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Taylor Nichols is no small gherkin on the pickleball court. During a recent weekday match at Chicken N Pickle, a new sports and entertainment complex in the blink-and-you’d-miss-it town of Webster, halfway between Houston and Galveston, the 33-year-old Fort Worth native zipped around the court, dinking and lobbing and backhanding the ball in a furious nine-hit rally with his opponent.Pickleball is Nichols’s bread and butter, and he dominates most matches he plays. Although this contest unfolded as most do in the booming recreational sport—including all of those earsplitting cracks, thwacks, and pops—there was one key difference: Nichols played from a sports wheelchair, a souped-up ride with intimidatingly angled wheels and Evel Knievel–red spokes.Before becoming enamored with all things pickleball, Nichols was an able-bodied professional motocross…

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Get in-depth coverage of news, reviews and conversations about Texas barbecue. It's basically Christmas every day for barbecue-lovers.

Kacey Musgraves’s third taping for Austin City Limits, which took place in June for an episode that will be the show’s fiftieth-season premiere when it airs Saturday, was a looser affair than most, despite the Golden, Texas, native complaining about the difficulty of sitting down in her restrictive, sequined minidress. Though her episode is one of the few to feature a single artist for the show’s full hour, Musgraves and her band took more than two hours to get through their set, retaking songs, retuning guitars, and generally revealing, as the singer put it at one point, “how the sausage gets made.”From another artist, the process might have come off as sloppy. But from Musgraves, especially at this point in her career, it played less…

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In Austin, just north of our imposing pink granite seat of government, inlaid on the new Texas Capitol Mall, is a large map of the state. Visitors to the promenade can walk across seven geographical regions, strolling from the Panhandle Plains, in the north; to Prairies and Lakes, in the north-central area; to the Piney Woods, in the east; to the Gulf Coast and the South Texas Plains; and from Big Bend Country, out west, to the Hill Country, in the middle-ish part of the state. Travel Texas, the state’s tourism office, uses the same seven regions in the way it divides the state. And Texas Parks and Wildlife seems to follow suit, though it spells “Piney Woods” as one word. But this particular convention, despite…

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From the hillside villas of Acapulco to the beach clubs of Barcelona to, now, a potholed stretch of Industrial Boulevard south of downtown Austin, the ritzy, sweaty, buzzy sport of padel has arrived in Central Texas.Last weekend’s grand opening of Padel Club Austin showcased the facility’s nine gleaming, glass-walled courts, lined with pristine artificial turf for this fast-paced racket sport that looks like a mix between doubles tennis and squash. The club also features a pro shop, a cantina, and, last Friday night, thumping, clubby beats from a live DJ.Visitors in workout gear and patio-bar attire mingled as the orange-and-violet sunset dimmed against the bright court lights. A man in a printed shirt and flip-flops walked by with his goldendoodle as partiers posed for photos…

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If you’ve ever wanted to sip on an old-fashioned set afire by a master mixologist in the renovated venue of the 1992 NAFTA initialing ceremony, have I got a spot for you. A plaque commemorating the North American Free Trade Agreement, which was initialed by President George H.W. Bush, Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, is an unobtrusive centerpiece in the courtyard at the brand-new Kimpton Santo, in downtown San Antonio. The live oak–ensconced plaza is situated directly between the hotel’s steakhouse and its vibe-y, high-concept speakeasy, the Study at Dean’s.The Kimpton Santo, the third Kimpton location in Texas (adding to the Pittman, in Dallas and the Harper, in Fort Worth), has been open for less than a month,…

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