Patriot Golf Club

Vincent Grant Gill was born April 12, 1957 in Norman, Oklahoma. His father encouraged him to learn to play guitar and banjo, which he did, eventually adding bass, mandolin, dobro and fiddle to his instrumental array.

Gill achieved his big breakthrough in 1990 with "When I Call Your Name." That heart-rending lament won both the Country Music Association's Single of the Year award and a Grammy for Best Country Male Vocal Performance. Since then, Gill has won 17 more CMA honors, including Song of the Year four times. His Grammy awards now total 20. In the process of earning these distinctions, he has sold more than 26 million albums. His high, pure tenor voice and unerring sense of harmony have caused dozens of artists–from Reba McEntire to Dolly Parton to Barbra Streisand–to embrace him as a duet partner.

Gill co-hosted the nationally telecast CMA Awards for the first time in 1992. He continued to host "Country Music's Biggest Night™" for 12 consecutive years, ending his run in 2003. Gill not only set a record for the most times anyone has consecutively hosted a televised award show, but also raised the bar for other television awards emcees via his deft ad libs and gentle humor and his evident respect for his peers and the audience.

In 2006, Gill released These Days, a groundbreaking, four-CD set that featured 43 new recordings of diverse musical styles. Each album in the set explored a different musical mood – traditional country, rock, pop and bluegrass.

Gill is a member of the Grand Ole Opry. An avid golfer, he helped create the annual Vince Gill Pro-Celebrity Invitational Golf Tournament ("The Vinny") in 1993 in order to help support junior golf programs throughout Tennessee. Besides being known for his talent as a performer, musician and songwriter, Gill is one of country music's most active and effective humanitarians. He has participated in hundreds of charitable events throughout his career. In 2006, the Academy of Country Music honored him as its Humanitarian of The Year.

In August 2007, the Country Music Association inducted Gill into its gallery of immortals, the Country Music Hall of Fame.

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Robert Trent Jones, Jr. (Bobby) was born in 1939 and learned about golf at Winged Foot Golf Club from the legendary Tommy Armour, who not only taught Jones the techniques of good golf but also captured his imagination with the folklore surrounding the game. After studying geology and majoring in history and American Studies at Yale, and attending a year of law school at Stanford University, Jones, Jr. graduated into the family business. His earliest experience was working beside his father on the legendary Spyglass Hill in the 1960s. After apprenticing with the senior Jones for several years, becoming vice president of the company, and assuming control of west coast operations, Jones, Jr. eventually expanded the company's business to Asia with his debut international effort, Bangkok's Navatanee Golf Course. This foray across the ocean represented the first of hundreds of international course designs he would create in the ensuing years as he matured into a great artist. In 1972, the son left his father's firm and set out on his own by founding Robert Trent Jones II golf course architects, where he has assembled what is arguably the most talented golf course architecture team in the industry. Jones is a member of the California Golf Hall of Fame; a long-standing member, former president, and current board member of the American Society of Golf Course Architects; and the recipient of many other industry awards and honors.

Politically active and highly opinionated, the well-read Jones quotes Jesus, Odysseus, and Gorbachev with equal ease, and counts many powerful celebrities, politicians, and even kings and queens among his friends. He is extremely driven and creative, a wonderful story teller, an aggressive self-promoter not embarrassed about singing his own praises, a brilliant architect, and a true ambassador of the game of golf. Explaining why golf matters at all in a world rife with turmoil and tragedy, Jones says, "I believe that if we can play a sport together then we might not kill each other. It's the Olympic ideal: get guys communicating by having a competition through sports. And what sport do older diplomats and generals play? Golf."

Commenting on golf course architecture in general, Jones says, "All great courses possess an overall mood or rhythm that engenders feelings of anticipation mixed with nostalgia in most players when they reflect on the course. The architect produces this effect in a fashion similar to the way in which a great composer creates a symphony. Each hole is deftly adapted to the site's natural attributes. A great course also has balance, which derives from the melding, in a pleasant order, of holes of varying degrees of difficulty. For me the hallmark of a great course resides in a golfer's ability to remember and visualize all the holes after playing the course once."

Robert Trent Jones, Jr.'s own golf course designs have scaled mountains, enlivened deserts, ranged across prairies, carved through forests, reclaimed wastelands, and rolled down to the edges of the world's oceans. Known as the father of environmental golf course design, Jones respects and embraces the land in his work. He describes his courses as "of the earth ... for the spirit." Whether carefully routing holes around ancient holy sites on the lava fields of Hawaiian Islands, or devising drainage systems that help purify water on the site of former oil fields, Jones has made it his signature to listen to the land. An article in Smithsonian Magazine once described his work as "a case study of how a golf course can have a surprisingly low impact on even a sensitive environmental area." Jones has proved this at courses from California's The Links at Spanish Bay to The Mines Resort and Golf Club, built on a former tin mine in Malaysia.

Jones describes his own architectural style as "Complex, eclectic, and wide ranging–like a jazz musician–like Waller or Gillespie. It's got hints of Tillinghast, McKenzie, and Ross, but it's still my own." He also suggests that his style is always evolving as he learns new things from other courses–which is evident in such recent and award-winning RTJ II designs as Osprey Meadows at Tamarack Resort in Donnelly, Idaho, Bro Hof Slott Golf Club in Bro, Sweden, and Chambers Bay, in University Place, Washington.

In creating his well-loved courses, Jones likes to present golfers with a blend of penal, strategic, and heroic golf puzzles that it is up to each golfer to solve for himself–often by determining the best position from which to attack the holes. Jones keeps metaphorically comparable activities such as chess, billiards, and certain target sports in mind when sketching out holes. His focus is on shot values and fine aesthetic appearances.

Like the best writers and artists, Robert Trent Jones, Jr. employs subtext and symbolism, imagery and illusion, as well as a range of other techniques from the verbal and visual arts to express aspects of philosophy, drama, and aesthetics in the golf courses he builds. An RTJ II design is challenging, memorable, and well crafted, blending in with the surrounding topography as if it has always been there.

Jones adds, "The very best courses are those where nature has provided the canvas and my job is to discover her secrets and reveal them. I try to design golf courses that will fascinate people so they'll want to play them many times and learn the depths and meanings of the courses' stories, their subtext, their poetry."

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In 1997, David retired from professional golf when offered a position as a golf commentator for CBS Sports. "I always enjoyed talking more than playing, and now CBS is paying me for what I like to do most." Thanks to his sharp wit and colorful personality, David has become golf’s favorite announcer.

David’s success extends beyond broadcasting. He’s authored five books, several making the New York Times "Best Sellers List". Each is "chocked full with belly-busting humor", including his latest "The Power of Positive Idiocy". His popular monthly column on the back page of GOLF Magazine should be "read twice to exact every available laugh".

For David, his most fulfilling activities are on behalf of badly injured U.S. troops. David stages events for wounded Special Forces, Green Berets and other US heroes involving golf, hunting, bicycling and skiing. "Losing a limb, or the ability to use a limb, is one thing," Feherty says. "But the dignity they lose with it is perhaps even more important. And to be able to give them some of that dignity back is my mission with these days. It’s not a charity. It’s just us trying to pay back a very small part of the check that we owe them."

What works for Feherty as a rehabilitative tool is humor – wicked humor. Having battled depression, Feherty knows the healing value of laughter. "The only thing that kept me alive was my sense of humor. I really believe that’s a human’s last line of defense. If I can’t make them laugh, I want to make them smile."

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