THE TAKE By John Steinbreder
Born and raised in the Philadelphia area, Michael McDermott is best known as a standout regional golfer who has been one of the best in the very competitive Golf Association of Philadelphia. Now 43, he is a five-time GAP Player of the Year and has captured that association’s Amateur Championship three times and its Middle-Amateur on four occasions. In addition, he has taken two Crump Cups, most recently in 2017 when he rode an eagle on the 17th at the Pine Valley Golf Club in the final to victory on the next hole, and won the prestigious Silver Cross, which goes to the golfer with the lowest aggregate scores in the qualifying rounds for the GAP Amateur and the Joseph H. Patterson Cup, an individual, 36-hole gross stroke-play event that he has won as well.
McDermott has something of a lower profile on the national and international scenes, though, and never has been nearly as active in those realms. To be sure, he has played in a number of U.S. Amateur and U.S. Mid-Amateur championships and made a couple of impressive runs, getting to the quarterfinals of the 2016 Mid-Am and the round of 16 of the 2003 U.S. Am, defeating along the way the top-seeded and future PGA Tour title winner J.B. Holmes. And McDermott also has played in the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball with fellow Keystone Stater and frequent GAP rival Jeff Osberg. But as the head of his investment firm, Kathmere Capital Management, and the father of three young boys, McDermott does not have a lot of time to devote to those circuits.
So he was slightly surprised and understandably overjoyed when he received the invitation to join the United States team for the 2018 Concession Cup, a biennial event contested between squads of leading mid-amateurs, senior amateurs and super senior amateurs from the United States and Great Britain & Ireland. Next to the Walker Cup, it is the biggest team event in amateur golf, and he appreciated the ask.
“It was such an honor for a guy like me, in his mid-40s, working hard and helping my wife, Brooke, raise our children,” says McDermott, who lives in Bryn Mawr outside Philadelphia and is a member of Pine Valley and also Merion Golf Club. “To be able to compete with some of the most accomplished amateur golfers in the country, guys like Tim Jackson, Scott Harvey, Todd White and Gene Elliott, is special enough. And to have teammates who I know from Pennsylvania like Nathan Smith, Buddy Marucci and Sean Knapp makes it even better.”
McDermott came by his love for competitive golf quite honestly. His father, Neil, was a passionate player who as an executive for Philadelphia Electric played for many years at the company course in town.
“Then, when I was in the eighth grade, he joined the Llanerch Country Club in Havertown, Pa.,” he says. “I was mostly a baseball and basketball player at that time, but my father got me interested in golf. I was lucky because there were four kids my age at Llanerch who were very good, very natural golfers, and on any given day they could shoot 75. They were also very competitive, and getting thrown in with them was a little bit like getting thrown to the wolves. They really pushed me, and as a result, I started to get pretty good at the game, too.”
By the time he was attending Haverford High School, McDermott was entering the occasional golf tournament. “I remember playing in the high school state junior championship between my junior and senior years, in Hershey, Pa., and I had the lead after one round,” he says. “I did not sleep one minute that night, and the next day I was in the last group with kids who were getting recruited by a couple of college teams while nobody was interested in me. And I did what you would expect someone in that situation to do, which was totally choke.”
Not surprisingly, that less-than-stellar performance did nothing to improve McDermott’s chances of playing college golf. “People kept telling me I would not make their teams,” he says. “But the coaches at St. Joseph’s in Philadelphia felt I was about to turn a corner. So they offered me a spot, and I was in the lineup there from Day 1 for all four years of school.”
McDermott graduated from St. Joe’s in 1997 with a degree in finance, and that year he was honored as the top athlete in his graduating class and named an All-America Scholar by the Golf Coaches Association of America. However, he says he never rose to the level as a player where he even considered playing golf professionally and instead decided to follow the advice of his father, a strong amateur golfer in his own right who would go on to lead the GAP as its president from 2002 to 2005. And that was to try to be the best amateur player he could be, using Philadelphia-area legends Marucci, Jay Sigel and Gordon Brewer as role models. Guys who were great golfers, great competitors and great people in their communities, McDermott adds.
Alas, McDermott did not find much time for golf after he finished college as he looked to start a career in finance and more or less put his clubs away for a few years. “But in the summer of 2000, I decided to play some tournaments, and that June I was runner-up in the Philadelphia Amateur,” McDermott says. “Then, the next month, I won the Pennsylvania Amateur. It was a real shock in both cases but also a real confidence booster.”
Not surprisingly, those performances led to his playing more tournaments, and he enjoyed doing that for a while. “I was single and had a low-expense lifestyle, so I entered events like the Porter Cup and the Sunnehanna (Amateur) as I also qualified for some U.S. Amateurs,” he says. But McDermott found that it was not easy to build the business he had started if he was off playing competitive golf all the time. Then in 2006, he married Brooke, and soon after they started a family.
“With my family and my work, golf became third on my priority list, and it has been that way for a while,” he explains. “My life is an incredible juggling act, and I have to be really good at managing my time. I’ll work all day, running my company, which now has a dozen employees. You’ll also see me at baseball and soccer games coaching or cheering for my boys, and then at the range early the next morning.”
That does not leave a lot of time for tournament golf. But he nonetheless finds ways to tee it in the big GAP events, where he often finds that two of his main adversaries are his younger brothers and fellow St. Joseph alums Kevin and Brian, and also the Crump and the U.S. Mid-Am, if he can play his way in. He also has his games at Merion and Pine Valley, where the 62 he once shot in a club event still stands as the course record.
As for being a part of the Concession Cup, that has been gravy in a very rich, mostly regional golf life.