Jim Crane Is Pushing To Make the Houston Open a PGA Signature Event — How Setting a New Attendance Record and the Pros’ Memorial Park Love Fuels the Drive

Even after a picture perfect finish at Memorial Park, with  his 11-year-old son James helping hand out the champions trophy to a golfer who is a member at his Floridian Golf Club, Jim Crane is thinking of an even bigger Houston Open. Not imagining it. Planning for it. “We want to be one of the best tournaments,” Crane tells PaperCity. “The possibility we’d move to an elevated event, I know they’re working on that.

“We haven’t had a lot of talks with (the PGA Tour) yet. But we want one of the best tournaments, best stops on tour, and I think we have the facility here with 300 acres. People can flow around here and not really bother the players. You get the course in great shape. And what we’ve been able to do with the attendance — it keeps going up.”

Becoming one of the PGA Tour’s Signature Events — tournaments often with smaller fields and massive prize money ($20 million purses this season) — would thrust the Houston Open into a new stratosphere. Signature events draw all the best players in the game. They are the ultimate showcases of golf (outside of the four Majors and The Players Championship) and the winner walks away with a $4.5 million check.

New PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp wants to double the number of signature or elevated events to 16, concentrating on major markets. Houston would fit with both those directives. “We like what the Tour’s doing,” Astros Golf Foundation president Giles Kibbe tells PaperCity. “We like what their plans are.

“We know that Houston is going to be a big part of the PGA Tour. We want it to be one of the bigger tournaments on Tour. So we’re going to do everything we can to get there.”

Several sources in golf tell PaperCity that the Houston Open’s jump to a signature event is unlikely to happen next season — with a few years down the road a more realistic target date. Texas Children’s current successful sponsorship of the Houston Opens runs through the 2028 tournament. To make the leap to becoming a signature event with a mega purse, additional deep-pocketed sponsors likely would be needed.

Few in golf that PaperCity talked to doubt the Astros Golf Foundation’s ability to get it done. Jim Crane carries a well-earned reputation for making things happen.

This 2026 Houston Open also bolsters the push to become an elevated event. Despite having the misfortune of having World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler withdraw from the tournament days before it started due to the expected impending birth of his second kid and Rory McIlroy limiting his schedule to deal with his back injury, Houston’s PGA Tour event still set a new attendance record.

The most people who’ve ever watched a golf tournament at Memorial Park came out over a chamber of commerce friendly run of weather over the four days of competition.

“We set attendance records this year,” Kibbe tells PaperCity. “So every year it gets bigger and bigger. Every year the golf course is maturing. The trees are getting growing to where they’re the right size in the places where we needed them. So the golf course keeps getting better.”

Gary Woodland winning for the first time since his 2019 U.S. Open victory, for the first time after having a baseball-sized tumor removed from his brain in September, 2023, for the first time since he emotionally talked about his post-surgery PTSD fight, is bringing even more national and international attention on the Houston Open. Woodland running away from the field on Sunday while wearing the special Courage shoes a Texas Children’s brain cancer patient turned Woodand buddy — 15-year-old Ceci — designed for him is the stuff of a sports movie.

“You could not have made this story up,” Texas Children’s Hospital CEO Debra Sukin says. “God was watching.”

Memorial Park’s Building PGA Aura

The PGA Tour’s best are always watching course conditions. And they’re often ruthless judges when a course does not measure up, more cruel than a high school mean girl. Memorial Park certainly is measuring up. Adam Scott, who has been on the PGA Tour for more than 25 years and owns a Masters victory, took the time to leave a note lauding Memorial as “the best conditioned course he’s played all year” before leaving Houston.

“This place is unbelievable condition,” Woodland says.

Positive player feedback can help fuel a tournament’s growth, maybe even fast track it.

“It’s extremely important because we know next year we’re going to have a bigger and better field,” Kibbe says. “Every year. When guys like Adam Scott and Tony Finau, all those guys, say those things, guys like (Top 35 player) Shane Lowry played for the first time in a long time this year.

“He came because he heard the golf course was great. He loved it. So he’ll be back.”

PGA Tour star Tony Finau does not just go down the line and sign every autograph after his final round at the Texas Children’s Houston Open. He takes off his shoes and gives them to two kids, signing them for the young fans. Finau walks back into the clubhouse in his white socks. pic.twitter.com/9ZoGmYfzcm

— Chris Baldwin (@ChrisYBaldwin) March 29, 2026

Crane and the Astros Golf Foundation rightly get a lot of credit for stepping in and keeping the PGA Tour in Houston when it looked like the nation’s fourth-largest city could be losing its Tour stop. But Crane did not take over the Houston Open to keep it status quo. From the beginning, the plan centered around elevating the tournament to a new level. And lifting up the entire Houston golf scene.

An LPGA Major — the Chevron Championship (set for April 23 through April 26 this year) — moving to Memorial Park from The Woodlands, where it had some difficulty attracting fans from within Houston to drive in — should be another significant boost.

“It was a natural to bring the LPGA because they were having similar troubles with attendance,” Jim Crane tells PaperCity. “We’re going to test it down here. The course should be in great shape for them too A little different tee boxes, but we’re looking forward to a great time with having them in there.

“And it will save some money and be able to give them a bigger platform to perform on also. And that’s what we really wanted.”

Jim Crane is all about the future, the next step, the next move that is going to boost golf in the city he loves, the city where he’s turned the Houston Astros into two-time world champions. Waiting for the trophy presentation to begin, he jokes with Gary Woodland about how Woodland is the best golfer at The Floridian and James Crane is the best fisherman. Sometimes even a billionaire sports owner is still just a proud dad at heart.

Houston Astros owner Jim Crane stepped aside during the Houston Open trophy presentation so that Texas Children’s cancer patient Ceci and Crane’s son James could hand Gary Woodland the trophy instead. Ceci and Woodland share an emotional bond with the 15-year-old brain cancer… https://t.co/ZjDadJ2sWM pic.twitter.com/CvDn2sGCW0

— Chris Baldwin (@ChrisYBaldwin) March 30, 2026

“He’s usually pretty shy, but he stepped right up there and handed the trophy over so now we’ve got him going,” Crane says of his son’s work in the trophy presentation along with Ceci. Jim Crane stepped back to let the kids handle that moment, something Gary Woodland seemed to delight in.

But Jim Crane is front and center in this push to make Houston’s PGA Tour stop a showcase Signature Event that brings one of the best fields in golf to H-Town year after year after. Being elevated matters.