Call it Heaven

Consider your social circle. Think about that friend who is always on their phone—the one you roll your eyes at because you thought you were in the middle of a conversation, but they’re suddenly inside a damn screen. Now imagine that person on their phone roughly 42 times as often. And then, somehow, imagine not hating that person. Irving Azoff takes every call. And his phone rings constantly. Over the nearly three days we spent together at Ladera, the most radical thing to hit this dusty stretch of Southern California desert since Coachella, 10 minutes rarely went by without a call or text. At one point, as we rolled across the 300-acre golf playground he created with Apple senior vice president of services Eddy Cue, I cocked an incredulous eyebrow at Azoff and asked, “Even the unlisted numbers?” He grinned in the bemused way a parent looks at a child who is just learning to tie their shoes and replied, “You always answer the unlisted ones.”

I didn’t go into the trip blind: At 76, Azoff remains one of the most powerful and well-connected people in the entertainment industry. He dropped out of the University of Illinois in 1970 to focus on his bustling business of managing bands, which already included REO Speedwagon. In the decades since, he’s had a hand in managing or promoting the Eagles, Van Halen, Jimmy Buffett, Bon Jovi, U2, Guns N’ Roses, Fleetwood Mac, Journey, Jennifer Lopez, Christina Aguilera, John Mayer and Nicki Minaj, among many others. As CEO of Ticketmaster in 2010, he led its $2.5 billion merger with Live Nation. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2020.

Azoff sporting the soon-to-be-coveted Ladera lemon mark

Today, he runs the Azoff Company, which still manages a slew of big names. Among myriad lucrative side ventures, he has helped conceive and launch multiple entertainment venues, including the Sphere in Las Vegas. And yet I was still blown away by the dizzying volume of phone calls from celebrities, their agents and various other powerful people.

The names I’m allowed to mention are eye-popping. The ones I’m not are even wilder. But after some time in Azoff’s world, a strange phenomenon begins to set in: The sexiness of this elite network becomes the norm. He deals with so many people worth eight, nine and 10 figures that Michael Jordan calling is just a regular thing that can happen on a Thursday afternoon. Harry Styles needs to get his birthday golf trip dialed in. Ellen DeGeneres is in the market for a new house.

In this new universe, I gradually became less interested in keeping a list of the names that blew up Azoff’s phone. Who, I wondered, does the man who talks with everyone want to hear from the most? The answer turned out to be simple: his four children and Gil Hanse.

“So, Eddy called,” Azoff tells me as we walk from the most luxurious temporary clubhouse in the 500-year history of golf toward a perfect line of blooming lemon trees near the practice range. “He can’t make it. He’s gotta be with Tim in LA.”

This is Azoff’s way of explaining that Cue, who was scheduled to join us, is now going with Apple CEO Tim Cook to a series of Oscar-weekend festivities. It occurs to me that Azoff—who, in addition to his achievements in the music business, has producer credits on Urban Cowboy, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and The Hurricane, and could likely get Christopher Nolan on the phone to discuss his next blockbuster—might also have more-important places to be.

“Sucks for Eddy!” he cackles. “Look at this place. Who would want to be anywhere other than here?”

He has a point. Nestled at the base of the Santa Rosa Mountains in the southeastern corner of the Coachella Valley, Ladera is a 50-minute drive from the Palm Springs airport, in a rural farming community called Thermal. More important to the small membership hand-picked by Azoff and Cue, it’s also fewer than 10 minutes from a private airport.

During my trip, it became clear that Ladera is not the prudent financial investment of two stern, bean-counting executives. Rather, everyone I spoke to, from employees at the course to the Azoff children, presented it as a passion project, with Azoff and Cue in the lead as a kind of goofball comedy duo.

“My wife says the two of us combined are dangerous,” Cue later told me over a conference call with his best friend, during which they laughed, poked fun at each other and basically proved everyone correct.

“Fuck yeah, we are!” Azoff howled.

Thus began their recounting of how Ladera came to be. It started nearly 20 years ago in what has become an industry legend. Cue was launching the iTunes store, and Steve Jobs asked why it didn’t include one of his favorite bands, the Eagles. Cue tracked down Azoff, who was managing the band. Together, they worked through an impasse at the record label, which led to several other high-profile Azoff clients joining the store. It’s not over the top to say this collaboration revolutionized the way all of us listen to music.

Azoff and Cue quickly discovered they were even better friends than business associates. Their families became close, taking trips to a house they bought together at Gozzer Ranch Golf and Lake Club in Idaho. All young adults now, the three Cue children love golf, and the Azoff boys are obsessed. Jeffrey Azoff qualified for the 2023 U.S. Mid-Amateur and has won multiple club championships at Riviera. His younger brother, Cameron, is also an accomplished amateur player.

Both families also have houses at the Madison Club, a posh Discovery Land property in the Coachella Valley where Adele lives around the corner from several Kardashians. Despite being one of the most exclusive communities in the area, the club was not immune to the post-COVID golf boom. One cool desert morning in 2021, the two men stood horrified watching multiple groups hack through the first hole. Cue cracked to Azoff that they should just build their own place.

“He should have never told me that,” Azoff said.

Things from there happened quickly, as they often do with Azoff and Cue.

“At first it was a family joke,” Cameron Azoff tells me on a late afternoon as we fire golf balls toward the horizon of Ladera’s perfectly manicured range. “Then they found the land. Then we were interviewing architects. Everything just started coming into place.”

After meeting with a star-studded list of designers, Azoff and Cue fell hard for Hanse and Jim Wagner. But they are one of the few duos on the planet who might be as busy as Cue and Azoff. They had a 10-month window to start from scratch on a strip of land that was still a citrus grove, or else the entire project would have to be pushed back a year. 

“It was a lot from a logistical standpoint,” Hanse later told me. “How do we move that much dirt in that short of a time? Getting equipment there, that kind of thing. But we weren’t intimidated at the scale of the job. We actually relished it because we hadn’t worked on something like that.”

Hanse and Wagner also had two uncommon advantages. The first was a nearly open checkbook from Azoff and Cue. The second was intrinsic, but perhaps even more significant.

“Irving is a genius when dealing with stars and artists,” Cue said. “Almost everyone who wants to build a golf course wants to be a designer. Gil and Jim asked us what we wanted, and we had a few small requests. But, at the end of the day, Irv knew when it came to actually doing the course, we had to let Gil and Jim do their thing.”

Cue, who has led the Apple Pay, News and Books projects, among several others, knew how to set the stakes.

“I’ve learned if you want to do something great, it’s never easy,” he said. “You can’t take shortcuts. We could have taken a lot of shortcuts. But we weren’t going to compromise. And that’s hard.”

“I’ll never forget what Eddy said to Gil,” Azoff said. “He told him to make this place his legacy. We provided a great piece of land and a great budget. He told Gil that if this wasn’t a great golf course, it was his fault.”

“It’s the truth,” Cue added. “I think he appreciated that we weren’t bullshitting him.”

Roughly 2 million cubic yards of earth moved and $40 million later, Ladera opened for play in 2023.

“In my line of work, when you build something, if you can get it to 70% of what you thought it could be, that’s incredible,” Azoff said. “This place came out 200% of what I thought it could.”

“Fuck you, Cameron!”

“It’s true, Dad.”

“No way!”

“Yep. There is one palm tree on this course. And you will never find it.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me! Alright, get the fuck out and walk to the next tee box. I have to take this call.”

My first day at Ladera is a late-afternoon course tour by cart and a range session with father and son. From the moment I arrived, Azoff has been bragging that Ladera is the only course out of more than 120 in the Coachella Valley with “no palm trees and no scum ponds.” No palm trees or water on a course in the Palm Springs area may feel like sacrilege, but Azoff and Cue were adamant. Their vision proves to be stunning: Ladera is framed by hundreds of lemon trees saved from the original grove. Looking out from the steel beams and cozy chairs of the clubhouse patio, it’s an inviting, open space of flagsticks, wildflowers, gaping bunkers, bumpy fairways and dry arroyos.

And, apparently, one palm tree. Cameron just let the cat out of the bag on a practical joke the kids decided to play on their fathers during construction.

“The tree is tiny,” Cameron tells me, unable to contain his laughter. “But we knew it would piss them off, especially Irv. We had to do it.”

Such is the playful, family-oriented vibe here. But make no mistake: It’s still all golf. Azoff, Cue and their children have played nearly every famous course in the world, and between them the two scions have roughly two dozen club memberships. They are still creating the rules at Ladera, and, just like the no-palm-trees edict, they aren’t afraid to buck trends. There are no pools, pickleball courts, cart paths or houses, nor will there ever be. In the past few years, some of the game’s new clubs have made it a point to be overly casual, putting on a show about flouting golf’s stuffy traditions. Not here. Despite the heat of the desert, Azoff and Cue have decreed that Ladera will be walking-only as much as possible. There will be limited groups on the course at all times.

Case in point: One day, Azoff and I are scheduled to play in the midmorning, behind a group of executives from two large, powerful companies. But when their private jet arrives late, they ask if they can play as a fivesome. Azoff and his team politely tell them to get started warming up and they will see what can be done.

“A fivesome?” Azoff steams as he walks away. “Would Augusta let them do that? This isn’t a fucking hit-and-giggle.”

Then Azoff, who famously made his fortune by doing whatever was necessary to make his clients and guests happy, grits his teeth and comes up with a solution. “They’re going off on No. 10,” he says. “I don’t even want to see them out there.” 

We are the only two groups playing that day.

But the practical joke from Cameron and the kids wouldn’t happen at Augusta either. Ladera is family first, ultra-private club second. Azoff and Cue brought their families in on several aspects of building it, taking input on course design, tee markers and scorecards as well as the logo and merchandise. 

“It’s just amazing that they included us so much throughout the process,” Jeffrey Azoff later told me. “They absolutely didn’t have to. They have accomplished so much that no one would have minded at all if they just built it by themselves. But they really wanted this to be a family thing.”

And it always will be. Ownership of the club will stay with the families.

“When we started this, people thought we were going into the golf business,” Cue said. “But this has never been about business. We love golf and we love our families, and Irving and I have been fortunate enough in our careers to be able to make this with them.”

“This is really for them,” Azoff chimed in. “It’s so cool to think about the kids one day taking the torch from us and having this be their paradise.”

The first hole at Ladera pays homage to a sacred place for the Azoff and Cue families. Just like their beloved first at Riviera, it begins at one of the high points of the property, with a gasp-inducing look at the round about to unfold. And just like Riv’s famous opener, it’s also a short and lively par 5 with a thrilling downhill tee shot. Azoff’s phone doesn’t ring once as we both make par. Between that, Hanse and Wagner’s triumph of earth movement and the top-three-on-the-planet cookie I devoured in the clubhouse, the magic moments are beginning to pile up.

The front nine works clockwise around the outer edge of the property, coiling around the counterclockwise second nine—a hat tip to another family favorite at Muirfield. Sloping roughly 140 feet from the course’s high point along what once was level ground, Ladera, while being completely fabricated, pulls off the rare trick of looking like it has always been sitting in the desert. Moving along humpy-bumpy fairways as wide as 100 yards, the black tees sit at 7,365 yards, and a series of shorter tees are available for every kind of player. (The tips can be stretched out to 7,700 yards, and it was Cameron’s idea to make them pink.)

The barrancas and bunkers throughout force strategic thinking on every shot. Already an award-winning critical darling in the architecture community, Ladera has the effect of being challenging but fun. It’s a big ballpark, but an easy walk. It’s no exaggeration to say it’s already on a trajectory to be regarded as one of America’s great courses.

It’s also starting to garner some of the character and legend that great golf courses need. Fred Couples, whose former coach, Paul Marchand, is now the director of golf at Ladera, started a 3-wood about 30 yards out over the barranca on the difficult par-4 15th before fading it to 3 feet for birdie. The Azoffs and Marchand still speak of the shot in hushed tones.

There are winks and inside jokes everywhere for the mega golf nerds. Some greens, like the massive fourth, are a callback to St. Andrews, while the complex on the long par-3 12th features a Biarritz dip in the back portion rather than the traditional front or middle. The walk from the short par-3 eighth hole to the uphill par-4 ninth winds through an intimate path set between two shoulder-high dunes à la Portmarnock (where the Azoffs are members). The Augusta National–esque open grass area between the ninth and 18th holes and the clubhouse is no accident.

“The golf IQ was really high in both families, so we had a great time adding all these little touches throughout the course,” Hanse said.

The drivable par-4 15th hole is inspired by the fabled 10th at Riviera, only here, instead of bunkers, the green is protected by severe drops. (Rob Light, a managing partner at Creative Artists Agency and one of the few  people at Azoff’s level in terms of music industry clout, was one of the first members at Ladera. The first time he played No. 15, he made a 10 and Azoff immediately named the hole after him.)

After we both make unlikely birdies there, Azoff high-fives me and happily points out another infinity view of the valley tumbling out below us, explaining how Hanse and Wagner took great care in preserving full 360-degree panoramas throughout the course. We take a breath and soak it in, until his phone jolts the silence.

“Hi, baby!” Azoff yelps. We’re standing close enough to where I can hear the female voice on the other end.

“Hi, Daddy! Just wanted to check in and say hi. Hope you’re having a great day out there.”

He walks off aimlessly, practically skipping at his daughter’s call. “Aww, thanks. It’s another perfect day out here. Everything OK with you?”

Before the end of our round, he will take multiple calls in an effort to rescue a charity concert: One R&B legend has cancelled, and Azoff is working a few favors to convince a second one to replace him. (Jeffrey will later tell me that their company represents neither of the stars; Irving was just trying to help solve the problem for a friend.) Azoff plays most of the par-3 third hole while on the phone with Don Henley. To watch his blend of compassionate friend who always listens and hard-edged deal-maker is a marvel on the scale of his golf course.

But when Azoff’s children call—and all four of them do, as they do nearly every day—he becomes Dad. He smiles at me as we peg it on the tough par-3 16th and says, “Your kids are much younger than mine, so it’s still too early for you. But one day, when they’re off living their lives, you’ll see that those calls are the best parts of your day.”

Then, just like jumping to the next song, we’re back to golf. And storytelling. He doubles over with laughter recalling how when Glenn Frey was alive, they would organize Eagles tour stops near as many great golf courses as possible.

“Henley hates golf,” Azoff says, “and he would always get so mad at us. He’d call me and yell, ‘What the fuck are we doing in some shitty town named Pinehurst?’”

Azoff caught the bug playing with Frey, and the duo churned through as many top-100s as possible. He gets going on another classic Frey yarn: Decades ago, the musician was on a first-class flight, and he noticed that the guy sitting next to him was drawing golf holes. He introduced himself and was starstruck to discover the man was Pete Dye. They dug into a conversation, and Frey confessed the nickname that he and Azoff had for the legendary designer.

“Mr. Dye, your golf courses are very hard,” he said. “We like to call you Pete ‘Eat Shit and’ Dye.”

Azoff and I don’t keep score. “I’m just as competitive as the next guy,” he says, not realizing the understatement bigger than the mountains above us. “But today I just want to bang it around and have fun.”

 Not that he has to, but Azoff warns me about the gaping bunker up the right side of the par-4 18th. Naturally, I blast one in there and make double. Azoff finishes another call as I pull the ball out of the cup and ushers me over to Ladera’s par-3 course.

Playfully named Q&A, the short course is a kaleidoscope of sloping greens and funky tee shots out of Wagner’s imagination. On the third hole, I hit what I think is a nice wedge, only to have it come up just short and roll 40 yards back down the hill.

“You got Wagnered!” Azoff hollers with glee.

The final hole of Q&A features a massive two-tiered green with the hole in front and a putting green on the back side. “Looks like Oakmont, right?” Azoff says as we end an unforgettable day.

“Can you hear that shit?! It’s ridiculous!”

At first, I cannot. Azoff points to a plane coming across the valley. The course is high enough into the base of the mountains (ladera is Spanish for “foothills”) that we are nearly eye level with planes coming into Palm Springs International Airport. Sure enough, the only sound is the distant whine of the plane’s engines. Azoff complains constantly about them having the temerity to invade his turf. 

“It’s almost perfectly quiet out here,” he says as we walk along the fifth hole. “But I’m part of the problem because I use the Thermal airport. Maybe I can just get planes to come in and out at night? No, that wouldn’t work. Damn it.”

I laugh and wonder if Azoff’s next investment will be in funding technology to soundproof plane engines. I ask how much he appreciates quiet after decades of being around ear-splitting guitars.

“You know, all those arenas have given me some hearing loss and a lot of brain damage,” he says. “I just really like it out here. Except for those fucking planes.”

Exceedingly minor issues aside, Azoff and Cue know they’ve built something special in the desert.

“In the beginning, I was worried,” Cue said on our call. “I knew the place wasn’t going to be bad. But I didn’t know if it was going to be magical. I couldn’t see it when it was dirt.”

Then Hanse found it. In January 2023, the course was in its early stages of being grassed, and Azoff and Cue invited a small group to come out, including Jeffrey, Light, PGA Tour Policy Board member Jimmy Dunne and venture capitalist Geoff Yang.

“No. 8 wasn’t even ready yet,” Cue said. “And somebody said, ‘Fuck it, let’s go play it.’”

Looking out over the short par 3, Dunne laid down the stakes: $20 per man for closest to the pin and $1,000 each for a hole-in-one. After Jeffrey led off and didn’t jar it, Cue upped it to $10,000 per man. Dunne ended up the closest at about 8 feet, with Hanse going last.

It was playing at the scorecard length of 135 yards, and Hanse later joked to Golf Digest that since he’d designed the course, he knew just where to hit it. Sure enough, his 9-iron landed soft and rolled directly into the cup. Chaos ensued, with clubs thrown everywhere, shouts, hugs and photos. Over beers out of a cooler, it was decided that the 60 grand would go to Hanse and Wagner’s Caveman Scholarships program, which provides money to the children of underprivileged employees at courses where the designers have worked.

“It was validation from the golf gods,” Cue said.

“You couldn’t have written it better,” Azoff chimed in. 

On my final night, Azoff’s wife, Shelli, joins us for dinner. She’s an absolute firecracker, and the couple comes off like sparring characters from Curb Your Enthusiasm. (Azoff is, of course, buddies with Larry David.) She’s come down from LA on a mission to pry Azoff out of the desert and take him back with her to the Vanity Fair Oscar party. He complains about one of Hollywood’s most legendary social scenes being “such an all-day thing” and having “so many people.” Shelli retorts that it’s his job to be one of those people. He rolls his eyes, admits she is right, then goes back to texting John Mayer.

“Of all the things he’s done, and he has done some legitimately great things, this is his pièce de résistance,” Shelli leans over and quietly tells me. “He’s never been prouder of anything. The course was made with extreme detail, but mostly love.”

Now my phone is ringing.

It’s my first day back home, and the girls are thrilled to see Dad but also immediately fighting over who gets to hug which leg. The little one is trying to drag me to the potty to show me her latest successful effort. We are a long way from perfectly manicured fairways, otherworldly chocolate-chip cookies and figuring out U2’s next move after playing the Sphere.

I manage to pull an arm free and look at my phone. Unlisted number. I answer.

“Hey, Travis, it’s Irving! Just checking to see if you got home safely.”

I assure him I have, tell him I already miss Ladera and ask about the Vanity Fair party.

“Oh, no, I didn’t go,” he says with a mischievous chuckle. “The weather was too nice here. I had to stay.”