The design does not incorporate unnatural water features, it’s not lined by palm trees, and it’s not constrained by housing considerations. Ladera breaks the mold of desert golf in Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley. Now that they’ve opened Ladera Golf Club in Thermal, Calif., Golf Digest’s Best New Private Course of 2023, the worlds of music and tech have merged like never before. Today, they count nearly two dozen memberships between them, mostly the same clubs, and play about 70 rounds a year together. Eddy Cue, a first-generation Cuban-American from Miami whose father was a stagehand and mother a butcher, studied computer science at Duke and has worked at Apple since 1989. He would run Ticketmaster and later be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. Irving Azoff dropped out of the University of Illinois in 1970 because it would’ve been financially reckless not to transfer his robust booking business of fraternity bands (among them REO Speedwagon) to Los Angeles. Better still is when money isn’t really a concern because you’ve both won low-net and gross in the game of life. The only thing better than building your own golf course is building one with your best friend.
