Cyril Walker did things his own way. He studied every yardage, changed clubs when a shot didn’t feel right, and refused to be rushed by anyone. His swing, as writer Grantland Rice described it, looked like he was ‘cracking a whip,’ and the low-stinging shots he produced were the envy of players twice his size. In his better days, he dressed with care in a vest and linen plus-fours. And those who met him remembered a slightly crooked smile and a left eye that seemed to wink along with it.

That personality makes the end of his story quite hard to picture. In 1948, Walker passed away in a jail cell in New Jersey. But to understand how the U.S. champion ended up in a jail cell, we have to go back to the beginning, when the game was still thriving for him.

Walker’s Love for Golf

Let’s first start with how he got into the sport. Walker was born in Manchester, England, in 1892 and loved cricket and football. Classic enough, but golf eventually found him by accident. At 11 years old, he slipped through the gate looking for a lost ball when he ended up on the grounds of Clayton Golf Club.

That’s where his love for the game began, and he started caddying for sixpence a round and used the money to buy his first set of clubs.

As he grew older, he even tried office work at a brokerage firm, but his heart was surely somewhere else. Against his father’s wishes, he chose to pursue golf, repaired his old clubs at Hoylake, and in 1914 sailed for America with a letter of recommendation in his pocket.

Soon enough, he started winning regional titles. By 1921, he had reached the semifinals of the PGA Championship, beating Gene Sarazen along the way. Walker was already making a name for himself.

Name & Fame

Then, in the spring of 1924, came a moment that would etch his name in the history books. He was vacationing in Michigan when he decided, almost on a whim, to enter the U.S. Open at Oakland Hills. The course was no easy one. It was, in fact, the longest the championship had ever seen, and even he admitted it out loud: it was too big for him. But quietly, he had admitted to his wife that he was going, and he was going to win there.

And well, he started his rounds with scores of 74, 74, and 74, tying him with Bobby Jones, the defending champion. Moreover, Jones was already off the course by then, playing about 20 minutes ahead, which meant Walker knew exactly which number he was chasing.

And the decisive moment of the tournament came at the 16th hole. Walker’s playing partner, Leo Diegel, had just found the water, which gave Walker a massive chance.

In his usual style, he changed clubs three times, paced off the distance, and hit his approach to about eight feet before making the putt. Tommy Armour, who would later become a three-time major champion, called it one of the finest shots he had ever seen.

Walker then closed his round with a 75, the second-best round of the tournament. Jones, meanwhile, faded with a 78. When it was over, Walker had finished at 297, three shots clear of the best amateur in the world. But Jones was gracious in defeat, telling reporters that anyone who could play the last nine in par under those conditions certainly deserved to be the champion.

The win surprised almost everyone. The Associated Press described Walker as a consistent player who had never before won an important title. The reports also noted he was the first foreign-born professional to win the championship since Jim Barnes four years earlier.

He won the prize of $500 and a gold medal, and overnight Walker became a name. He played exhibition matches, including some with Bobby Cruickshank, and endorsed products called Correct Golf Grips. In fact, he even wrote a syndicated newspaper column offering advice to amateurs, even though he privately disliked noisy galleries. By some estimates, he earned about $1,500 in the years that followed, which would be millions today.

“It’s absolutely necessary to believe in yourself,” he once wrote, and for a while, that belief carried him a long way.

In 1926, he was chosen for the U.S. side in the International Match against Great Britain, and he finished tied for 18th in the Open Championship the same year. He was still a force, too, reaching the quarterfinals of the PGA Championship again in 1931, years after his Open win.

So, for a few years, everything he believed about himself was true. But the same habits that made him a champion also started turning against him.

When the Wind Changed

But one of his traits that started brewing problems for Walker was his slow play. And he certainly did play painfully slowly. He studied every green, checked the wind again and again, and took endless practice swings. One joke of that era said he was “a cross between a caterpillar and a Jersey lightning,” while another claimed the groups behind him were handed playing cards to pass the time. But fellow pros soon began refusing to be paired with him.

At the 1929 Los Angeles Open, he refused to speed up, and officials had no choice but to disqualify him. But tragically, that same year, the stock market crashed, and most of his savings went with it.

The years that followed were equally hard. Drinking took hold of him; so did money troubles. He was reported to have been arrested for drunk driving in 1934 and told the judge he hadn’t held a job in three years.

That was the same year he played his first Masters, hosted by the man he had beaten a decade earlier. He finished last, and it became his final major championship.

By 1940, a reporter found him gambling in Miami Beach and sleeping in a Salvation Army shelter for 25 cents a night. Moreover, he wore the same torn maroon sweater every day because it had become the only shirt he owned. Eventually, he made his way back to New Jersey, where he washed dishes at a diner and stayed at the YMCA. What little he earned often didn’t last long.

That brings us to the tragic night of August 5, 1948, when 55-year-old Walker walked into Hackensack Police Headquarters in New Jersey and asked for a bed. Sergeant Ralph Pinot let him sleep in a cell, as he did not have a family or a safe place to sleep. But by the next morning, officers found him slumped over a chair, having passed away from pneumonia.

Cyril Walker was laid to rest in a potter’s field, but his name was never truly lost. He still sits in the record books as a U.S. Open champion, alongside the likes of Bobby Jones, whom he defeated in 1924.