Much of the golf business in this area has always come from “Winter Texans,” visitors from chillier climes who would come chasing reasonably priced rounds and warmer weather. For the most part, they wanted no part of Fort Brown once the difficulties kicked in.

“It is pretty sad,” said Celso Medina, who runs Golf Headquarters, an impressive golf store in Brownsville. “It's a personal thing, (it was) one of my favorite golf courses. That's where I really learned to play the game actually.

“(It was) very affordable mostly for the average person that couldn't afford to play at a country club. It really hurt.”

Lucio gets emotional when he sees the site now. Like Medina and Prepejchal, he remembers fun nights with the guys, when dozens of players would sit and barbecue and knock back beers hours after darkness called a halt to play.

No longer. It has taken just a few years for derelict course equipment to get swallowed by nature. A large pond that once needed to be avoided by players is now dry, with the balls of so many errant shots wedged in the dried mud.

Lucio tried to disguise the fence by putting up a course sign on it, tried to make it look like an entrance and not a stark reminder of political divisions. Perception is king, though, and it didn’t have much impact.

Yet here is the puzzling thing about the course and the border and just the odd nature of the U.S. and its interactions with Mexico. You can easily get onto the course from Mexico by crossing the river. The river is less than 50 feet across in some spots, and the water is usually slow moving.

The fence is there, but there is a gap in it you can drive through. At times the border agents are there, at others they are not, either patrolling the scrubland or just off duty. At those unattended moments, anyone can just walk through and be on the streets of Brownsville within a minute or so.

As Bob Lucio moves through it, he first takes a look back, then across to the fence. He gives a deep sigh and a small shake of his head.

“I don’t get it,” he said. “I didn’t get it then, and I still don’t. I have lived here all my life, and we used to celebrate our joint history with Mexico. When I put my time into the course, it was because I thought I’d be here forever.”

Texans love their Whataburger — and, apparently, the tiny plastic tents that display order numbers at the iconic fast food restaurant.

Police in Cross Roads, a small town in northeast Denton County, recently recovered a “large quantity” of the order numbers that had been stolen from the local Whataburger off U.S. 380.

“We have learned that it has become a game for area teens to be removing the plastic ‘order numbers’ from the restaurant when in attendance,” the Northeast Police Department announced Saturday on Facebook, warning teens they could be cited for theft of property.

The “game” has so gotten popular, the Facebook post said, that the Police Department, at times, has more of the order numbers than Whataburger.