The US Open returns to Merion Golf Club just outside Philadelphia with the first shot being struck not long after sunrise on Thursday, June 13.
When that happens less than a handful of players in the field will know that this major is being contested in the hometown of the first American US Open champion, a man who still holds the oldest unbroken record in US Open history, but who has also faded with the passage of time like grainy photos on museum walls.
His name remains vaguely familiar, but never quite placed.
This year the entire golf world is celebrating the centennial of Francis Ouimet’s 1913 US Open victory in Brookline, Mass., over British champions Harry Vardon and Ted Ray. That story – the rail-thin boy champion and his 10-year-old caddie, Eddie Lowery, who upset the greatest players of the day – made the front pages of every major newspaper in the English-speaking world and heralded what most regarded as the dawn of American golf. Mark Frost even wrote a book and a Disney screenplay about Ouimet called, “The Greatest Game Ever Played.”
But Ouimet was not the first American to win the US Open, nor was he the youngest.
Both those titles belong to John J. McDermott, the son of a Philadelphia mailman who won the 1911 US Open at the age of 19. McDermott remains the youngest Open champion in history. Then, in 1912, he became the first player ever to break par for 72 holes in a major championship when he won his second US Open title.
In 118 years, only six players have won back-to-back US Opens: Scotland’s Willie Anderson, legendary Masters founder and Grand Slam winner Bobby Jones, Ralph Guldahl, Ben Hogan, Curtis Strange and Johnny McDermott. Jack Nicklaus never successfully defended a US Open title, nor did Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Tom Watson or, to date, Tiger Woods. Of the six men who did accomplish the feat, five are in the World Golf Hall of Fame. McDermott is the only one absent.
He has become the answer to a trivia question, an aside to most conversations about the game and its history. One of the only reasons modern golfers might know McDermott at all is from a scene in “The Greatest Game Ever Played,” where actor Michael Weaver, who portrayed McDermott, confronts Harry Vardon and Ted Ray before the 1913 US Open, telling the two, “We hope you have a nice time here, but I don’t think you will … This time you’re not taking our cup back.” There was a lot of anger and Hollywood melodrama in the scene, but McDermott was clearly the bad guy, not just in the scene but in the movie – the ugly American who would fall from on high and be shunned by his peers.
Most of the scene was true. The only liberties taken were with a bit of phrasing and where and when the incident took place. It was actually a tournament held a few weeks prior to the US Open at Shawnee-on-the-Delaware, an event McDermott won by eight shots over Alex Smith. He beat Vardon by 13, Ray by 14. Afterward, he said, “We hope our foreign visitors had a good time, but we don’t think they did. And we are sure they won’t win our National Open.”
This was hardly an international incident, but the mean-spirited nature of the remarks lasted longer in the minds of the public than McDermott’s lopsided victory.
It is a shame that this great champion – a man who regularly won $1,000 challenge matches at a time when the average American salary was $750 a year; a man who won the Western Open (a major tournament at the time) in 1913 and the Philadelphia Open four times – would be remembered as a brash lout. All but forgotten are the words Ray, himself a British and US Open champion, used to describe McDermott: “I have never seen a man who, when called upon to hit a ball a given number of yards, could do so with such damned irritating consistency.”
But there is good reason that the public knows so little about McDermott.
On June 23, 1916, at the age of 24, McDermott was certified by the state of Pennsylvania as a “lunatic” and committed to the State Hospital for the Insane in Norristown, a gothic brick and stone structure straight out of a modern-day horror movie. His parents, Margaret and John, Sr., were ordered by the state to pay $1.75 a week “for support of said lunatic” until further notice.
In hindsight all the signs were there. McDermott was described in turns as quiet and mannerly and in the next minute as boorish and bullying. Growing up as a caddie at Aronimink Golf Club near his grandfather’s farm, McDermott was always the smallest kid in the caddie pen, but also the one known for picking the fights. He was happiest when he was alone practicing his game, first at a makeshift course he created in a field near the seventh fairway of Aronimink, and then as an apprentice at Merion and Camden County Country Club.
McDermott’s sister, Alice, remembered that her brother, “would be on the practice field as soon as it was light, about 5 a.m., and hit shots until 8 a.m. when he opened the shop. After his day’s teaching, he would go out and play. Often he finished in twilight with somebody holding a lantern.”
Solitude was his friend, as McDermott could be easily agitated by the most mundane interruption. Part of him appeared to be genius. He could, according to reports at the time, hit a mashie – the hickory-shaft equivalent of a five-iron – 150 yards and land the ball on a newspaper. But he would also scribble gibberish in notebooks while mumbling, and work himself into frenzies that would end with outbursts like the one at Shawnee-on-the-Delaware. He didn’t drink or smoke, and when he was hired by the members at the prestigious Atlantic City Country Club as the head professional he was described as “courteous to the members” and someone who “attends mass regularly.”
He also snapped after losing the 1910 US Open in a playoff to Alex Smith. According to a report by John Kiernan of The New York Times, Smith extended his hand after the playoff and said, “Hard luck, kid.” McDermott, 18 years old at the time, standing five-feet, eight-inches tall and weighing 130 pounds, refused to shake the champions hand and said, “I’ll get you next year, you big tramp.”
The fact that McDermott did, indeed, beat Smith and everyone else in 1911 and 1912 was irrelevant.
At the time, no one made the connection between his erratic, paranoid, irrational behavior and mental illness. The word schizophrenia did not even exist until 1908, and diagnoses remained sparse before the 1920s. “Madness” and “nervous breakdown” were the most common catch-all phrases for such disorders. Like most males who suffer from schizophrenia -- an estimated 0.7 percent of the general male population worldwide -- McDermott first exhibited symptoms in early adulthood, although those who knew him sensed that something was wrong as early as age 12 or 13.
Certainly USGA officials did not recognize the signs of mental illness. They were so enraged by McDermott’s insults at Shawnee that they threatened to reject his application to the 1913 US Open even though he was the two-time defending champion. The committeemen relented and allowed McDermott to play, but all were overjoyed when Ouimet, an amateur, won the title in a playoff over Vardon and Ray, ushering in a new dawn for the American game and sweeping aside the memory of the moody McDermott.
In mid-October of that year, less than one month after Ouimet was hoisted onto the shoulders of an adoring crowd in Brookline, McDermott collapsed in his golf shop in Atlantic City. Once revived, he babbled and twitched and shuddered from people and things that were not there. Then everyone realized something was terribly wrong.
Twenty months later, McDermott was committed to the institution that would care for him for most of the rest of the life. Two months after that, in August 1916, a newly-formed group called the Professional Golfers Association of America (PGA for short) made its first charitable donation to “the care of John J. McDermott.”
Grantland Rice wrote of him not long after his commitment: “There isn’t any question but that McDermott would have been to American golf what Vardon is to British play if John had not been forced out through fate just at the moment when he was coming upon the uplands of his career.”
Treatment of the mentally ill in the first half of the 20th century ranged from medieval to woefully naïve. McDermott’s care was basically to be watched and fed and given a quiet environment where he would not hurt himself or others. It was, by all accounts, compassionate, although unproductive. McDermott could leave under the care of his parents and, later, his sisters, Alice and Gertrude, and he continued to play golf occasionally.
In 1922, the grounds crew at the Norristown hospital built a makeshift six-hole golf course with crisscrossing fairways and barely-mowed greens. It measured 1,232 yards. Only one patient played it regularly.
Walter Hagen visited McDermott after playing in a Philadelphia fundraiser. After their round, McDermott told Hagan, “I don’t think I ever saw a more beautiful view than from here. Tell the boys I’m getting along just fine.”
He played outside the confines of the hospital as well, making appearances on leaderboards in events throughout the Philadelphia area in 1925 and showing up in golf shops for casual rounds for decades thereafter. When the tour made regular stops in Philadelphia during the ‘50s and ‘60s, McDermott would always show up and watch. One year, standing alone outside the gallery ropes, Arnold Palmer recognized him and asked how he was doing.
“My putting could be better,” McDermott said.
“We could all use some of that,” Palmer replied.
His last public appearance came at the 1971 US Open at Merion, a classic championship where Lee Trevino beat Jack Nicklaus in a playoff. By then, almost no one at the USGA or on the Merion staff recognized the 79-year-old McDermott. He still shuffled and mumbled, wearing rumpled clothing and unpolished shoes. Some members of the staff tried to have him escorted off the grounds. Jackie Burke, a former World War II Marine and winner of the 1956 Masters and PGA Championship, recognized McDermott and intervened.
Once USGA officials realized who he was, a chair was placed behind the 18th green, and players came off and shook his hand. Dozens of American players thanked McDermott for paving the way for them. He was, at times, too overcome with emotion to respond.
Six weeks later McDermott died in his sleep. He was buried in the Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, Pa.
Today, his 1911 US Open medal is on display at the USGA Museum in Far Hills, N.J.
No tributes are planned for McDermott during the 113th US Open at Merion, although Ouimet’s centennial celebration is already in full swing.
