u2019s a Krait snake.\u201d\u00a0 I said, \u201cWhat happens if he bites you?\u201d\u00a0 And the guide said, \u201cSmoke one cigarette, and say good-bye.\u201d<\/p>\n Two weeks earlier a wild elephant had pushed over our construction shack during the night.\u00a0 Then we found out that tigers had been coming out of the jungle to lick the salt on the beach near the sea where we were working.\u00a0 On the ride out to the site one day, an elephant was sleeping in the road, and my driver, Chan, stopped the jeep and climbed down and started speaking very calmly and soothingly to the elephant, and it got up and quietly walked off.\u00a0 I asked him what he\u2019d done, and he said he asked, \u201cLord of the jungle, may we pass?\u201d\u00a0 So I asked how he knew the elephant understands him, and he just said: \u201cHe understands me because I respect him.\u201d\u00a0 That was a difficult job.\u00a0 Our supervisors kept quitting.<\/p>\n Another wilderness experience was designing the Wild Coast Golf Course, in Transkei, South Africa.\u00a0 The rough plunges down into ravines, and one hole plays across a natural waterfall.\u00a0 A real one.\u00a0 If you lose your ball you don\u2019t go down there, because that\u2019s where the black mamba, a poisonous snake, lives.\u00a0 Wild monkeys run onto the 6th green and steal your golf ball even today.<\/p>\n How do you express your own adventurous experiences in your golf course designs?<\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> One way is through heroic golf holes– similar to the great eighth at Pebble Beach, where you must be a hero to cross an ocean-filled chasm to reach the green.\u00a0 Heroic, to me, involves a quest on which you never give up.\u00a0 You may have to backpaddle and regroup, and create strategies, but it\u2019s like Odysseus.\u00a0 You\u2019re always out there searching.\u00a0 And if you go out seeking you\u2019ll find something.<\/p>\n In terms of a course of mine that\u2019s exciting and dramatic, consider Southern Highlands, in Las Vegas; as for truly heroic courses, I\u2019d say that the Prince Course, at Princeville Resort in Hawaii, is top among them because you have at least seven or eight heroic holes.\u00a0 You must avoid the creek on the first hole, cross the chasm on the second, cross a cliff on the seventh, and avoid waterfalls on twelve, thirteen, and fifteen.\u00a0 That a heroic golf course, full of lines and edges of doom.<\/p>\n The Prince Course, photo by John and Jeannine Henebry<\/p><\/div>\n The Prince Course #7, photo by John and Jeannine Henebry<\/p><\/div>\n The Prince Course #13 & #14, photo by John and Jeannine Henebry<\/p><\/div>\n You mentioned Odysseus\u2019s quest, but what is your own quest like?<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> When I go out in search of a golf design, there aren\u2019t any bridges or golf carts.\u00a0 Unknown animals are hanging around and they may or may not be dangerous.\u00a0 We enter their realm to create a much more refined trip for the golfer later on.\u00a0 The search for the best golf course within a given site is easier if the site is flat, like in Las Vegas.\u00a0 But then the quest involves creativity to produce something dramatic.\u00a0 The best courses are those where nature has provided the canvas and my job is to discover her secrets and reveal them, as opposed to imposing a philosophy.\u00a0 To me, bad golf architecture is what we call \u201cproduction architecture\u201d whereby the designer sets up the holes with thoughtless repetition.<\/p>\n If golf courses can tell a story like that of Odysseus, do they also have other stories to tell?<\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> Courses reveal stories in many ways.\u00a0 One way will bore you to death; a golfer describing a hole-by-hole account of his round will clear out a room faster than a fire.<\/p>\n I like to tell a story about aesthetics.\u00a0 Golf is a nature walk through a garden, which in every culture is an extremely important place of sanctuary and restoration and re-creation.\u00a0 Jesus on the cross said, \u201cI will see you in Paradise.\u201d\u00a0 The literal translation is, \u201cI will see you in the Garden.\u201d<\/p>\n But different courses tell other stories, too.\u00a0 I think the Princeville course\u2014which we are currently renovating and updating for the modern era even though it hosted a World Cup and LPGA events\u2014 tells the story of romantic natural wonders mixed with championship toughness and accessibility. We\u2019ve had several courses which stopped and were revived a couple of years later due to economic or political factors.\u00a0 The Moscow Country Club is the most clear example of that.\u00a0 In golf, when it\u2019s seventy-two holes of medal play, or eighteen holes in a match, you\u2019ve got to play them all, and if you get in trouble you must keep plugging along.\u00a0 That\u2019s an important story.\u00a0 It\u2019s a metaphor for life and golf.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s come back to the Moscow Country Club in a moment.\u00a0 But first maybe you could go a little farther in explaining how you express your own stories or experiences through design elements in the way a writer or artist might use elements of their respective forms to express personal feelings or experiences.<\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> That\u2019s when golf architecture becomes golf art, which happens at a higher level; sometimes it can be almost kitschy, but hopefully it\u2019s evocative and harmonious.\u00a0 I\u2019ve used symbolism in this way a couple of times.\u00a0 I built a green in the shape of the state of Texas at Las Colinas, made a brook into the Rio Grande, and shaped a bunker like Oklahoma.\u00a0 That was a private joke on the golf writer Dan Jenkins, who lived nearby.<\/p>\n I also built the Zen bunker at Princeville.\u00a0 I\u2019d been working in Japan and had gone down to the temples, where I saw the sand gardens with stones in them, where people meditated.\u00a0 To the Japanese, those stones represent islands of time as well as the islands of Japan.\u00a0 To me, it looked like a bunker, so I said why not put some big stones in a hole on Kauai, which is the last major landfall off the U.S. (except for Alaska) before you reach Japan.\u00a0 This was in 1970, and the Japanese had not yet come to play golf in the states, but I knew they were going to.\u00a0 They saw the Zen bunker as a bridge, a welcome.\u00a0 They thought it was fun.\u00a0 In one sense, Zen is existential; meditation is a highly useful discipline for finding oneself.\u00a0 On the other hand, it can be a joke on you in the cosmic sense.<\/p>\n I try to design golf courses that will fascinate people so they\u2019ll want to play them many times and learn the depths and meanings of the courses\u2019 stories, their subtext, their poetry.\u00a0 There are many ways to play my golf courses.\u00a0 My style is very complex.\u00a0 You have to engage the holes, because they have character.\u00a0 You have all these choices, and every day there\u2019s different ones, so the story that a hole tells depends on its mood that day, and on your mood.\u00a0 You should struggle with the hole in your mind.\u00a0 It\u2019s not just an adversary to attack or defeat; you should talk to it, and listen to it.<\/p>\n Have we entered an age of golf architecture as golf art?<\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> I think the eighties marked the beginning of the new golden age in golf architecture, and the current era \u00a0represents the environmental age.\u00a0 You can read our Green Proclamation on our website to hear more about that\u00a0 Today, we\u2019re using less boldness, less gimmickry, and fewer natural resources in designing golf courses.\u00a0 When a natural element of the land affords the opportunity for drama– like the old sand quarry that became Chambers Bay, near Tacoma, Washington (and which will host the 2015 US Open)– you don\u2019t need to trick it up.\u00a0 It\u2019s always seemed strange to me, for example, to see bulkheads in the wild west.<\/p>\n The principal of harmony in art requires that the foreground and near ground have some shape or form and color which feels harmonious when you walk into the landscape.\u00a0 At the level of golf art, this has to extend beyond the golf course.\u00a0 It\u2019s not just the frame; it\u2019s everything. \u00a0For example, at the Whistler Golf course, in British Columbia, Canada, in June the bunkers and the snow drifts high in the mountains relate to each other.\u00a0 They\u2019re part of the same harmony, though they\u2019re miles apart.\u00a0 Here in Barbados, the white-faced bunkers relate visually to the puff ball clouds that float by overhead.<\/p>\n How should golfers view a course architect?\u00a0 Are you our ally or our adversary?<\/strong><\/p>\n Chateau Whistler, photo by John and Jeannine Henebry<\/p><\/div>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> If you read my book Golf By Design<\/span> carefully, it will teach you some of my tendencies and those of other golf architects to set up a series of challenges, risks, and rewards in a golf layout, and you\u2019ll see how and why we do that.\u00a0 You alone still have to play the course and make the shots, but at least you\u2019ll have a focus.\u00a0 And I think people with a focus always play better.\u00a0 In that sense I\u2019m your ally.<\/p>\n In terms of the game itself, I\u2019m your adversary.\u00a0 I will set up challenges that may frustrate you if you don\u2019t pay attention.\u00a0 But strategically I\u2019m not a penal architect, like Pete Dye.\u00a0 I don\u2019t say \u201cdeath or glory\u201d very often.\u00a0 I\u2019ll occasionally use a penal element if it happens to be there naturally, but basically I try to give every player– men, women, children, old and young, high and low handicaps– options in playing a hole.<\/p>\n Being a golf architect is a bit like being a stage hand; we set the stage for the real drama.\u00a0 Golf architects used to just be known within the game.\u00a0 They weren\u2019t known in the general sense any more than great lighting experts in the New York stage are well-known by the public.<\/p>\n You\u2019ve described yourself as an environmentalist, and stressed environmentally responsible course design.\u00a0 Do you feel that there are some places on the planet where a golf course just doesn\u2019t belong?<\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> Absolutely. We\u2019ve actually turned down many sites because they just wouldn\u2019t become good golf courses, because they\u2019d be forced upon the land.\u00a0 This is particularly true in the mountains of Japan, where it would look like an army of Kumatsus (bulldozers) had come through.\u00a0 I describe such designs as \u201caccelerating geologic time\u201d– like by twenty-five million years.\u00a0 Some developers will ignore the land, and we don\u2019t participate in that.\u00a0 We might relocate a substantial quantity of earth, but we\u2019ll do it in a way that preserves natural elements such as rock outcroppings, forests, and streams\u2014 as we did at our new Rainbow Hills golf course in South Korea.<\/p>\n We\u2019re efficient.\u00a0 We\u2019re light on the land.\u00a0 But we\u2019re not minimalists either.\u00a0 So-called \u201cminimalist\u201d courses– where almost nothing has been moved in the landscape– often leave the golfer feeling unfulfilled, like leaving a restaurant still feeling hungry.\u00a0 That concept of minimalism is not architectural, and very few sites are that good that you can romantically go back to basics without bulldozers.\u00a0 You have to build a green that drains, or you can\u2019t putt on it.\u00a0 Tees have to be oriented in the right place, fairways must support heavy mowers to cut the grass, and bunkers have to hold sand.\u00a0 These are technical issues.\u00a0 If we have to recreate an unadorned site, we will– as we did at Kensington and Windsor, in Florida; but we\u2019ll try to leave it as if we haven\u2019t been there.\u00a0 We\u2019ll realign the terrain so that it feels natural.<\/p>\n When I see a piece of land which is extraordinarily beautiful and also conducive to golf, I get nervous– not that I should stay away from it, but rather that I should approach it with great care.\u00a0 I don\u2019t want to ruin it.\u00a0 I want to study it a long time and observe its character like a man getting to know a beautiful woman– he wants to know if she\u2019s beautiful without makeup.\u00a0 You want to learn the true qualities of the site before treading lightly on the land.\u00a0 One of the jobs I have when I see a beautiful piece of land is to tell the owner the truth: that he\u2019ll have to invest a certain amount of money just to protect the beauty, and if he doesn\u2019t want to do it, or thinks he can do it for less, I\u2019ll say let someone else do it.<\/p>\n In my opinion there are some great pieces of land which didn\u2019t turn out as well as they might have.\u00a0 Tralee, in Ireland, for example, a wonderful place where Ryan\u2019s Daughter<\/span> was filmed.\u00a0 It was designed by Arnold Palmer and Ed Seay.\u00a0 Architecturally, I could see many ways to have made a better golf course.\u00a0 I\u2019m a constructive critic as well as a creator.\u00a0 I don\u2019t know what happened there.\u00a0 Maybe they didn\u2019t have enough of a budget, or enough time.\u00a0 But they didn\u2019t get the most out of that land, as they managed to do at other lovely sites, such as Spring Island, South Carolina.\u00a0 My father\u2019s work at Ballybunion New was not as good as it could have been.\u00a0 Those are extraordinary pieces of links land.\u00a0 But in the case of Ballybunion I know they had almost no money, and that\u2019s very difficult.\u00a0 Courses like these may be remodeled later, but they can never reach the full potential they had when the site was virgin.<\/p>\n As an environmentalist, is it also difficult to watch the amount of development that often springs up around a golf course built in a previously pristine place?<\/strong><\/p>\n Cabo Real, photo by John and Jeannine Henebry<\/p><\/div>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> This has happened many times before.\u00a0 In Hilton Head, South Carolina, for example, at first people thought those golf courses were just wandering through a woodland.\u00a0 They were, initially, but then the houses went up and the golf courses were strung out among them, much like a suburban street.\u00a0 At Cabo Real, in Mexico, we purposely put the golf holes along the edges of cliffs, which is dramatic and heroic, but it also means that they can\u2019t build anything there.<\/p>\n Over-development is always a disappointment, but we have to work in the practical world.\u00a0 The best thing of all is pure golf– when you can design a golf course where there are no houses, like we did at Chambers Bay, \u00a0at the Lake Course in Kunming, China, and with the first 18 holes at Joondalup in Australia.\u00a0 If you have enough golfers in a major urban area, the market will recognize pure golf and respond.\u00a0 This also happened \u00a0at Granite Bay, near Sacramento.\u00a0 But you can\u2019t do it everywhere.\u00a0 The market isn\u2019t that rich.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s go back and talk about the Moscow Country Club.\u00a0 It took twenty years to build that golf course.\u00a0 What was the process like for you?\u00a0 What did it mean?<\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> When I first saw the Reds on the greens, I knew the cold war was finally over.\u00a0 In the early days of the project, the golf course had a symbolic meaning in the West that the Russians were open enough to consider this.\u00a0 But it took them a long time to decide whether a golf course was a political symbol.\u00a0 They first thought of golf as an English game, and they didn\u2019t like the English because they held Murmansk during the Bolshevik Revolution.\u00a0 Golf had meanings of colonial empire.\u00a0 I had to explain that golf was really an old Scottish game.<\/p>\n On a very crude level they also pointed out that golf is a capitalist game, but we pointed out that it\u2019s not; it\u2019s a military game.\u00a0 Scottish soldiers played golf in India, Egypt, and elsewhere. But British soldiers were not some of their favorite historical figures.\u00a0 That was even more serious.\u00a0 But toward the end, they didn\u2019t see it as anything more than a way to provide a luxury service, and to encourage business and tourism.<\/p>\n In terms of the transformation of the people involved, it was a kind of reverse Doctor Zhivago.\u00a0 The Doctor was transformed by his experiences in the Bolshevik Revolution.\u00a0 In the case of the golf course, because it took so long, many of the Russians involved were transformed backwards to a less ideological society.\u00a0 Dr. Armand Hammer was the catalyst, back in 1974.<\/p>\n What was your toughest challenge in getting the course built?<\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> They never gave us an accurate map.\u00a0 I\u2019m a former boy scout, and I was walking around in the woods with a compass, and I said, \u201cThis topographical map is really off.\u201d\u00a0 I kept saying this and it was five years before they really trusted me.\u00a0 They said I was very observant.<\/p>\n \u201cIs<\/span> it wrong?\u201d I asked.<\/p>\n \u201cYes.\u00a0 The map is incorrect.\u201d<\/p>\n I asked how I was supposed to do my job and they said, \u201cWe do not give correct maps to foreigners because your military will use it to attack us.\u201d<\/p>\n And I said, \u201cWell, I\u2019ll give you an incorrect golf course unless you give me a correct map.\u201d\u00a0 Paranoia was a science over there.\u00a0 But for good reason.\u00a0 The bunkers on the third hole in Moscow are actual bunkers from which they fought the Germans in WW II.\u00a0 Also, I was told that the woods 30 Km northwest of Moscow were approximately where Napoleon\u2019s army fought.\u00a0 They\u2019ve been attacked so many times.\u00a0 They had reason to give me an inaccurate map.\u00a0 They finally gave me a map that was so accurate they had calibrated the circumference of every single tree in the forest.<\/p>\n Beyond the game of golf, what did building the course mean to you personally?<\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> I believe that if we can play a sport together then we might not kill each other.\u00a0 It\u2019s the Olympic ideal (and just one reason why golf would make such a great Olympic sport): get guys communicating by having a competition through sports.\u00a0 And what sport do older diplomats and generals play?\u00a0 Golf.<\/p>\n In November 1979, I asked a major player, Ambassador V. Kuznetzov, how things were in Moscow.\u00a0 He said, \u201cThings in Moscow are much colder than the snow in your face.\u201d\u00a0 A month later they attacked Afghanistan.\u00a0 That was the end of sports exchanges, and the project went into deep hibernation.<\/p>\n Six years later the Russian client called up again and said Gorbachev is in power now and he wants to talk about that golf course.\u00a0 Then there were little things, like his government collapsing during construction.\u00a0 The most positive thing I can say is that at the opening, soldiers from the Red Army came to see the course and they had to try it.\u00a0 If you don\u2019t build it, they\u2019ll never see it, and never try to play.<\/p>\n It sounds like you have very strong feelings for the Moscow course.\u00a0 Do you have other favorites, courses that mean particular things to you, or express specific moods?<\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> When I want to play serious golf I go to Pine Valley, because I grew up in New Jersey and have been playing Pine Valley since I was sixteen, and I have a lot of memories.\u00a0 I go with friends and we play all day long and try to eat as many meals as rounds we play.\u00a0 It\u2019s a very difficult course– walking golf.\u00a0 It\u2019s like going to church: you get reinvested with the lore and the nature of the game.<\/p>\n <\/strong>To me St. Andrews is an interesting place, but I always feel slightly uneasy because there are so many oddball bounces.\u00a0 You have to learn to laugh with the golf course, because it\u2019s certainly laughing at you.<\/p>\n I like the San Francisco Golf Club.\u00a0 I like Winged Foot because you have to hit really precise approach shots.\u00a0 It brings back all kinds of memories, too.\u00a0 That\u2019s where Tommy Armour taught me how to play.\u00a0 It\u2019s very evocative.<\/p>\n Golf Courses are like outdoor churches.\u00a0 They\u2019re places you have a lot of memories of great matches won and lost, friends enjoyed, weather– all kinds of things come flooding back.<\/p>\n Chambers Bay, photo by John and Jeannine Henebry<\/p><\/div>\n Chambers Bay #2, photo by John and Jeannine Henebry<\/p><\/div>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n You communicate your love for the game and some of your memories and experiences in your book, Golf By Design<\/span>.\u00a0 Would you like to say a few words about the book?<\/strong><\/p>\n RTJ Jr.:<\/strong> I authored the book for two reasons.\u00a0 First, I would play golf with someone at the San Francisco Golf Club who\u2019d been playing there all his life, and I\u2019d say \u201cDo you usually come up short on the fifth hole?\u201d\u00a0 He\u2019d say, \u201cHow did you know?\u201d\u00a0 And I\u2019d say, \u201cBecause you see where the bunker is set fifteen yards short, but it\u2019s a high faced bunker, the top of which obscures the fairway, and it looks like it\u2019s right in front of the green?\u00a0 Your eye is tricked.\u00a0 There\u2019s an illusion because there\u2019s no background and no reference point.\u00a0 It\u2019s pure ocular science.\u00a0 You think the green is closer and you cannot make yourself hit the club you need to hit, even though you know the yardage.\u201d\u00a0 After such explanations people often told me, \u201cYou should write a book!\u201d Eventually I got hubris and thought that I should<\/span> write a book.<\/p>\n Site visit, China, 2009<\/p><\/div>\n But more importantly, the book was a gift back to the game, which has been so good to me.\u00a0 I wanted to help people understand what architects do, just as a museum curator could explain the works of Picasso and Rembrandt in a deeper way than just as beautiful paintings.\u00a0 I wanted to elicit a depth of appreciation and communicate the beauty, the whole ethos of being on a golf course.\u00a0 I also wanted to help people play better.\u00a0 I wanted them to defeat me.<\/p>\n In a Zen-like way, I\u2019m a Master of my art, and I want to teach you my art.\u00a0 And if you enjoy it as I have, then I\u2019m blessed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"![\"prince_ocean_ariel\"](\"http:\/\/theaposition.com\/jeffwallach\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2\/2009\/08\/prince_ocean_ariel-150x150.jpg\")
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