McDermott was portrayed as a non-drinking, pious, polite young man, but it seems his inner devils were never too far beneath the surface. By 1913, he continued to improve, winning the Western Open, then seen as a Major championship. That same year, two of the greatest names in golf, Harry Vardon and Ted Ray were brought to the US for a series of exhibition matches and tournaments, seemingly deliberately planned to get them in perfect shape to wrest the US Open from American hands again. Vardon had won the US Open on his last visit, in 1900, and Ray was the reigning British Open champion.
Their preparation seemed perfect as they steamrollered all opposition in every event they undertook – until they ran into McDermott on the eve of the 1913 US Open at The Country Club in Brookline, at a tournament at Shawnee-on-the-Delaware, with a near complete US Open field taking part. McDermott crushed the field, winning by eight shots from “big tramp” Alex Smith, and beating Vardon by 13 strokes and Ray by 14. It was a stunning performance and should have been the springboard to immortality in the game. Instead, it marked the start of a precipitous decline that led to McDermott being all but forgotten.
His rout led to him being carried around the locker room shoulder-high in a chair by the other American pros. From his perch, Johnny reportedly declared: “We hope our foreign visitors had a good time, but we don’t think they did, and we are sure they won’t win the National Open!” This seemingly innocuous statement – which McDermott vehemently denied uttering – was seen as unforgivably rude by the standards of the day and was latched upon by an unforgiving press on both sides of the pond.
From our jaded experience with tabloid journalism, it seems such an obviously contrived concoction to sell newspapers, but at the time even led to calls for McDermott to be banned from defending his US Open title in 1913. His invite wasn’t withdrawn, but the scandal had devastated Johnny and he finished a distant eighth. More galling was watching the amateur Francis Ouimet hailed as the savior of American golf when beating Vardon and Ray in a playoff, his own achievements seemingly ignored.
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