Course Comparisons / Texas
Memorial Park Golf Course vs. Lochinvar Golf Club: The Houston Choice
Houston's golf argument in one pairing: a municipal course inside a city park that hosts the PGA Tour, against a Jack Nicklaus private club most Houstonians will never see. Memorial Park Golf Course and Lochinvar Golf Club sit in the same county, Harris County, serve the same golf population in theory, and in practice serve two completely different cities. One of them you can play this weekend. The other one outranks it on the state's best list. Both facts matter.
Memorial Park: the municipal that hosts the Tour
Memorial Park began as a nine-hole course with sand greens near Camp Logan hospital in 1912, and the full course opened in 1936, a John Bredemus design. It hosted the PGA Tour's Houston Open from 1951 to 1963, in the Hogan and Snead era, and then, after more than half a century away, the Tour came back. The reason is the renovation: in 2019 Tom Doak rebuilt the course for $18.5 million, funded by the Astros Golf Foundation, with Brooks Koepka as player consultant. The Houston Open returned from 2020, and a city-owned golf course became a Tour venue again without ceasing to be a city-owned golf course.
That last clause is the whole argument. Golf.com ranks Memorial Park No. 7 on its list of the best municipal courses in the United States, and the Dallas Morning News placed it No. 52 in its 2026 Texas Top 100, rarefied air for a muni. Doak's renovation kept the public golf intact while giving the Tour a course it could set up hard: width off the tee, trouble concentrated around the greens, and a routing through the park's pines that looks like Houston and plays like an examination. In our Houston ranking it is the public standard, and its presence in the Texas state ranking is the strongest evidence in the state that municipal golf can still aim at the top.
Lochinvar: the private counterweight
Lochinvar Golf Club opened in 1980, designed by Jack Nicklaus, private from the first day. The Dallas Morning News ranked it No. 24 in its 2025 Texas Top 100, comfortably ahead of Memorial Park's position, which tells you what the state's panelists think of the golf when conditioning, exclusivity, and a Nicklaus design in its prime era are weighed together. Lochinvar is the Houston private model at its most traditional: a members' course, kept to a members' standard, in a city where private club golf is a serious social currency.
We will be plain about the limits of the public record here. Lochinvar does not market itself, does not publish its yardage to the world, and does not seek visiting opinion. What can be said on the record is the ranking, the architect, and the year, and the inference any Houston golfer would draw: a Nicklaus course from 1980, maintained for a private membership for four and a half decades, will test your long game and reward the member who plays it weekly. The concession Lochinvar's side must make is the mirror of Memorial Park's strength. A course almost nobody can play has a ceiling on what it can mean to a city's golf.
The verdict
On the panel's evidence, Lochinvar is the finer private test, No. 24 in Texas against No. 52, and if the choice is a membership and the comparison is pure golf behind the gate, Lochinvar wins the head-to-head. Choose it if you have the invitation and the game to use a Nicklaus course properly.
Choose Memorial Park anyway if you are a Houston golfer without that invitation, which is to say almost every Houston golfer. It is a Doak renovation with a Tour event, a top-ten municipal in America, on public land at public access. The better course in this pairing is the one with the gate. The more important course in Houston golf, and the one we would send a visitor to play, is the one in the park.