# The Best Golf Courses in Houston

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-houston-tx/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Texas


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Houston is too big and too flat and too humid for a tidy golf identity, so it produced a tidy golf argument instead. Memorial Park got a Tom Doak redo and hosts the Houston Open. Champions hosted a Ryder Cup, a U.S. Open and five tour stops. One is a municipal course anyone can book. The other is a private club built by two tour players. The whole question of what a city owes its public golfers sits inside those two facts.

Behind them come two old money private clubs and a modern daily fee outlier. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and Houston is one of the few big cities in America where that formula puts a muni at No. 1 without any charity involved.

## 1Memorial Park Golf Course

Memorial Park is the best public golf story in Texas. A city course in a city park, redesigned by Tom Doak, good enough that the PGA Tour came back to play the Houston Open on it. Doak on flat Houston ground did what he does: he made the interest come from angles, from green contours, from where the ball lands rather than how the hole looks in a photograph. Tour players do not praise munis out of politeness for long. They kept praising this one.

The concessions are Houston itself. The heat and humidity from May onward are a physical test no architect can redesign, tee times for a famous muni are fought over, and a flat site will never give a visitor the visual drama of a coastal or Hill Country course. None of that changes the evidence. A municipal course holding a Tour event, designed by the most respected architect of his generation, open to anyone who can get a tee time, is No. 1 in this town by a distance.

## 2Champions Golf Club Cypress Creek Course

Champions has the deepest tournament record in Houston. A Ryder Cup, a U.S. Open and five tour stops is a resume no other course in the city can touch, and it was built by Jimmy Demaret and Jack Burke Jr., two tour players who wanted a golfers' club, run by golfers, with a big, honest, demanding course at its center. Cypress Creek is that course: long, tree lined, and built in an era when championship golf meant hitting it past trouble rather than around it.

It is second for two reasons. Access is private and proudly so, and the design era it represents has been overtaken, in most critical eyes, by the kind of strategic work Doak did across town. Champions' members will dispute the second point and they have the trophy case to argue from. The trophy case is real. So is the fact that the city's best players now get examined in public at Memorial Park every year.

## 3Houston Country Club

Houston Country Club is the establishment address, the old club in the heart of the city whose membership reads like a history of Houston business. Its golf has always been presented as classic parkland: shaded, groomed, and more interested in being a fine members' course than in hosting anybody's championship.

That modesty is genuine and it caps the ranking. A club that does not seek examination cannot complain when examiners rank the examined courses above it. Third in Houston, ahead of its River Oaks rival on depth of golf tradition, is a fair landing spot for a club that has never much cared what lists say.

## 4River Oaks Country Club

River Oaks carries the most famous neighborhood name in Houston and a club to match it, set in the enclave where the city's wealth has lived for a century. The golf is good, private, immaculately kept parkland golf, and the club life around it is the real product.

It finishes fourth among the privates here because, as a golf course pure and simple, it has the least public evidence to argue with. No championships, no famous redesign, no tour players in its founding story. What it has is place, and place is worth a great deal in Houston society and rather less in a golf ranking.

## 5Wildcat Golf Club

Wildcat is the modern Houston answer: daily fee golf built close to the center of a city that sprawls in every direction, designed for the golfer who wants a full course without a membership or a drive to the suburbs. In a five course list full of history, Wildcat is the one that feels like the present tense.

Fifth is still fifth. It does not have Memorial Park's architect or Champions' record, and its convenience, which is its best argument, is an argument about traffic rather than golf. But every big city ranking needs the course a visiting golfer can play on a Tuesday without knowing a soul in town and without fighting for a muni tee time, and in Houston that course is Wildcat, with Memorial Park booked solid ahead of it.

Houston's argument ends where it started: the muni and the champions' club, one open to all and one open to almost none, and a flat, hot city that somehow produced both.

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