AUSTIN, Texas — For years now, we’ve heard the pleas, and the voices are getting louder. But so is the silence on the other end.
Save Muny. Preserve one of the oldest public golf courses in Texas, its staunch supporters say.
But this is about so much more than golf and keeping a venerable course built in 1924, the same year Royal-Memorial Stadium went up on the University of Texas campus. It’s about social history, about civil rights as the first desegregated public course in the South, about opportunities for young and old, about high school golfers and senior golfers, about teaching the game, about a university’s umbilical cord with a city that supports it, about urban green space, about doing the right thing.
And, yes, it’s about money. Alas, the rallying cry might be falling on deaf ears.
Lions Municipal Golf Course is every bit as much in danger today as when the city’s lease for the historic property on the north bank of Lady Bird Lake expired in May 2019. Ever since, under an agreement between landlord UT and the city of Austin, Muny has operated on a five-month rolling lease.