"When the last putt falls at Congressional, the curtain will close on the Jones era of Open doctoring."

John Garrity tells us the era of Rees Jones messing with U.S. Open venues appears to be ending after this year's Open at Congressional.  

They point out that other designers have been hired to prepare seven of the next eight U.S. Open sites. (The USGA has assigned its Open venues through 2019, with the exception of 2018, which means it's quite likely that the earliest Jones's services could be called upon again would be in 2020, when he'll be 78.)

"So I may be the PGA Doctor," Jones says with an optimistic lilt, alluding to his redesign of the Atlanta Athletic Club's Highlands course for this year's PGA Championship and to his completed renovation of New Jersey's Baltusrol Golf Club for the 2016 tourney. "Or as one article called me, the 'PGA Physician.' " In certain countries, he adds, he'll still be the Open Doctor because he's toughening up national championship venues in China, Japan and Canada.

That's a relief.

As for player criticism of his no reward, all risk, drab-bunker, clumsily shaped features:

Jones dismisses such critiques with the air of a man brushing lint off his slacks. "My courses are only controversial," he says, "for the players who play poorly."

He also used the opportunity to rip the minimalist movement. 

Jones, while agreeing that he's a strategic designer, asks why a tournament venue would hire an architect who wasn't. "Today's middle-aged architects are really into aesthetics," he says, taking a shot at the naturalist trend in course design. "They love their wilderness bunkers, which tend to be expensive to build, hard to maintain and difficult to play out of."

Here's a challenge I guess I'm going to have to look into. 

Let's get a Rees design contract and fee for his shapers, and compare his fee with the project cost for employing Coore and Crenshaw's shapers.

And the, let's take the courses involved and find out whose bunkers are more to maintain, the ones that are trimmed a few times a year versus the rotund pieces that are mown with fly mowers every two weeks.