Myopia Hunt Club

Favorite Hole

No. 16, “Paddock,” par 3, 140-192 yards

If no one cared how many holes a golf course had, this striking par 3 would likely be Myopia’s finisher. It drops from an exposed ledge where the first, 14th, and 15th holes sit to a sheltered green site next to the pro shop. Nos. 17 and 18, a pair of out-and-back par 4s, occupy their own paddock, and although they’re well designed, using a side-slope to fine strategic effect, they can’t help but feel tacked on. The round comes to a natural culmination at the 16th, which exits the course’s main arena with as much flair as the up-and-over first tee shot enters it.

The star of the show is the beautifully sculpted green, which runs away from the player and features a meandering central channel. Front pin positions are especially challenging, requiring either a low shot that lands just over the fronting bunkers and trundles on or a high shot that somehow doesn’t get pushed offline by the wind on the way down.

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Overall Thoughts

If you were to write a CliffsNotes guide to the history of American golf architecture, you might start with the opening of C.B. Macdonald’s National Golf Links in 1911. The National was the grandest, most fully realized U.S. golf course to date, the first true stateside rival to the championship links of Great Britain. Two years later, in a turf-resistant forest in New Jersey, George Crump started building Pine Valley. An American “Golden Age” of golf course design had begun.

I’ve often wondered, though, which U.S. courses were thought to be best prior to the National and Pine Valley. When I reread Robert Hunter’s book The Links a few weeks ago, I remembered that he provides an answer. In the first chapter, he describes the state of American golf architecture in the early 1910s, noting that Macdonald “was building the National Links in the sandhills of Long Island” and Crump “was laying out in the drifting sand of New Jersey the matchless Pine Valley.” Among existing courses, Hunter gives high marks to Garden City in New York and Ekwanok in Vermont. He reserves the warmest praise, however, for Herbert Leeds’s Myopia Hunt Club, calling it “an exacting test of golf, and, although but little changed in over 30 years, still one of our best courses.”

(Sidebar: I’m not sure why Hunter doesn’t mention Oakmont, which debuted in 1904. Maybe he hadn’t yet made the trip out to western Pennsylvania to see it. Oakmont would host its first U.S. Open in 1927, the year after The Links was published.)

Over the decades, Myopia has preserved Leeds’s architecture well and remained admirably immune to trends. Today, it’s one of the most authentic representations of pre-Golden Age U.S. golf architecture—a museum of the game.

Myopia has many types of hazards that were common before World War I but came to be frowned upon as Harry Colt’s naturalism crossed the Atlantic and took hold in America. The bunkers are sunken, simple in shape, frequently coffin-like. There are vertical hazards galore, from abrupt hummocks and berms to a crumbling wall along the 17th hole. These artificial elements combine with natural, site-specific features—grasses, trees, wild topography—to create a unique aesthetic. What may have seemed outmoded to the golf cognoscenti of the 1920s now feels fresh and exciting.

The par-5 second hole is like an archive of late-19th-century architecture. Its basic form is natural, vaulting from the plateau at the south end of the property into the valley that contains 11 of the course’s 18 greens. Its built components, however, are overtly artificial. The player encounters two cross hazards—a dry ditch and a trench-like bunker—and a large berm runs along the right side of the fairway. The green sits low, hidden from any approach longer than 75 yards, and runs away. This is basically Victorian “steeplechase” design, the kind that Hunter and other Golden Age architects would later criticize. The player’s task was obvious: carry the ditch on your second shot and the bunker on your third. These days, however, No. 2 at Myopia plays more as a “half-par hole.” After a strong drive, you will probably have a chance to clear the last cross-hazard with your second shot and feed the ball onto the green. In this way, the hole has become more fun, albeit less difficult.

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Such is the irony of Myopia Hunt Club’s history: what used to be a bruiser of a U.S. Open course now feels quirky and quaint, a 6,500-yard romp.

As currently presented, though, the course doesn’t entirely embrace this identity. The greens are maintained at speeds that, when combined with severe tilts, leave only a few viable pin positions. Also, although Gil Hanse’s team has widened several fairways since 2011, several more—Nos. 8, 10, 12, and 13, for instance—strike me as narrower than they should be.

To be fair, toughness is part of Myopia’s heritage. The course’s early-20th-century boosters tended to use the adjectives “best” and “most challenging” interchangeably. The club treasures its history, and that history includes four ferocious U.S. Opens. Yet it’s clear that Herbert Leeds didn’t just want players to suffer; he also wanted them to enjoy themselves. Why else design a hole like the fourth, which tempts players to take on a diagonal carry over a wetland area to earn a shorter approach, or the sixth, which presents multiple options off the tee, ranging from a layup with a mid-iron to a go-for-the-green attempt with a driver? Why else create a course in which all 18 holes can be instantly recollected after one round?

Myopia is a pleasure to play and, with some adjustments to mowing lines and green speeds, could be even more so. -GM

2 Eggs

(How We Rate Courses)

Myopia Hunt Club gets Eggs for land—which is exceptionally varied, ranging from dramatic to subtle, parkland to linksland—and design, the eccentricities of which have been lovingly preserved for over a century. As far as presentation is concerned, we would like to see more slope-appropriate green speeds and some additional fairway widening.

Course Tour

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