'“It crushed me early on,” McDermott recounted. “It crushed me from the standpoint of, I looked introspectively, just looked at myself and said, ‘what did I do wrong?’ I didn’t place any blame, no. It was, ‘what did I do wrong?’ I feel like that period of my career, that period of my life, had I not gone through that, I don’t know if I would be here now. What I mean by that is, my whole career had been going like this every year."'