Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

A DIFFICULT PAR

James R. Hansen

Robert Trent Jones Sr. and the Making of Modern Golf

The definitive account of modern golf’s foremost architect: Robert Trent Jones SR.

Robert Trent Jones was the most prolific and influential golf course architect of the twentieth century and became the archetypical modern golf course designer. Jones spread the gospel of golf by designing courses in forty-two US states and twenty-eight countries. Twenty U.S. Opens, America’s national championship, have been contested on Jones-designed courses.

New York Times bestselling biographer James R. Hansen, author of First Man: The Life of Neil A. Armstrong, recounts how an English immigrant boy arrived in upstate New York in 1912, just as golf was emerging as a popular pastime in America. Jones excelled as a golfer, earning admission to Cornell University, whose faculty consented to a curriculum tailored to teach him the knowledge needed to design golf courses. Cornell provided the springboard for an act of self-invention that propelled Jones from obscurity to worldwide fame.

Jones believed that every hole should be “a difficult par but an easy bogey.” As gifted as he was at golf design, Jones was equally skilled as a salesman, promoter, and entrepreneur. Golf Digest’s annual rankings of the 100 Greatest Golf Courses have regularly featured about fifty Jones designs, paving the path for his two sons, Robert Jr., and Rees, whose work would carry on their father’s tradition. Hansen examines Jones’s legacy in all its complexity and influence, including the fraternal rivalry of Jones’s distinguished sons.

Besides being an acclaimed New York Times bestselling author, James R. Hansen has always been an avid golfer and plays to a six handicap. Hansen has played and studied more than six hundred courses around the world. He lives in Auburn, Alabama.

Available products
Book Published 2014-05-08 by Gotham
Book Published 2014-05-08 by Gotham

Comments

A Difficult Par is comfortably the best golf biography I have read, the first time, to my knowledge, that a historian of such eminence has shone the light of his professional skills on one of the game's major figures. Jones emerges from Hansen's scrutiny as a deeply flawed individual, but in many ways a classic American rags to riches (and almost back to rags again!) story, his impact on golf enormous, though not always wholly positive. Kudos is due to all concerned: the Jones family for authorising the book, though it does not paint them in the most forgiving colours, but mostly to the author for navigating a minefield and producing a work of such stature.

A Difficult Par is an American Dream saga--the story of an impoverished but ambitious young man without a high school diploma who married the girl of his dreams and gained fame and fortune as the world's premier golf architect. In this remarkable biography, James R. Hansen combines an engrossing family saga of courtship, romance, marital love, father-son tensions, and sibling rivalries with a detailed chronicle of Jones's business practices and a fascinating analysis of Jones's theory and practice of golf architecture. Hansen skillfully describes dozens of Jones's most celebrated courses, clearly demonstrating that Jones's genius lay in his ability to design a course that would severely test the world's premier golfers, but also provide an enjoyable round for hackers and duffers who struggle to break 100.

As a historian and simple lover of classic golf course architecture, I've been waiting a long time for a comprehensive biography of the man who shaped the landscape of the modern game. With A Difficult Par, James Hansen has done the game of golf a great service by delivering a beautifully written and defining examination of the complicated life and legacy of Robert Trent Jones, including the dynastic succession that continues to shape the game we know today. This wonderful book is an easy birdie and difficult to put down. A well-worn copy deserves to be on every true golf lover's bookshelf.

A Difficult Par paints a memorable portrait of the life and works of the father of modern golf architecture, and depicts his remarkable succession from immigrant to immortal. A must read for students of the game and its most noble names.

Robert Trent Jones was the most influential man in golf course design since Old Tom Morris. This biography by James Hansen is essential reading for all who love golf and golf courses. There is no book like it, answering far more questions about the leading personalities and practices of modern golf course design than any author has ever achieved.

Most of us in the golf world felt this was a book that could never be written. It took a decade of dogged persistence on Hansen's part to produce not just a candid and truthful biography of Trent Jones but a veritable masterpiece in sport literature.

In this magisterial study of Robert Trent Jones, James R. Hansen narrates the remarkable achievements of the world’s most celebrated golf course architect. Hansen not only delves deeply into Jones’s Walter Mitty-like personality, he sets Jones's achievements into the context of America’s reach as the world’s leading economic and cultural power. A Difficult Par is a rich three-dimensional account of an extraordinary and uniquely American life.