Derr, veteran Masters journalist, dies at 97

PINEHURST, N.C. - John Derr, who reported from the Masters a record 62 times and broadcast from the 15th green when it first was on television, died of an apparent heart attack, his daughter said Sunday. He was 97.

Cricket Gentry said her father watched the Belmont Stakes as American Pharoah won the Triple Crown. She went to his house after the race Saturday night and found him in his chair in front of the TV.

Derr attended his first Masters Tournament in 1935 and was in the clubhouse when Gene Sarazen made his double eagle on the par-5 15th hole. He worked for CBS Radio and was part of the first telecast from Augusta National Golf Club in 1956.

Derr also was in Carnoustie in 1953 when Ben Hogan captured the only British Open he played.

It was his intimate friendships with Masters and Augusta National co-founders Bobby Jones and Clifford Roberts that most influenced his life.

“I got to Augusta by way of Duke University - not as a student but as a reporter at a Duke football game,” Derr told The Augusta Chronicle in 2013.

At age 17, Derr was working as an unpaid journalist for the Gazette in Gastonia, N.C. His editor agreed to pay him $12 a week as a reporter but charged him $12 a week to teach him how to do it.

The young Derr was covering Duke’s 1934 football game against Georgia Tech in Durham, N.C. Derr happened to be assigned the seat next to Atlanta’s O.B. Keeler, the man who famously chronicled Bobby Jones’ career. Keeler suggested he attend the Masters, and Derr did so in 1935.

“Lo and behold, the first person I see when I go through the gate is O.B. Keeler,” Derr said. “He said, ‘Oh, I see you made it. Have you seen Bob Jones yet?’ ”

Next thing he knew, Keeler dragged Derr over to meet the Grand Slam winner, and Jones took an instant liking to him “for no reason” and established a friendship.

“Mr. Jones said, ‘Have you met Grantland Rice yet?’ ” Derr said. “I told him no, I just got here. So Jones takes me over to meet Granny Rice. ... I was introduced by Bobby Jones to all these people. You can’t have it any better than that. I am so fortunate. You could never plan something like that.”

By Sunday, Derr was part of the press corps stationed on the clubhouse veranda, entranced as he watch legends such as Rice, Keeler and Ralph McGill craft their stories of the Masters.

It was on that veranda where word came from a caddie that Gene Sarazen made a two on 15. Writers immediately dismissed it as a mistake, that he meant 16 instead.

By the time it was confirmed, Derr had the chance to rush down and watch Sarazen play the 18th.
He got eyewitness accounts of the shot that made the Masters famous. The Sunday crowd in 1935 at Augusta had been reduced by overnight rain, and Derr estimates little more than 2,000 patrons were there, and very few were at the 15th hole when Sarazen holed his second shot.

“Sarazen said he’d met 20,000 people who saw it, but there were only 26 and he knew the name of every one of them,” Derr said.

Derr met many famous people and became friends with them.

President Eisenhower requested to play with him the Tuesday after the 1956 Masters, and Derr had to decline so he could drive home to New Jersey to see his pregnant wife. Ike persuaded him to play nine holes.

“So I walked out on the president at Augusta National ... but for a good reason,” Derr said, adding that the president later sent a letter and gift on the birth of his daughter, Cricket.

Derr played often with Sam Snead, even rooming with him on the road sometimes. He turned down repeated offers to play practice rounds with Ben Hogan before his British Open win at Carnoustie because he remembered Hogan saying he’d “rather be horse-whipped than play in these pro-ams because you spend all your time looking for their balls.”

Derr had lunch with him every day instead.

“That’s an opportunity you don’t get in this day,” he said.