When Rickie Fowler won the Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit on July 2, ending a four-year winless drought, the cheers for one of the game’s most popular players could almost be heard from the Murrieta Valley Golf Range, about 90 minutes south of Los Angeles.
That’s where Fowler, 34, first learned the game as a kid. His grandfather, Yutaka, spent every Wednesday with his first grandchild and would take him to the range, which opened, in 1992, and let him whack away. A passion for the game was forged in those natural grass bays in the shadows of the Santa Ana Mountains, and it’s where Fowler spent more and more of his formative years.
“My dad used to deliver the sand for maintenance and gravel for the parking lot in exchange for me to hit balls,” Fowler said.
Thirty years later, Fowler completed a boyhood dream of his, becoming owner of the range earlier this year. In between watching tennis at Wimbledon and playing Sunningdale Golf Club in London with Jordan Spieth and Justin Thomas ahead of this week’s Genesis Scottish Open at the Renaissance Club, Fowler shared with Golfweek just how much his childhood range meant to him.
“I always wanted the range to be around and it to be open for the next generation,” Fowler wrote in an email. “I wanted kids to have the same opportunity as me if they were interested.”
Bill Teasdall, a former mini-tour player, found the land, leased the 15-acre property and opened the 50-stall range, where 90 balls still cost just $12, and included a teaching area for his best friend, Barry McDonnell.
“When we opened, Barry said to me, ‘Bill, we’ve got the perfect place to practice. Now all I need is a young kid with some talent and I’ll take him all the way to the Tour,’” Teasdall told PGA Tour.com in 2016. “And Rick showed up two months later.”
Initially, McDonnell pushed back on giving Fowler lessons, and he started out working with instructor Mark Quinlan. But eventually Quinlan moved on and McDonell started working with Fowler, who often used his dad’s full-size clubs as a child, developing an unorthodox loop in his swing that McDonnell never touched, at age 8. It wasn’t long before he shared with his best friend that he thought he had a prodigy on his hands. He said, “This kid is the one,” Teasdall told The Athletic recently. “And I said, Jesus, Barry, he’s only 8!”
“By the time Rickie’s 20, if I do my job, he’ll have the perfect golfing mind and he won’t even know where he got it,” Teasdall recounted that McDonnell said.
Teasdall wasn’t the only one to whom he bragged about his whiz kid. Whenever someone asked McDonnell whether he had any talented prospects he was working with, he gave a stock reply: “Well, there’s one. But he’s only eleven. You’ll know his name in time.”
Fowler’s mother, Lynn, was the first to share with Teasdall her son’s dream to own the driving range one day. She mentioned it at a high school tournament during the 2006-07 season as they walked along a fairway.
“When he decided to retire, I wanted to be able to step in to make sure the range stayed,” Fowler said in an email. “That was also assuming I was successful enough on the golf course.”
Practicing regularly at the driving range under McDonnell’s watchful eye, Fowler become a scratch golfer by 12. McDonnell passed away in May of 2011, just a few months after Fowler was named Rookie of the Year. He was spot on about Fowler, who reached No. 4 in the Official World Golf Ranking in the winter of 2016 and has won six times on the PGA Tour, including the 2015 Players Championship. Along the way, he also never forgot about where he came from or his dream to make sure Murrieta Valley Driving Range remained intact.
“I’ll be damned, Rick went and won the Players Championship and I get a phone call from his agent, telling me Rick will buy this place whenever I’m ready to retire,” Teasdall told The Athletic.
That date was premature for Teasdall to call it a day but around 2019, he was ready. The sale was delayed by the global pandemic, but they came to an agreement in November and the sale was finalized in January.
“It has been in the works for a couple of years, as the land is owned by a family and Bill leased it from them,” Fowler explained. “We had to make sure that we would be able to continue that lease long enough and it wouldn’t get ripped out from under us.”
“He did what everyone who grew up pounding balls on a range imagines they might do one day,” Brendan Quinn, who first reported the sale, wrote in The Athletic. “In a world that has made him one of this game’s most public figures, he preserved the place where he is himself. That’s as real as it gets.”
Fowler said he’s hired KemperSports, a golf hospitality management company, to help with “the week-to-week business stuff,” but he’s not looking to make household changes. In fact, Teasdall still is a regular presence there as is Lisa D’Hondt, who has worked the front counter for nearly 30 years.
“I wanted to keep the range how it has always been,” Fowler said in an e-mail. “A lot of the people that were there when I was growing up are still the ones running it day to day. We all share the same vision and I’m looking forward to, when this season settles down, being able to spend some more time with everyone involved to discuss our current and future plans for the enhancements at the range.”
Keeping it the same so that he can always return to the place where Fowler feels most at home — on his range.
