With its abundant sunshine, Las Vegas has long been a golfer’s paradise. Still, it took over 30 years for the city’s first golf course to open—the Las Vegas Golf Course, also known as “The Muni,” opened as a nine-hole range in 1938, just as the city was experiencing its first boom due to legalized gaming and Hoover Dam-related tourism.

The Muni, located on West Washington Avenue and Decatur, added an additional nine holes in 1947, and was in its early years a frequent haunt for locals who enjoyed golf.

But it wasn’t a tourist attraction, and there were many who thought that no one would come to Las Vegas to golf. When Mo Dalitz first proposed building a golf course on the Strip in the early 1950s, most of the other “hotel men” (today they’d be called “casino executives”) considered it a non-starter. They spurned his offer of building a golf course not connected to any one casino but open to all. So Dalitz built his golf course, with the help of Allard Roen, directly adjacent to Wilbur Clark’s Desert Inn.

The rest was history. The Desert Inn Golf Course opened in 1952, and helped to establish Las Vegas as a premier first-class tourist destination. The Tournament of Champions, nationally televised on NBC, raised public awareness of the burgeoning resort. The Tournament was moved after Howard Hughes bought the hotel in 1967, but by then it had served its purpose well: millions of golfers knew that they could find a great course in the land of the slot machines.

Over the years, a host of celebrities from Tony Bennett to Sylvester Stallone swung their clubs on the Desert Inn’s greens.

After Steve Wynn acquired the Desert Inn, he closed the hotel and its golf course, but a redesigned set of links opened with Wynn Las Vegas in April 2005. Like the original, the new course hosts celebrities and, like the original, it is the only golf course owned by a casino resort on the Strip. It will have to last many years, though, before it reaches the historic status of the Desert Inn Golf Course.

SOURCE: Las Vegas News Bureau Collection, UNLV Special Collections

By David Schwartz

David G. Schwartz an Atlantic City native and the director of the Center for Gaming Research at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. He is the author of Roll the Bones: The History of Gambling. His web site can be viewed at www.dieiscast.com.

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