Robert Trent Jones went to Cornell to become a golf architect, at a time when no one in golf saw a connection between golf and higher education. He spent three and a half years studying in Cornell’s various undergraduate and graduate schools. His special curriculum in “golf architecture” was made up of courses in surveying, hydraulics, landscape architecture, horticulture, agronomy, economics, chemistry, public speaking and journalism.
As you might have guessed, I collect stories about great players from the past. Stories from when golf was more of a game, less of a television show. Here’s one about Johnny McDermott, the first American to win the U.S. Open, in 1911 and 1912. This week, as you may know, the 2007 U.S. Open begins at the Oakmont Country Club in Oakmont, PA., so if nothing else this is a timely tale.
Following his U.S. Open wins, Johnny McDermott, our first “homebred” U. S. Open winner, entered the 1914 British Open, but because of travel delays he arrived too late to tee off. Returning home to the States his ship, the Kaiser Wilhelm II, collided with an English ship and sank. He drifted in a lifeboat in the middle of the Atlantic for over twenty-four hours before being rescued.