With their legacies on the line, it's time for the sons of Robert Trent Jones to end their feud

A couple decades back, I was on a hunting trip to Wyoming with several family members and friends. We hunted deer and antelope at a ranch near Douglas, owned by some colorful old geezer.

In between giving the ground lead poisioning shooting at our prey, we found out a lot about the old guy, namely his decades-long feud with his brother, who lived at the ranch next door. We even got to hear a long, terrifying description of how he blew away his bother’s cat when it got to his property.

A year later, sadly, the brother got his payback, blowing away his nemesis brother with a shotgun. It seems he had turned 80 and decided enough was enough. It was by all means a sad turn of events, but it just seemed inevitable that death and prison would be how their story ended.

It was also one of those head-scratching times where everyone wondered how two brothers could have such a deep animosity. Both were successful, jovial people. And both despised one another. It made very little sense.

Much like the feud the Jones boys are having.

The South Florida Sun-Sentinal has a good story online about the battle between Robert Trent Jones’s boys, Rees and Robert Jr., that leaves readers with the same feelings of “why” as the two old Wyoming ranchers gave myself and my hunting group.

Things have been coming to a head lately over a possible redesign of Coral Ridge Country Club, which was the favorite course of the elder Jones. Rees Jones is planning on doing the redesign, while Robert Trent Jones Jr. is against the whole idea.

The Sun-Sentinal has no reasons on why the rivalry between the two renowned designers began, but the story gets others to express their views on the feud – because the bothers won’t talk about it, or each other, it seems.

It’s a shame that the brothers – two of the biggest names in modern course design – can’t get their act together and are content to be childish. In the end, it hurts not only their reputations, but also the reputation of their legendary father.

“It was their father’s sincerest wish late in his life that his sons would resolve their differences,” a former associate of Jones Sr. told the Sun-Sentinal.

With Father’s Day approaching, here’s hoping that the Jones boys kiss and make up. It would be an honor to their dad, and put them both back on track to maintaining and building on his great legacy.

Because being known as bickering brothers, rather than sons who built upon their father’s great works, will in the end only diminish the myriad accomplishments of each brother. Basically, it’s time for the Jones boys to grow up.

–WKW