"Tom,
I'm relatively new here, but didn't the link for Myopia get pulled down somewhere back in 2005, and wasn't it requested to be pulled more to keep a low profile than anything else. Your post almost seems to suggest that a Myopia request came in on the back of the gazillion Merion posts, which is no way near the case the best I can tell."
Jim:
No, that apparent request from Myopia to take down the course review of it on here couldn't have much to do with Merion threads (which began about 7-8 years ago) even though I did hear from one of the Myopia historians about those recent Merion threads.
In my opinion, Myopia is only concerned about unwanted publicity and that was probably the reason for their request of this website to take off the course review.
Myopia is one of the app fifty clubs on the USGA Architecture Archive list to be approached and I'm the contact for Myopia. They do have a concern about unwanted publicity and I can certainly say they would never want their course and club put through what Merion G.C. has been put through on this website. I'm pretty confident in saying that would be total anathema to Myopia.
Their architectural history, in my opinion, just might be the most interesting one of all of the early American courses simply because it seems Myopia was considered by so many to be the first good course and good architecture in America a number of years before NGLA existed. Herbert Leeds is a very interesting guy and he did Myopia his way, that's for sure, even though he did have a pretty consistent modus operandi of asking the good players who played the course what they thought about it and sometimes reacting with his architecture to their comments.
The other interesting and really valuable thing about Myopia, in my opinion, is once Leeds made it into an 18 hole course it was never that much changed and some of what was changed over the years has to a large degree been rather recently restored---not all, but most.
What Hutchinson had to say about Myopia at the time he said it is pretty curious, in my opinion, and I can most certainly see why perhaps many Americans, and American architects (and not just Travis) reacted pretty strongly and pretty negatively to it.
Hutchinson and MacDonald had been long time friends and collaborators on a number of things to do with golf for years before that article, particularly on the Rules of Golf but also on architecture and it's interesting to note that in 1910 Hutchinson was making a tour of American courses aboard Lord Brassey's yacht and it's pretty clear to see he was naturally promoting NGLA and probably Macdonald's idea of basically mimicking the best holes abroad over here.
After a while, this clearly did not sit very well with some American architects and some were pretty vocal about it in print, certainly including Travis and Tillinghast.
There had been all kinds of undercurrents of national competitiveness in golf and then in architecture between America and GB going back to as early as the turn of the century. I can pretty much guarantee it all had a whole lot more to do a number of other things than with just two words---ie the Schnectedy Putter incident!
One might get that impression if all one did is read some of the Travis articles of that time but although his opinion may've been the most stringent of all (due to the entire years long Schnectedy Putter situation and the whole issue of ball and implement "standardization") which was beginning to be considered at that time there was a lot more to do with it than just that.
I think some of Tillinghast's articles of the teens are the most enlightening in all this, particularly regarding American architecture vs the architecture abroad. Essentially Tillie was saying that American architects had caught up to their early GB mentors and were doing better over here than they were over there.
National competitiveness in most all things golf (the tournament players, Rules (I&B, standardization, amateur status, stymie) and architecture) was very strong back then, and it seems like the guy who really got caught in the middle of it all was Charles Blair Macdonald, as he was the one who seemed to have his feet firmly planted on both sides of the Atlantic on all those issues!
This is why I've said for a long time now that the story of Macdonald in things other to do with golf course architecture is a great big story just waiting to be told. Most even on here don't seem to understand it all that well, in my opinion.