World's Most Amazing Golfer

Bob MacDermott

By Curtis Gillespie
Published: March 01, 2005

Christmas and New Year's were a battle. It took MacDermott two hours a day to get dressed, and his wounds themselves required endless, often bloody dressing changes. The pain was constant.

"It's one thing to hear a woman scream in pain, but to hear a grown man doing it, I just couldn't take it," says Janie, a petite Malaysian whom MacDermott met overseas.

As MacDermott's stumps began to heal over enough to accommodate prosthetic limbs, golf crept back into his thoughts. When he returned home, two months after the accident, he called his teacher, Peter Cushner, the longtime head pro at Lloydminster Golf & Country Club. In the dead of winter, Cushner and MacDermott sat next to a space heater in the club's shuttered pro shop, huddled around a bunch of tools and materials, brainstorming.

The first hurdle was how to replicate the left wrist action in a golf swing: Flexible enough to supinate yet stiff at impact. They settled on six inches of high-pressure tubing jury-rigged to what Cushner calls a "spoonlike" implement in which to anchor the club. It wasn't much, but it was a start.

"The first time I tried to hit balls was into the net at the shop," MacDermott says. "It hurt so bad, and felt so bad as a golf swing, that I nearly cried."

MacDermott kept at it. He returned to the shop daily to hit balls, often for two or three hours. The torque from all these swings would often cause the skin on his leg stump to overstretch, rupture and bleed--at which point he'd clean the stump off, bandage it and keep going.

"Golf kept me motivated and sane," MacDermott says. "And Janie was into it for me, which helped. I'm sure she figured it was better for me than sitting on the couch, watching game shows and popping Tylenol 3s."

Cushner never once heard MacDermott bemoan his fate during those winter months. "And Bob didn't just want to play golf again," he says. "He wanted to be a great player."

As the days grew longer in the spring of 1998, MacDermott found the good days starting to come more often. He was hitting balls, had his family. He was facing down his new reality.

Which was about to change. Again.

Janie hadn't been feeling well all winter and went to the doctor in March. Their 4-year-old daughter, Shannon, also hadn't been her peppy self, so Janie brought her along. Days later, the doctor called Janie with the test results: She was pregnant, and Shannon had leukemia.

"We had almost no money," says MacDermott, "a 6-year-old boy, a 4-year-old girl with leukemia. It had been a selfish time--all I'd been thinking about was myself--but that ended right there."

Shannon, now 21, endured three years of chemotherapy before improving. Today, with her leukemia in remission, she's studying youth and family counseling at a local college. That November, Janie gave birth to Carrie Ann, now 16. Just as MacDermott and I finished lunch, his son, Dayton, 23, a 2 handicap who works at an auto-body repair shop, called seeking a small loan toward a motorcycle.

"I'm not crazy about it," says MacDermott, after hanging up his cell phone, "but with my 'Vette it's hard to criticize."

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