Jones: George Shultz was a personal friend of mine, a member at
San Francisco Golf Club, as I am. We played golf occasionally. When
he became Secretary of State under Reagan, in 1982, he knew about
the Moscow golf project and how it had been put on the back burner.
In late 1986, he told me, “Bobby, get ready. That project may have
some importance.”January 1987
Jones is in Moscow, quietly negotiating terms of the golf course commis-
sion with the UPDK.Jones: One night, I was walking by myself. There was no danger,
walking the streets in Moscow, because crime was punished severely.
But you couldn’t find good food.Craig Copetas, a Moscow-based journalist: It was about 1:00 in
the morning, and I had gone down to Old Arbat Street because I
needed to look into the window of an antiques shop there for a story
I was working on. No one was in Moscow at 1:00 a.m. in those days;
it was completely vacant. There’s one of these Moscow mists in the
air, kind of a frozen fog. And out of this mist, from around the cor-
ner, comes this guy wearing a baseball hat. He comes up to me and
says, in English, “Do you know where I can get something to eat?”
I said, “This is Moscow. Are you a tourist? Are you lost?” He says,
“No, I’m here building a golf course.”
Now, old Moscow hand that I am, having heard every conceiva-
ble farfetched tale you could imagine, my jaw dropped. I looked at
him and I said, “And I thought I was crazy.” I didn’t believe him. This
made absolutely no sense. But I was intrigued. I said to him, “Well,
I happen to know an illegal place down the street that stays open
quite late where we can get some khachapuri—it’s like a Georgian
pizza.” We went there and spent the whole morning talking,and he explained to me the project’s history. I was in complete awe.June 1, 1988
A deal to create Moscow Country Club was announced at a summit
meeting in Moscow, with a two-year contract between Jones’s firm and
the Soviet foreign ministry (via a “techno-export company”).Jones: Our plans had been approved by [Minister of Foreign Affairs
Eduard] Shevardnadze, and George Shultz actually did the final [U.S.]
approval of the project. Their contract was promptly agreed to, but
ours was not. In the contract I submitted, I put a plan in it that had
a legend: tee, fairways, greens and bunkers. The guy reviewing it in
the Commerce Department was not a golfer. He said, “Oh, I had to
send it to the Defense Department. You have a thing of known mil-
itary significance—bunkers.” That held it up.Blake Stafford, Jones’s business lawyer: We had to do some rede-
sign of the irrigation system, because there was a computer control
to regulate the irrigation heads. They also said, “What are these
bunkers?” I said, “They’re depressions in the ground you create to
catch errant golf balls.” They said, “It sounds like something from
a battlement of some kind.” I said, “Nope, it’s not for fighting wars,
it’s for fighting golfers.”- COMING TO AMERICA
NOVEMBER 1988
Jones invited a small group of Russians—among them, Deputy For-
eign Minister Ivan Ivanovich Sergeyev and assorted Soviet engineers
and architects—for a two-week U.S. tour to learn more about golf. The
itinerary included a visit to USGA headquarters in Far Hills, N.J., and
course tours in and around Washington, D.C., Chicago and Califor-
nia’s Monterey Peninsula.
Jones: When the Russians had a party, they had a party. Once you
broke the ice with them, they were very warm. In Moscow, they took
my son Trent to the circus. They took my wife and me to the Bolshoi
Ballet. We tried to return the same hospitality when they came to
see us in the States.B
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90 GOLF.COM / S e p tember 2019