Robert Trent Jones, Jr. opens his ninth golf course in China this year — “They call me Chairman Bob over there,” he cheerfully notes — but these days the 74-year-old architect is celebrating a more unique achievement. Jones’ 1994 book, Golf by Design, has been translated into Mandarin and is now for sale in the many places where Chinese people work and play.
“There are 1.3 billion people in China, but what a lot of people don’t realize is that there are many, many other millions living outside China,” Jones explains. “There are a lot more Chinese than we think, and they love golf.”
Golf by Design’s publisher is a company controlled by a friend, Wang Jun, the princeling and former arms merchant who’s been called “the godfather of golf in China.” But even if the book finds a second life in the People’s Republic, Jones doesn’t intend to write another one.
“It’s the first and last book I’ll ever do,” he promises. “Writing it was the hardest thing I ever did.”