Town Rankings / Texas
The Best Golf Courses in Horseshoe Bay
Horseshoe Bay was built for one purpose: a resort on Lake LBJ where the golf was the amenity that sold everything else. Three Robert Trent Jones Sr. courses on the lake, plus Jack Nicklaus's Summit Rock above them, give this small Hill Country town a deeper bench than cities ten times its size.
Four courses, two owners of the argument. The three resort courses share a designer and a lake and a booking desk. Summit Rock is the private challenger. Ram Rock is the brute, and the brute leads this ranking, because a list that scores the golf first has to start with the hardest examination in town.
1Horseshoe Bay Resort Ram Rock Golf Course
Ram Rock has carried its reputation for decades: the tough one, the course resort guests talk about in the bar the way fishermen talk about weather. Robert Trent Jones Sr. built plenty of resort golf that flattered the customer. Ram Rock does not flatter. It is long, it is tight in the places where a resort course is usually generous, and it has ended more vacation rounds than the other two resort courses combined.
The concession is fairness, or the lack of it on a bad day. A high handicapper paying resort prices can feel beaten up rather than tested, and a course that punishes its paying guests walks a line. Ram Rock has survived because most golfers, even while losing balls, respect a course that does not condescend to them.
It is No. 1 here because Horseshoe Bay has three resort courses and only one that golfers drive home still thinking about.
2Summit Rock Golf Club
Summit Rock is Jack Nicklaus's private course in the community, and Nicklaus in the Hill Country means elevated tees, demanding approaches and a membership price of admission that the resort courses cannot match for exclusivity. Estimates for clubs of this type put initiation well into six figures, and that figure is an estimate, not a published number, because clubs like this do not publish numbers.
On pure test it presses Ram Rock hard, and its members would flip this order. It sits second on two counts: fewer golfers have ever seen it, so its reputation rests on a smaller jury, and a ranking that gives any weight to access cannot put a gated private course above a resort course the public can book when the golf is this close. If your only criterion is the examination, call it 1A. Ours is not, so it is No. 2.
3Horseshoe Bay Resort Apple Rock Golf Course
Apple Rock is the scenic middle of the resort trio, the course that uses the lake and the high ground for its best holes and gives the visiting golfer the Horseshoe Bay day in its most photogenic form. For a lot of resort guests it is the favorite round of the trip, and that is a legitimate claim about the day, if not about the test.
It ranks third because scenic and favorite are not the same as best. When the wind is up and the group contains a player who wants to know where he stands, Ram Rock answers questions Apple Rock never asks. Play Apple Rock on the first day, when everybody is fresh and the cameras are out. It does that job better than any course in town.
4Horseshoe Bay Resort Slick Rock Golf Course
Slick Rock is the gentlest of the Jones courses here, the traditional starting point for resort groups and the course most likely to send a mixed foursome back to dinner still speaking to each other. There is a real skill in building that course, and resort golf would collapse without it.
It is fourth because gentlest is gentlest. In a town where the same designer also built Ram Rock, the easier sibling finishes last on a list scored on the golf. No shame in it. Every resort needs a Slick Rock, and most guests should play it first, but rankings are not itineraries.
The Jones trio plus Nicklaus on one lake is an odd concentration of famous names for a town this size. Play them in reverse order of this ranking on a first trip, easiest to hardest, and save Ram Rock for the morning you are ready to be told the truth.