Course Comparisons / Texas

Memorial Park Golf Course vs. Jackrabbit Course: The Houston Choice

Houston's most interesting golf argument is not between two private clubs. It is between a municipal course that hosts the PGA Tour and a private course at Champions Golf Club that most Houstonians will never play. Memorial Park Golf Course against the Jackrabbit Course. A city course with an $18.5 million renovation and a tour event, against a George Fazio design from 1957 ranked No. 36 in the Dallas Morning News 2025 Texas Top 100. Public ambition against private pedigree, in a city big enough to sustain both at full strength.

Memorial Park Golf Course

Memorial Park began as a nine hole course with sand greens near the Camp Logan hospital in 1912, which makes it older in spirit than almost anything in Texas golf. The full course opened in 1936, designed by John Bredemus, and it hosted the PGA Tour's Houston Open from 1951 to 1963. Then came the second act that defines it now. In 2019, Tom Doak renovated the course for $18.5 million, funded by the Astros Golf Foundation, with Brooks Koepka as player consultant, and the Houston Open came home from 2020. A municipal course, renovated by the most sought after architect alive, advised by a major champion, hosting the tour. Golf.com ranked it No. 7 on its list of the best municipal courses in the United States. The Dallas Morning News put it No. 52 in its 2026 Texas Top 100, against every private club in the state. Our Houston ranking treats it as the city's public standard, because nothing else is close.

Jackrabbit Course

The Jackrabbit's record is quieter, and honesty requires saying what that record is and is not. It is the George Fazio course at Champions Golf Club, opened in 1957, private, and ranked No. 36 in the Dallas Morning News 2025 Texas Top 100, sixteen places above where that paper put Memorial Park the following year. Rankings panels who have walked both courses keep landing the Jackrabbit ahead on the golf course itself, away from the story around it. Champions is a serious golf club with a serious membership culture, and the Jackrabbit is its second course only in the sense that a club with two strong courses has to call one of them second. What we will not do is invent hole by hole detail the record does not carry. The verified case is this. A Fazio design, from the heart of his career, at a club built by golfers for golfers, rated by Texas panels above the most celebrated municipal in America.

There is a Houston specific layer here that outsiders miss. Memorial Park is not a course at the edge of town. It sits in the city's central park, in the middle of the metropolis it serves, which is why the renovation landed as a civic event rather than a golf story. The Astros Golf Foundation funding, the tour's return, the sand greens origin near a wartime hospital a century ago, all of it reads as one long civic sentence. Champions Golf Club represents the other Houston tradition, the private club built by serious players as a refuge from the public game, where the Jackrabbit's quality is protected by the same gate that limits its audience. Houston, a city that respects both public works and private enterprise without apologizing for either, has produced the purest versions of both models and set them a few miles apart. The comparison is the city, accurately drawn.

The verdict

Here is the concession, and it cuts against the romantic pick. On a pure architecture ballot, judged by the Texas panels who do this professionally, the Jackrabbit may simply be the better golf course, and its No. 36 state ranking against Memorial's No. 52 is evidence, not noise. If a member of both clubs tells you the Jackrabbit is the finer test, believe him.

Our verdict still goes to Memorial Park, and the reason is the whole ballgame. The Jackrabbit's excellence is available to a few hundred families. Memorial Park's excellence, a Doak renovation, a tour layout, a top ten municipal in the nation, is available to anyone in Houston with green fee money. In the Texas state ranking, access counts in our scoring, openly. Pick the Jackrabbit if you can, and enjoy a Fazio that Texas raters swear by. Pick Memorial if you want to play tour golf at a city course and feel what public golf can be when a city and a foundation decide to fund it like they mean it.