Architects
William F Bell (1962)
Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner (2005)
California Dreams
Even municipal golf breaks the budget for a musician living off $5 Footlongs and the McDonald’s Dollar Menu. That’s why the clubs I played with while growing up in Hawaii were shoved into the attic of the three-bedroom house I shared with my five bandmates in Santa Barbara, California, two decades ago.
The years that followed were a haze of heavy drinking and other abuses to my body that I feel to this day. After we went on our first national tour in 2008 and Iration became my sole source of income, I learned that success in this business meant I needed some different hobbies. In the early 2010s, a group of fellow musicians put together a round in Monterey near a festival we were all playing. Despite years off the course, I figured I could pick up my clubs and jump right back to where I’d left off as a kid who regularly shot in the 80s. What unfurled was the most embarrassing sporting event of my life. The sheer humiliation of being terrible and watching my friends get around the course with ease struck a nerve. I got the bug.
My life changed forever after that day. Golf became my obsession. Tours became opportunities to see courses all over the country that I’d never bothered to think about back when I was hungover. I became a hopelessly stricken golf course architecture nerd.
Suddenly, my home courses began to lose their appeal. We would often drive the hour south to highly rated Rustic Canyon, or, when lucky enough to be invited, play the Dr. Alister MacKenzie–designed Valley Club of Montecito (which has informed my love of architecture perhaps more than any other course). The feeling you get after leaving those places is like hearing a song you can’t get out of your head. But I still needed to find an option close to home that could give me the same vibe. That yearning led me to Soule Park.
Lost and Found
My dad was born on the Valley Isle of Maui, and by the time he moved to the Big Island of Hawaii and started our family, he was your average 20-handicapper. He played with his buddies and gambled a few dollars while mostly enjoying the company and the cold beers. I began in the local HSJGA program in Waikoloa at age 10, and before long, I started beating him. My dad took pride in that and would often bring me along as his little ringer during rounds with his business partners. We had a course called Waimea Country Club that was definitely not a country club. It was five minutes from our home and became the place where we spent most of our time together. There were two par 3s that sat inside a wooded grove and played over small ponds. I remember feeling disbelief that holes like that existed so close to my neighborhood when most of the golf played on the island was through the black lava rock that covers the northwest side.
On the weekends that we didn’t play golf, my dad would load up our Kermit-green International Harvester Scout and drive us down the harrowing one-lane road that winds into Waipio Valley. The black-sand beach that sits at the end of the road was where we explored an almost impossibly beautiful landscape with wild horses and sheer green walls. Those memories have inspired many of the songs I’ve written.
“Lost & Found” is a song about the way a memory or a place can be an anchor when you feel adrift in the world. It references the sandy sheets and sunburnt cheeks of my childhood that help bring me to a happier place when I’m missing my family and the simple comforts of home. About once a week, I make the 50-minute drive from Santa Barbara to a place that now offers me that same escape.
Soule Park Golf Club sits in the middle of Ojai Valley, about 15 miles inland from the Pacific, under the shadow of the Topatopa Mountains. A few years back, my friend Parker Anderson, a burgeoning Renaissance Golf Design designer/shaper, brought me to my first Soule Monday skins game. I had played there before, but that day he helped me see the true beauty and value of the course and its community. Soule Park has architecture that belongs behind a six-figure membership fee, but its true strength lies in the people who play there for less than $50 a round.
My foursomes are usually made up of surfers, lawyers, real estate agents, divorcées, retirees, artists, students and service-industry folk. Some are there for the camaraderie, some to forget about real life and some to pay off gambling debts, but all share a love of the course. Most are unaware that it was designed by arguably the game’s most in-demand architects, but that is a testament to the fact that there is no placebo effect in place. The combination of natural beauty, proper golf and passionate players creates a synergy that is greater than the sum of its parts. On tour, I make it a point to play as much golf as possible; I’m now lucky enough to have seen many of the world’s top courses. But no matter where I play, it’s tough to match the feeling I get when pulling up to the gates of Soule.
Stay the Course
From late December 2004 through the early days of January 2005, a catastrophic deluge fell on central California. Ventura took on nearly an entire year’s worth of rain. Multiple homes and businesses in Ojai were flooded. A landslide took the lives of 10 people in La Conchita. A barranca running through Soule Park became a surging river. The golf course was essentially washed away.
Garrett Morrison of The Fried Egg wrote an incredible story of the devastation and eventual rebirth at Soule. In it, he quotes Logan Hall, who was working there at the time: “It was a hell of a scene. It was apocalyptic.…I don’t remember one person that was like, ‘Oh yeah, we’ll be okay.’ Pretty much everybody was like, ‘How’s your résumé looking these days?’”
The County of Ventura commissioned the golf course in 1959, naming it after Zaidee Soule, the woman who’d donated the land. Her family was part of the original settlers of Ojai, and the property was initially a sheep ranch. The county chose William F. Bell to design it. The “F.” is important because his father, William P. Bell— “Billy” Bell, as he was known—was the lead associate for golden-age great George C. Thomas Jr. and helped him build Los Angeles Country Club North, Riviera and Bel-Air Country Club, among other gems. The younger Bell surely benefited from his father’s name—he landed some incredible golf properties in Southern California—but never hit the same design heights as his father or Thomas. Nevertheless, Soule opened in 1962 and remained popular among the locals even though the condition of the course deteriorated over the ensuing decades. As Morrison put it, “When I first saw Soule Park in the 1990s, I was struck by the scale of the land, the pulse-quickening drop from the 1st tee to the fairway, and the wide, dry ravine cutting through it all. The course wasn’t exceptional, but the place was.”
After the storms, the damage was so severe that for months no one knew if the county would spend the money to save the course. Finally, Craig Price came to town. Price, whose company managed Rustic Canyon, got things back in playing shape. And he had two secret weapons: Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner. The two men had (along with Geoff Shackelford) designed Rustic Canyon, and Price tapped them to bring Soule back to life. The duo was still coming up back then, but the magic of Rustic Canyon and the potential of their future projects was evident. They kept the original routing, but shaped the new, larger and more intricate greens, playing corridors and bunkers by themselves, adding variety, strategy and fun throughout the course.
“When we first saw Soule Park, it was right after major flooding, and the course looked a bit like a war zone on the holes along the barranca,” Hanse told me. “There was an irrigation pipe sticking up in the air, bridges were torn out of the ground and there was debris everywhere. However, the setting for the golf course was amazing, and there was beauty about it that made us realize that this could be a really special place.”
Despite the work, Soule still struggled with maintenance and management issues. Several years went by, along with Price and another set of managers. Around 2015, the course was already losing its Hanse-and-Wagner feel. Keith Brown was next in the management line, and the fit was, thankfully, perfect. With deep experience in California municipal golf, Brown set about reestablishing the course and its culture.
He and his team worked to pull the layout back to how Hanse and Wagner had envisioned it. They also set about making the club a friendlier place to be. “I wish I had taken a photo of all the signs I took down from the property that said, ‘No, you can’t do this, that, or the other,’” Brown told Morrison. “It was unbelievable. Even [the outgoing message on] the answering machine, before it said anything to you, told you that proper golf attire was required. You walked into the pro shop, it reminded you that proper golf attire was required. When you stepped onto the golf course, you would see a sign that told you what you shouldn’t be doing. You looked at the driving range, the same thing. We took everything down.”
Brown also led a renovation of Zaidee’s Bar & Grill and turned it into a destination that locals now flock to for a meal with an incredible view. Today, the vibe is distinctly Californian, with players sporting everything from matching J.Lindeberg outfits to tank tops and bare feet to dogs on leashes.
Already Gold
When I’m driving down the 101 South to play Soule, I often think of the par-4 eighth hole, which climbs up a slope and works right to left to a brilliant green structure built into the side of the hill with a massive front bunker protecting it. I also plot out how to play the incredible short par-5 fourth, with its two-sided “boomerang” green that is as memorable a feature on a municipal course as I’ve ever seen. But I always come back to the par-5 fifth.
From the tee box, a series of hanging power lines haunt your line of sight. I have a knack for hitting famous landmarks. The first time I played Old Macdonald at Bandon Dunes, I hooked a drive directly into the Ghost Tree. (No word as to whether or not that resulted in its recent bout with mortality.) A Soule local rule states that you get a mulligan if you hit the power line. It’s also said that you aren’t a true local until you do. So, in true “Poosh” fashion, I hit one twice in a row.
The fifth is the second of two consecutive par-4.5 holes. It was originally a par 4 but was expanded by Hanse and Wagner. Then they got wild and built one of the few legitimate punchbowl greens in California. The hole plays slightly downhill, into the predominant breeze that flows consistently up the valley toward Ventura. The course boundary runs along the left side of the hole, and, in true risk/reward style, the optimal line of play is down that side.
When I asked Hanse what he remembered about building the fifth hole, he said, “It was expanding the concept of the long par 4, where you can land it short and let it feed onto the green. Playing to avoid the centerline bunker will allow you to hit the long second shot into the bowl, and hopefully it is very receptive to that type of shot.”
At some point, the centerline bunker was replaced by a mound. It’s now basically an upside-down grass bunker, and it creates some great images when someone is forced to climb to the top of it to attempt their second shot. There is also a sizable oak tree sitting 30 yards short right of the green. It forces the layup shots to be played to the dangerous left side and penalizes mishit second shots that glance off the tree or land beneath it. And if that wasn’t enough, the San Antonio and Thacher creeks combine just to the right of the green. For years the river was dry, but during another recent rainstorm that wiped out two on-course bridges, the water washed away the shrubbery that had been obscuring it. For a few months that followed, a stunning river flowed next to the green. I’ll never forget walking up to it during one of those days, taking in the scene and thinking about how $39 to play here felt like robbery.
If I’ve learned anything from my long days on the road, and now from being a father of two, it’s that beauty is often found in the places we least expect. Like the fifth hole at Soule, which opens with the most muni trope ever, but leads you to a place that’s on par with any top-50 private. It’s why, for me, Soule Park is the best public golf in America.
On Tour with Micah Pueschel
Want more with Micah? Listen to TGJ Podcast 170, where the Iration frontman goes deep on tour life, playing an “insane” run of golf and his performance anxiety, among other topics:
