The last champion

Long before he became a four-time Las Cruces City Golf Tournament champion, before decades spent on fairways across southern New Mexico, before construction jobs and business ownership and memberships at local country clubs, Ron Giron was just a boy in Socorro with a single golf club and a backyard.

At 71, Giron can still see it clearly. The holes weren't real holes, just little cups he dug into the ground. He would spend hours hitting balls around the backyard, inventing a golf course of his own because it was what he had. Golf wasn't a sport his family could easily afford. There were no bags full of clubs, no private lessons, no expensive memberships.

Just one club and a kid who loved the game.

Then a neighborhood friend changed everything. The friend's father regularly took him to the golf course at New Mexico Tech, and one day the boys learned a city tournament was coming up. Giron wanted to play, but the $10 entry fee might as well have been $1,000.

His friend had a solution.

"He said, 'My dad will pay the 10 bucks,'" Giron recalled. "It all started there.”

So, the young golfer entered the tournament with little more than enthusiasm and a borrowed opportunity. Tournament officials loaned him a putter.

He won.

The victory caught the attention of the course professional, who offered him a job cleaning up around the clubhouse, shining shoes and caddying for golfers. What began as a childhood pastime in a backyard became something more serious. The game had opened a door.

Life eventually took him to Las Cruces. Golf, for a time, took a back seat, but never disappeared. He worked construction, earned his contractor's license at 21 and built a career that occupied much of his adult life. At 24, he joined Las Cruces Country Club and became part of a local golf community that would shape much of the next five decades.

The courses changed over the years. So did the city. Las Cruces Country Club eventually closed. Giron spent years at Red Hawk before moving to the university course. Through it all, he kept playing, usually at least twice a week.

Golf became less about competition and more about connection.

The same players appeared at tournaments year after year. Friendships formed. Rivalries developed. Stories were shared in clubhouses and parking lots and around scorecards.

That's one reason the Las Cruces City Golf Tournament mattered so much to him. For generations of local golfers, "The City" was more than another tournament on the schedule. It was a gathering place.

At its height, the tournament stretched across multiple days and multiple courses. Giron remembers years when competitors played Las Cruces Country Club, Picacho Hills and Sonoma Ranch over a long weekend. Golfers from across the community came together for what many considered the city's championship.

He won it four times. The trophies don't all sit neatly together anymore. He knows he won in 2003. He knows he won again in 2013, the final year before the tournament disappeared after a 50-year run. The others are remembered more through stories than hardware.

For Giron, though, the victories aren't what stand out most. What he remembers are the people.

"Everybody knows everybody in the golf world," he said. "It's just a big party when everybody gets together."

That sense of community was built into the tournament itself. Unlike many championships that reward only the best players, the City Championship was organized into flights based on handicap, giving golfers across a range of skill levels a chance to compete.

"When you put it in flights, everybody's got a chance to win," Giron said. "That's the exciting part."

The format created something rare. A golfer didn't have to be the longest hitter or the lowest handicap player in town to have a meaningful weekend. Everyone arrived with a chance, and everyone left with stories.

That's why Giron believes the tournament's return this year matters. The city has no shortage of golfers. What it has lacked since 2013 is an event capable of bringing them all together.

Robert Caldwell worked for the city Parks and Recreation Department back then, one of the faces of the tournament. Now, no longer with the city, he’s the one bringing the event back.

For someone whose own golf journey began with a city tournament more than 60 years ago, that connection carries special meaning for Giron.

As Las Cruces prepares to revive one of its oldest golfing traditions, Giron sees an opportunity for another generation to discover what he learned all those years ago in Socorro — that sometimes a tournament is about much more than who wins.

Sometimes it's about finding a place to belong.