Two golfers versus…one?! Inside the most fascinating match of the year

EDISON, N.J. — As John Ramsey and partner Chadd Slutzky’s hopes dwindled in their second-round match at the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball Championship here at old-timey Plainfield Country Club on Tuesday, Ramsey’s frustration began to show.

After failing to extract his ball from a fairway bunker with his second swing on the par-4 16th, Ramsey played his third shot with such haste that it looked as if he were already surrendering. A couple of shots later, Ramsey’s exasperation surfaced again when he tossed his ball into the fescue behind the green. On the long par-4 17th, more disgruntlement, after Ramsey’s third shot, a misplayed chip, caught a slope on the front of the green and drifted from its mark. Ramsey was unimpressed with himself.

“It’s like you’ve never played golf before,” he barked.

Ramsey, who is 45 and a star on the Illinois amateur circuit, has, of course, played a lot of golf before, and at an exceedingly high level; you don’t get to this stage of one of the game’s elite amateur events without possessing serious game. Yet on the first tee Tuesday morning, he and Slutzky, also of Chicagoland, encountered something they’d never seen in their many years together as competitive four-ball partners: not two opponents but only one, 39-year-old Marc Dull, a Florida-based landscaper who also earns his keep as a Streamsong caddie.    

“We kind of expected both guys to be here today,” Ramsey told me Tuesday afternoon of Dull and his would-be partner, Chip Brooke. “But he was by himself.”

Ramsey was flying solo because, after he and Brooke had advanced through the first round of match play, Brooke had to jet home to Orlando for his daughter’s high-school graduation. Brooke’s exit meant Ramsey would earn the curious distinction of becoming the first player to compete sans teammate in the match-play bracket of this championship, which is now in its 10th year.

Two vs. one might work in basement Ping-Pong matches or the WWE, but it is an ill-suited format for elite amateur golf. “Ninety-nine out of 100 times, they would win that match,” Dull told me later of his opponents. He paused for a beat then adjusted his estimate. “Or maybe 90 out of a 100.”

Whatever the odds, they’re long. Really long. When you allow two scratch-or-thereabouts players to pencil in the best of their two scores, chances are they’ll make no worse than par and have at least one good look at birdie. As a case study, take the 2024 U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball, where former Drake University golfer Haeri Lee played by her lonesome in the second round when her partner had to duck out for an AP exam. After 10 holes, Lee was 6 down. She conceded the match.

On a breezy, sun-splashed New Jersey morning, Ramsey and Slutzky looked as if they might dole out a similar beatdown on Dull when they birdied 2 and 3 on Plainfield’s rollercoaster Donald Ross design to jump out to a 2-up lead.

But then Dull dug in. He birdied 4 to get a hole back; saved par from off the green at 5; then made two more birdies, at 6 and 7, to seize a 1-up lead. “They were probably assuming I’m gonna miss one or two of them,” Dull said of his birdie tries, which included an eight-footer at the 7th that broke 2 feet. “Like, we work for a living, we’re not professional golfers, but I made them all.”

Demoralizing for Ramsey and Slutzky? How couldn’t it have been?

Dull is a formidable talent — he’s a two-time Florida State Golf Association Amateur of the Year and was runner-up at the 2015 U.S. Mid-Amateur — but he still had no business making this match interesting. Instead, he made it an all-timer. After a Dull bogey at 10, the score was tied again and stayed that way until 13 where Dull made his fourth birdie of the round to take another 1-up lead. He had nothing to lose; the same could not be said of his Ramsey and Slutzky.

“I feel like it might have put more pressure on us,” Ramsey said of playing 2-vs.-1. “You don’t want to be the two guys that lose to one guy.”

Then came the dagger. After tying 14 with pars, Dull, on the par-3 15th, rammed home a 35-footer — “a hundred miles an hour,” Ramsey later said of the ball’s pace — that if it hadn’t disappeared into the hole might have run 10 feet past it. If you’ve ever been the victim of such a putt, you know the soul-crushing despair it instills.

Which brings us back to Ramsey’s piques of temper at 16 and 17. “There was definitely some frustration,” Dull said later. “Because, I mean, I get it. Like, if I’m playing one — if me and my partner are playing one guy — I would get frustrated, too. Why are we not killing this guy? You know what I mean? The thought would be, he can’t keep doing this. Like, he’s got to screw up somewhere.”

But Dull didn’t. Instead, he threw one haymaker after another. “Didn’t even miss a shot,” Ramsey said. “It was unbelievable.”

When Dull coolly parred 17 from the back of the green and neither Ramsey nor Slutzy could manage a birdie, the match was over.

As Dull readied for lunch on the clubhouse patio after his historic 2-and-1 win, he said he felt okay physically but was “mentally exhausted.” Rest, though, was not in his near future — another 2-vs.-1 showdown was, his afternoon quarterfinal against a couple of Maryland standouts, Hunter Powell and Carson Looney. If Dull could somehow advance to Wednesday’s semifinals, Brooke, his partner, was at the ready to hop a flight back from Orlando, but until then, Dull was on his own.

Could he put up another fight? Boy, could he ever. After another early deficit — he fell 2 down through 5 holes — Dull made two birdies and an eagle in 5 holes to get back to even through 10. That eagle came at the par-4 10th, where from a divot hole in the fairway, Dull jarred his second from 132. After 17 holes, the contest, remarkably, was still tied. But it wouldn’t be for long. At the drivable par-4 18th, Dull smashed his tee ball into a greenside bunker but needed two more swings to find the green. He made 5 while his opponent — excuse us, opponents — made 3 to win 1 up and earn a place in the semis.

Powell and Looney were joyful on the 18th green but also awed by what they had witnessed from Dull. “For him to come out, repeat it, and not only repeat it, but to play better is one of the most absurd things I’ve ever seen,” Powell said. “We told him when we shook hands that he was the best golfer that we’ve ever seen in person.”