I've been wanting to blog about this place for a while but I always found myself in the wrong lane when I drove past it, until yesterday. I took off from work a little early to beat the traffic and made Players my destination. It is a nondescript, stand alone, little burger joint on a prime piece of real estate at the corner of MLK and Lavaca on the southern edge of the University of Texas at Austin. If UT had its way a few years back it would now be just a memory and there would be a convention and teaching center being built where it used to stand. The problem is that the University wanted to buy the land for fair market value and pay the owners of the business nothing for the twenty five years they had investing into making Players a thriving business. In other words they were supposed to start from scratch all over again. The public and students thought that was kind of a raw deal and so did the Texas Legislature who decided UT could get by with the land that they had already purchased from willing sellers. As a result, Players is now poised to be in an excellent position for walk in customers from the new hotel complex being built next door. I remember drinking beer in the beer garden behind the building with a bunch of housepainters, about thirty years ago, and that may well have been the only time I was ever in there other than this time. I liked it then and I like it now. I know it has a special spot in the hearts of many UT students, past and present, as well as lots of University employees who drop in for lunch on a regular basis. I'll have to try that myself sometime soon.
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