Young Philadelphian was America's first Open winner

It was June 1971, and the crowd gathered at Merion Golf Club for the U.S. Open included a confused old man who kept trying to gain access to the players' locker room.

As guards hustled the intruder away from the clubhouse, Arnold Palmer passed by. The world's most famous golfer suddenly turned and did a double-take.

"Johnny?" he asked of the old man. "Johnny McDermott?"

It was indeed Johnny McDermott, the man who had helped popularize golf in America, the first American to win a U.S. Open (1911); the first to capture back-to-back Opens; still the youngest, at 19, ever to win the event.

Palmer's greeting was a rare late-life highlight for McDermott. By then, he had spent decades forgotten in a Norristown mental institution. He would die there, two months later, at 79.

The U.S. Open will be back at Merion this month. And among the history its return is sure to invoke is that of McDermott, the Philadelphian who was this country's first great professional golfer.

"They say that before all the trouble, he was the best there was," said Pete Trenham, a veteran Philadelphia-area professional who met McDermott on some of the old man's Sunday visits to St. David's Golf Club. "But by the end, it was kind of sad to see him. He didn't know if it was 1915 or 1970."

The son of a West Philadelphia mailman who learned the game while caddying at Aronimink, then located not far from his home, the bantam-size golfer had a long, fluid swing.

Most U.S. golf pros then were Scottish imports. Scots or Englishmen had won the first 16 Opens, including the 1910 event at Philadelphia Cricket Club. McDermott finished in a three-way tie for first there, but fell in a playoff to winner Alec Smith.

He would win the tournament the next year in Chicago. And the year after that in Buffalo. Shortly afterward his troubles began.

In 1913, British stars Harry Vardon and Ted Ray came to America for a tour. In an event at Shawnee-on-the Delaware, McDermott won by 8 strokes, topping Vardon by 13 and Ray by 14.

"We hope our foreign visitors had a good time," the cocky McDermott said at the awards ceremony, "but we don't think they did, and we are sure they won't win the . . . Open."

McDermott's "unsportsmanlike remarks" drew immediate criticism from golfers and sportswriters on both sides of the Atlantic.

His attempts at an apology betrayed his deteriorating mental condition.

"I am brokenhearted," he said. "I am worried greatly . . . near a breakdown."

McDermott rested that winter in Florida. In 1914, he traveled to Prestwick for the British Open. He missed a ferry that connected with a train to the course and arrived late. Officials offered to make an exception for him.

"He just told them, 'No, that wouldn't be right,' " Trenham said, "and he didn't play."

Discouraged, McDermott booked passage home on the Kaiser Wilhelm II. While the ship passed through the fog-shrouded English Channel, it was rammed by a cargo vessel, the Incemore. McDermott, who had been in a barber's chair at the time, scrambled for a lifeboat and, badly shaken, eventually was rescued.

His nerves further frayed, McDermott played poorly in the 1914 Open, and not long afterward, he passed out in the pro shop of his course, the Atlantic City Country Club. He entered Norristown State Hospital a short time later, his career over at 23.

"Every couple of weeks, I'd go get him at the asylum and take him to Jeffersonville and we'd play," Bud Lewis, a former pro at Manufacturers Country Club, recalled in 2005. "Even though he was a little haywire, you could still see some flashes of what he had been. He'd par a few holes in a row or something. I'm not sure he knew what year it was, but he never talked about the old days."