Myopia Hunt Club - Massachusetts, U.S.A.

Myopia Hunt Club, like such other classic courses as Merion and Garden City, owes its distinctive design to a gifted and determined member of the club. The man behind Myopia was Herbert Corey Leeds, a skilled all-around athlete, who starred as the shortstop on the Harvard baseball team during the 1870s, and was severely bitten by the golf bug when he was 40 years old. Leeds set about overhauling Myopia's basic nine-hole course, completing the remodeling of the existing nine in 1896 and adding a second nine in 1902. Between 1898 and 1908, Leeds's course hosted four u.s. Opens. Myopia dates all the way back to 1879, having been originally founded mainly as a club for amateur baseball. The founding members all wore glasses and so the club acquired its unusual appellation. The club was incorporated as the Myopia Hunt Club in 1892, with fox hunting the dominant activity, but golf soon came to the fore. Leeds believed strongly that a stray shot should be penalized and built about 200 deep, curly grass-walled bunkers around sloping, natural greens. Leeds also created small sugarloaf mounds by covering old stone boundary walls with earth. One hazard to be avoided at Myopia is the Taft bunker, 15 yards short of the 10th green. Leeds had a dispute with President Taft, who was a member at Myopia, and so he kept making the bunker deeper each time Taft landed in it, until at one point caddies had to be supplied with ropes to hoist the rotund First Golfer from the sand.

The Country Club - Massachusetts, U.S.A.

The Country Club in Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside downtown Boston, is the original American country club. With its canary yellow and white clap­ board clubhouse, it remains a beautiful enclave of rolling fairways with rocky outcroppings through the stately oaks and maples. The Country Club has been the site of some of golf's most epic battles, beginning in 1913, when Francis Ouimet, a 20-year-old unknown amateur who grew up on Clyde Street across from the club, won the U.S. Open by defeating the English stars Harry Vardon and Ted Ray in a playoff In 1999, the course was the setting for the historic come-from­behind win by the U.S. squad in the Ryder Cup Matches. The Country Club began as a retreat for pursuits like riding, shooting, and horse racing before golf was introduced thanks to a figure described as "a young girl from Pau." The girl in question was Florence Boit, the daughter of wealthy Boston expatriates, who brought her clubs from France on a visit to her uncle Arthur Hunnewell's estate in Wellesley in 1892. Hunnewell, together with Laurence Curtis and Robert Bacon, then took the lead in establishing golf at The Country Club. Florence Boit and her three sisters are the subject of John Singer Sargent's masterpiece in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.