AUSTIN, TEXAS | Let’s get this right out in the open. The golf in and around this city of nearly 1 million people is good but not great.
That doesn’t mean it is not a terrific place to visit with your sticks.
To be fair, you are not going to find a top-50 course in the Texas Hill Country, which includes Austin and sits upon a landform known as the Edwards Plateau that is some 31,000 square miles in size. But there is nonetheless a wealth of fun and challenging tracks here. Such as the Canyons and Foothills courses that Tom Fazio designed among live oaks and along creeks and limestone cliffs at the 4,000-acre Omni Barton Creek Resort & Spa on the edge of town. Or the trio of Robert Trent Jones layouts at the even more expansive Horseshoe Bay Resort. A 45-minute drive from downtown Austin, it is set on the shores of Lake LBJ, a body of water named for former U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson.
The municipal golf element in Austin is strong as well, thanks to a couple of standouts.
One of those is the Butler Pitch & Putt, a nine-holer that was recently revamped by one of Ben Crenshaw’s longtime shapers and a celebrated designer in his own right, Dan Proctor. Located in a downtown park, it also boasts a food truck that serves up first-rate burgers, biscuits and fried okra, and stages the occasional live music act. Over time, Butler has evolved into a great hang, with many of the foursomes including players pushing baby carts or leading their dogs around by leashes, all the while sipping from bottles of Shiner Bock beer or cans of “ranch water” laced with tequila.
The other is Lion’s Municipal Golf Club, a 100-year-old track on the west side of town that in 1950 became the first desegregated public course in the South.
Muny, as it is affectionately known, is also where World Golf Hall of Famers Ben Crenshaw and Tom Kite often teed it up as youngsters and even when they were star golfers at the University of Texas, which is located in Austin.
Bringing up the names of those former Longhorns raises yet one more reason to embark on a golf trek to these parts. And that is the game’s rich heritage here. Crenshaw and Kite are understandably a big part of that. So are one-time UT stars and major championship winners Scottie Scheffler, Jordan Spieth and Justin Leonard.
Then, there is Harvey Penick.
Penick grew up caddying at the Austin Country Club. He became the assistant golf professional at the age of 13 and assumed the head pro job after graduating from high school in 1923. Penick held that position until 1971 but continued teaching as the professional emeritus until his death in 1995. He also served as the golf coach for UT from 1931 to 1963.
Crenshaw and Kite are perhaps his best known local students. But over the years, a number of golf greats from other parts of the country traveled to Austin to work with Penick, including Mickey Wright, Kathy Whitworth and Betsy Rawls, all of whom are in the World Golf Hall of Fame with Crenshaw and Kite as well as Penick, who was inducted into that institution posthumously in 2002.
But what really makes Austin such a fabulous destination is all that the area has to offer après-golf. Some of the best barbecue on the planet is found here, and I would recommend Lambert’s (in town) as well as Opie’s (in Spicewood, a 45-minute drive to the northwest) for their succulent smoked brisket, ribs and sausage. The Salt Lick, too, and if you have any doubts about its culinary bona fides, consider that the restaurant catered Crenshaw’s Champions Dinner at Augusta National in 1996, the year after he took the Masters for a second time.
The music is also stellar, as one would expect from a city that describes itself as the Live Music Capital of the World. And many a time I have wandered into C-Boy’s or the Continental Club on South Congress Street to catch guitarist Jimmy Vaughan, brother of the late, great Stevie Ray Vaughan, shredding his way through a set with his trio.
“I originally bought (Pedernales) in 1976 and then lost it to the Internal Revenue Service for a while in 1991 when I was going through all my tax trouble. But some friends of mine bought it from the government and then held it for me until I could buy it back from them.”
willie nelson
There is also the chance you might run into Willie Nelson while you are in town, whether sitting in with friends in a local club or holding court at his nine-hole course in Spicewood. Called Pedernales and open to the public, it is about half a mile from Nelson’s Hill Country home and next door to his recording studio.
It is also a place the red-headed stranger has owned twice.
“I originally bought it in 1976 and then lost it to the Internal Revenue Service for a while in 1991 when I was going through all my tax trouble,” Nelson said. “But some friends of mine bought it from the government and then held it for me until I could buy it back from them.”
Bottom line, this area is a terrific place to play – on and off the golf course.
“It’s a good golf town and has been for a long time,” Crenshaw said. “You can play 10 months a year easily. There’s good public golf. Good country club golf, too, and at places that are not rigidly private.
“I had three wonderful courses I grew up on,” he added. “Hancock, which is a nine-holer right in town. And Muny, which I first played when I was 8 or 9 years old, paying $1.25 a round. Also, Austin Country Club, an old Perry Maxwell course where Harvey (Penick) worked for so long, and where he had a home on the 12th hole. I fell in with a bunch of ragtag junior golfers. Our parents would drop us off at one of those courses in the morning and then pick us up at dark.”
On my latest trip here, I headed first to Horseshoe Bay, where I played all three of its Trent Jones courses: Ram Rock, Slick Rock and Apple Rock. Different as those individual tracks may be, they possess common characteristics. Such as the varied terrain across which they are routed, full of hills, dales and grassy meadows dotted with live oaks as well as spring-fed creeks and ponds. There are granite rock outcroppings, too, and sweeping views off of tees that make driving the golf ball there a real pleasure.
Each of these layouts also has multiple tees, so golfers can more easily find the distances that suit them best.
But the tracks have their individual traits as well. Ram Rock, which opened in 1981, is the bear of the bunch, with 59 bunkers, 10 holes where water comes into play and uphill approaches to a number of greens. No wonder it has been a frequent site of the Texas State Open, I thought to myself after posting a rather large number there.
As for the other two, I found them to be much more recreational golfer-friendly. The oldest, Slick Rock, came on line in 1972 and is noted for its par-4 14th, which plays over a creek and waterfall and then doglegs to the right. It is called the Million Dollar Hole because that is what it cost to build.
With regards to Apple Rock, I appreciated how it restored my psyche after the battering I took on Ram Rock, to say nothing of my game, as I managed to post four solid pars on the first four holes. I also enjoyed the sheer beauty of the spot, with its cacti, “cap rocks” and swaths of bluebonnets in full bloom. The raptors soaring over the course, hanging in the breezes blowing off the lake, are a sight to behold. And at the end of the round, as the sun just started to set, I heard coyote pups yelping in the woods.
The terrain at Barton Creek, which was first developed in the mid-1980s, is just as well-suited for golf, with holes on the Canyons and Foothills courses winding up and down gentle hills and across ravines. There are outcroppings and cliffs, too, and lots of waterfalls and creeks. Only the rock in this case is limestone, not granite. Wide fairways help to make these tracks eminently playable, and Fazio was sure to give golfers lots of elevated tees.
“They lend a strong sense of drama,” the architect once told me about the ones he built at Canyons, which opened in 1999. “You get a real rush when you’re standing up high looking down at a fairway or green.”
He was also able to provide plenty of excitement at Foothills, which came on line in 1986.
“The terrain was wild and wonderful, with steep cliffs and gorges,” he said.
Among the most noteworthy of his holes there was the par-3 ninth, which has water running in front and to the left of a testy green – and was once described by former Texas governor and U.S. President George W. Bush as his favorite golf hole anywhere.
I find both those tracks to be pure joy, no matter how well – or poorly – I play. The setting is certainly part of that. And though they are quite close to the city, they somehow feel very far away. I also appreciate how Fazio keeps things interesting by making golfers hit draws and fades through their rounds as well as punch shots and high-flying short irons.
At the end of the trip, I made my way to Muny, reminding myself as I pulled into the parking lot that Byron Nelson and Ben Hogan teed it up there, in 1948 and 1950, respectively, and that boxing great Joe Louis shot a near-par round in 1953. Kite and Crenshaw both won the annual Firecracker tournament at Muny, and back in the mid-1930s, A.W. Tillinghast revamped a few of the holes.
The course that day was full of golfers. Some carried. Some rode. Some pulled a trolley, with one particularly enterprising fellow attaching a small cooler of beer to his pull cart with bungees. Most players wore shorts, while a few were clad in blue jeans. A number of them wore T-shirts and a couple had donned cowboy hats. As for the par-71 layout, which records nearly 65,000 rounds a year, I could not help but think of the quotes I had read about it, with Hogan and Nelson praising it as one of the best in the land. I also recalled the stories I saw about Crenshaw still coming out to Muny for a game every now and then as he and others fight to keep the golf course going even as people associated with the very well-endowed University of Texas, which owns the 140 acres across which it is routed, openly wonder whether it is time to sell it.
I ambled onto the terrace off the limestone clubhouse after my round and drank a Dr. Pepper as I watched golfers at tables on an outside terrace drinking beer and munching on tacos as they talked about their rounds.
Later, I took note of a black-and-white photograph hanging on one of the walls. It was Crenshaw and Kite when they were kids, and I loved that all these years later, people are still flocking to Muny for their golf.
They are also coming to places all over the Texas Hill Country, and understandably so. What a great place this is for a game.
Top: The Canyons Course at barton creek
Photos courtesy Omni Barton Creek Resort & Spa and Horseshoe Bay Resort