Myopia Hunt Club
Myopia Hunt Club first opened for play in 1894. The course was designed by Herbert Leeds and years later was rennovated / redesigned by Geoffrey S. Cornish.
Myopia Hunt Club plays to a par-72 and maximum distance of 6,538 yards.
Myopia Hunt Club hosted four of the first 14 U.S. Opens.
When Myopia was established in 1875, there wasn’t a single organized golf club in America. Its 30 founding members had staked out enough land in South Hamilton, Massachusetts, to pursue their equestrian pleasures. But in 1894, after seeing golf at The Country Club in nearby Brookline, Myopia leaders appointed a golf committee. R.M. Appleton laid out nine holes; the first tournament was held June 18, 1894, and Leeds, a former baseball player at Harvard, was the winner. Leeds went on to the rudimentary nine holes at Myopia, then added nine more, and by the turn of the century his control over the golf program was complete.
The 6,539-yard layout Leeds devised included four-foot-tall mounds, dozens of seemingly bottomless bunkers, lightning-fast putting surfaces, blind shots, substantial carries, deep declivities, gnarly rough, plateaued greens, and a pond and paddock to avoid. Not one of the 30 pros in the 1901 Open broke 80, and Willie Anderson’s victorious four-day total of 331 still stands as the highest winning score ever. Leeds was pleased.
Leeds would rule Myopia for more than 30 years. When he died in September 1930, the club’s golf culture eroded. By the time the Depression and World War II had passed, golf had nearly fallen off the charts in South Hamilton, not to resume its central place at Myopia for decades.
When Bill Safrin was hired as head professional in 1980, he found that only 4,500 rounds had been recorded in 1979. Safrin jump-started the golf program. As participation increased, the members took a renewed pride in their classic golf course.
There is absolutely nothing formulaic about Myopia Hunt’s design, no cookie-cutter holes or textbook routings. The first hole is a short uphill climb to a blind green, the second a 487-yard downhill par 5 with a generous fairway. Par 4s range from 260 to 446 yards, and there’s not a single hole that reaches 500 yards.
It is an immensely enjoyable layout, rife with singular holes that you will find nowhere else in America, weaving past ancient stone walls, crossing open meadows and concluding at sequestered greens.
Today Myopia Hunt Club has some 370 members, about 200 of them regular golfers. The people who basically saved the club in the 1980s are the senior members who hold offices and direct Myopia’s progress today, so the future is in good hands.