# Memorial Park Golf Course vs. Westwood Golf Club: The Houston Choice

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/memorial-park-golf-course-vs-westwood-golf-club/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Comparisons / Texas


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Houston's best golf argument is a public private fight with a shared grandfather. Memorial Park is a municipal course that hosts the PGA Tour. Westwood is a private club across the decades from it. Both were designed by John Bredemus, the father of Texas golf architecture. One opened in 1936 and got a $18.5 million Tom Doak renovation in 2019. The other opened in 1928 and kept its gates. A Houston golfer choosing between them is choosing between the city's two ideas of what Bredemus's legacy should be.

Memorial Park's history runs deeper than its current fame. Golf on the site began as a nine hole course with sand greens near the Camp Logan hospital in 1912. Bredemus built the full course that opened in 1936. The PGA Tour's Houston Open was played here from 1951 to 1963 and returned in 2020, after Doak's renovation, funded by the Astros Golf Foundation with Brooks Koepka as player consultant. The results speak in rankings: No. 52 in the Dallas Morning News 2026 Texas Top 100, and No. 7 on Golf.com's list of the best municipal courses in the United States. A muni in the top tier of its state and the top ten munis in the country is not a feel good story. It is a verdict on the renovation and on the decision to spend real money on public golf.

## The private original

Westwood's case rests on 1928 and on Bredemus unrenovated by modern fame. It ranked No. 50 in the Dallas Morning News 2025 Texas Top 100, two spots from where Memorial Park sits in the following year's list, which tells you the panelists see them as near equals as golf courses. Westwood is private, in town, and built for members who play it weekly rather than for a tour field that visits yearly. That intimacy is its best argument: a Bredemus course learned by heart over decades of member play is a different experience from a Bredemus routing rebuilt to hold a PGA Tour event.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access and value. On golf, the Doak renovation gives Memorial Park the edge in strategic interest at championship scale, while Westwood counters with continuity. On the day, Westwood wins for its members and loses for everyone else, because everyone else cannot get on. On access and value it is not close. Memorial Park is municipal. Westwood's costs sit in the private estimate tier, figures the club does not publish and we will not invent. Both appear in [our Houston ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-houston-tx/) and in [the full Texas state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-texas/), and the ordering between them flips depending on which of those three categories you weight.

## The verdict

Memorial Park wins, because a great course anyone can play beats a very good course almost nobody can, and because Doak's work made the muni the more interesting examination anyway. The honest concession belongs to Westwood: if you are a member, your Tuesday game on an untouched 1928 Bredemus is a better golf life than fighting the Memorial Park tee sheet. Pick Westwood if the membership is realistically yours. Pick Memorial Park if you want to know what public golf can be when a city, a foundation and a serious architect all decide to mean it.

The money tells the story cleanly. Memorial Park's renovation cost $18.5 million, and it was spent by a foundation on a course the public owns, so that a PGA Tour event and a Tuesday foursome could share the same fairways. That is philanthropy aimed at access. Westwood's money, raised privately since 1928, was spent the opposite way: on keeping a good course good for the people inside the gate. Neither use of money is wrong. They are just opposite answers to the question of what a golf course is for, and Houston is big enough to run both experiments at once.

Bredemus would probably have enjoyed the argument. He built for whoever hired him, public or private, and Texas golf grew up on both kinds of his work. The Houston Open's return to Memorial Park in 2020 settled the public side's claim for this decade. Westwood's claim does not need settling. It renews itself every morning its members tee off on a course older than the Astrodome, older than the Johnson Space Center, older than modern Houston itself.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.