Rees Jones has played with Presidents and renovated multiple U.S. Open courses. He’s been a member at Pine Valley for 44 years, is the son of a legendary golf course architect, and has run his own successful course design business for more than 35 years. Yet what Rees Jones might be most proud of—aside from being a husband, father, and grandfather—is having been inducted into the Montclair High School Hall of Fame.

On that occasion in 2006, he joined a group of alumni as eclectic as their hometown, including astronaut Buzz Aldrin, Poet Laureate and two-time Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Wilbur, guitarist Joe Walsh, and his own brother Robert, a fellow course designer. Today, Jones still speaks fondly about his pride in being a “Mountie,” how six guys (including himself) from the class of 1959 got into Yale, and how he and his classmates learned to compete in the real world.

Despite a career that has taken him all over the globe, Jones remains rooted firmly in the Garden State. The interest in golf course architecture came from his father, but the New Jersey ties are thanks to his mother Ione Davis, a Montclair native born on Hawthorne Avenue who finished first in her class at both Montclair High and Wells College in New York. While at the latter she met Robert Trent Jones, a student at nearby Cornell. After marrying, the pair settled in a home on Montclair Avenue, with Trent Jones setting up a golf course design business in downtown Manhattan.

The younger of two brothers, Jones was a member of Montclair High’s 1957 state championship golf team, graduated from Yale, and worked at his father’s company for a decade. A brief foray to Myrtle Beach in 1974 for the first project of his own course design company was enlightening. “That was before cable television, so I thought I was in another country down there,” he laughed. “When I came back I realized I was sort of a metropolitan guy.”

And a family man. Although he recently moved to nearby Verona, Jones and his wife raised their two daughters in Montclair. “They got a good education, and this town is really diversified,” says Jones, whose office is just off Bloomfield Avenue. “You get to meet a real cross section of humanity. They both got in good colleges, although neither went to my alma mater. One’s a social worker, and one’s a writer. Both live in Boston so we go there to visit them and our grandchildren.”

Being a presence in his children’s lives was important. “My father was away most of my childhood, so I intentionally did not take jobs that far away, like in Japan or South America,” says Jones. “I took jobs mainly on the East Coast, or England and Spain. I could fly there overnight, work all day, have dinner, and then come back the next day. I coached my daughter’s basketball team for three years and only missed one game. I wanted to be close enough to home so that I would be more part of my kids’ upbringing.”

In addition to good restaurants (among his Montclair favorites are La Couronne, Facino, Osteria Giotto, and Halcyon) and proximity to Newark Airport—useful for someone who has accumulated more than a million frequent flyer miles—Jones says there’s another bonus to staying in his home state: quality golf courses. “I played a lot of junior golf here, and I was introduced to some really fine courses, not really knowing what I was looking at,” he says. “Those became sort of my standard. When I would go to other places and see bunkers that were just little pockets of sand, I’d notice there was a difference. So I was brought up experiencing the Baltusrols, the Ridgewoods, and the Plainfields. Those kinds of courses had a lot of technique built into them by the architect.”

He wound up working on remodeling projects for many of them, both with his father and on his own. “I feel a really strong responsibility if these clubs want me to do it, rather than just go build a new one somewhere else,” says Jones, who has yet to break par at his home course, Montclair Golf Club. “Those are the courses where I was really brought into the game.”

As a 13-year old, Jones worked at the 1954 U.S. Open at Baltusrol, measuring drives so his father would know where to put bunkers on future U.S. Open courses. It’s fitting then that he would carry on that tradition, working on enough championship venues that he acquired the title of “U.S. Open Doctor” for his work on courses such as Baltusrol, Torrey Pines North, and Bethpage Black.

“People ask me all the time, you got your name recognition from your redos and not your new courses. Are those better?” he says. “I tell them no, those redos are the ones they play major championships on, so that’s how it comes about. I’ve done some pretty darn good new courses too, like Atlantic Golf Club and The Bridge on Long Island, Red Stick in Florida, Rio Secco and Cascata in Nevada, Ocean Forest in Georgia, and Nantucket in Massachusetts.”

His original designs in New Jersey include Cherry Valley Country Club in Skillman, the Forest Course at Fiddler’s Elbow in Bedminster, Pinch Brook in Florham Park, and the Gold nine at Flanders Valley.

Despite a busy remodeling schedule, with projects at championship venues like Hazeltine, Congressional, Atlanta Athletic Club, and Medinah, Jones isn’t sure how many new courses he will get to build in New Jersey or elsewhere. “We’ve had bad economic times before, although this is pretty dramatic right now,” he points out. “The stimulus package did not include golf, and when my dad was building golf courses in upstate New York, it put hundreds of people to work. I still think there are going to be a lot of municipal golf courses when the money comes in. The state has to get their bank account filled again. I question whether there will be many more high-end daily-fee courses unless they’re in a major destination spot like Orlando, Las Vegas, or maybe the Atlantic City area.”

Despite the cyclical nature of his business, there’s no other job Rees Jones would want. “I like what I do,” he says. “It’s not like work to some degree. I go to a lot of interesting places with different cultures.” Not unlike his own hometown of Montclair, New Jersey.

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