Myopia Hunt Club

Myopia Hunt Club in South Hamilton, Massachusetts was founded in 1882 as a fox-hunting club by a group of Harvard graduates whose nearsightedness, the story goes, had disqualified them from collegiate baseball. They moved the club to its current South Hamilton property in 1894, and member Herbert C. Leeds — who was not a professional architect — laid out the original nine holes that year, then expanded the course to eighteen by 1898. The result is one of the earliest substantial American golf courses, and one of only a handful of nineteenth-century US courses on which the U.S. Open has been played.

Myopia hosted the U.S. Open four times — in 1898, 1901, 1905, and 1908 — placing it among the earliest championship venues alongside Newport Country Club, Shinnecock Hills, and Chicago Golf Club. The scorecard reads 6,555 yards from the back markers, par 72, with a slope of 138 and a course rating of 72.5. The yardage is short by modern championship standards, but the course's defense is the green complexes Leeds crowned aggressively and the cross-bunkering he installed at the landing zones — features the modern game has not been able to soften.

The three par-3s sit at 138, 192, and 252 yards. The 252-yard eighth is the longest one-shotter and is among the longest par-3s of any US Open-era design; it plays uphill into prevailing wind and resembles the cross-country shots tour players see at Royal Liverpool more than anything else in American competition. The three par-5s on the routing — between 473 and 529 yards — are scoring chances by modern standards, though they played as full three-shotters in the gutta-percha era.

The number-one handicap is the 451-yard sixth, a par-4 with an approach into a green Leeds set behind cross-bunkers. The 417-yard second-hardest is the long par-4 fifth; the 404-yard third-hardest is the par-4 fifteenth. The North Shore Massachusetts climate compresses the playing window into April through October, with September delivering the firmest fairway conditions. The membership has preserved the original Leeds routing — there is no expansion to 7,000-plus yards, and the course plays as it was designed to be played.