The name is a joke that stuck. Many of the people who gathered here were bespectacled, horse-loving New Englanders, and when it came time to christen their club they chose Myopia, as if to admit that whatever they saw, they saw up close. The beginnings reach back through more than one doorway. There were four nearsighted brothers in the 1870s, more interested in tennis and boating than anything else, and there is the club's life beginning in 1882. The fox hunting came later, and with it the identity that still sits on the club's name and logo. In the early 1880s a group of members broke away and formed the Country Club in Brookline, and by 1894 Myopia had settled in Hamilton. When Brookline added six holes of golf, Myopia answered with nine of its own. It is hard not to read that as a neighborly rivalry played out in turf. The Scotsman Willie Campbell came as professional in 1896 and helped lay the beginnings of a new course before returning to Brookline the next year. The plans fell to Herbert Corey Leeds, one of the original members and a former Harvard baseball player. He carried them out over a few years and went on directing the course's architecture from the late 1890s through the 1920s. An eighteen-hole layout opened for play in 1898. Yet when the U.S. Open arrived that same year, it was played over nine holes, and Leeds himself tied for seventh. By 1901 the course stood newly expanded, and it was fearsome. That 1901 Open tells you what Leeds had made. Not one player broke 80. The Scottish professional Willie Anderson finished on 331 and then needed an 85 in a playoff to win. By 1905 the Haskell ball had made the course more manageable, and Anderson won again with 314. The championship came back once more in 1908, making four Opens among the first fourteen. For a while, Myopia and Garden City on Long Island were thought to be the two finest and hardest courses in the country. That was before the great flowering of American golf architecture in the 1910s and 1920s. What remains is a piece of golf from before that flowering, and it is unapologetically itself. Fairways and greens sit naturally on the land. No two holes are the same. The bunkers are the signature, scattered in odd places that seem almost haphazard, in shapes and sizes that obey no pattern. Some are bizarre and many are cruelly penal. Quirky, unusual, and full of character, the course feels like nowhere else. The 12th has a claim as the toughest hole on the toughest course in Open history. It plays 447 yards as a par four, though it was originally designed as a five. The tee sits high on the property with a magnificent New England view, the kind that makes you linger. Then you look down at the work. Thick woods guard the left. A large rock on the right blocks the view of the landing area. The fairway slopes from right to left, so a fade is the best way to hold it, but a miss to the right leaves you with little but hope. The approach goes to a small, crowned green that slopes away from you. Even the view cannot soften it. Since 2011 Gil Hanse has guided the club through tree removal and fairway expansions. Myopia remains private, and a game here has to be secured. For anyone even mildly curious about how American golf looked before its golden age, this is the course to study. It is the place to stand and squint, close up, the way its founders did.