By Paul Rogers
In the finals of the 2023 Met Junior at Echo Lake Country Club in Westfield, N.J., Barnes Blake found himself in the slightly awkward position of squaring off against a friend, Liam Pasternak. The two of them chatted at the beginning of the match, but then the grinding began – they barely spoke to each other over the final nine or 10 holes. Ultimately, Blake, a lifelong member of Echo Lake who knew his way around the old tree-lined course, defeated Pasternak, 3 and 2.
Blake, a sophomore at Georgetown University who plays on the golf team, and Pasternak, a senior at Westfield High School who has committed to Notre Dame, will soon be competing again at Echo Lake. But this time they will be playing as partners, in the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball.
The championship, May 17–21, will feature 128 two-man teams. Each side will play 36 holes of stroke play – 18 at Echo Lake and 18 at Plainfield Country Club in Edison, N.J. – after which the field will be cut to 32 teams. Five rounds of match play at Plainfield will follow.
Qualifying was held at sites around the country from August through December (to be eligible, each player must have a handicap index of 2.4 or lower). Nearly 2,500 teams attempted to earn one of 112 available team spots. Sixteen exemptions were reserved for past champions, recent high finishers, and teams in which both players were in the top 400 in the World Amateur Golf Ranking as of July 31, 2024.
Blake and Pasternak, friends from junior golf, qualified by shooting a better-ball score of 7-under 65 at New Jersey National in Basking Ridge in late August. For once, they were competing as teammates rather than opponents. “We, like, talked the whole round and had fun with each other,” Blake says. “So it was just a really big change of pace compared to what we were used to.”
Such camaraderie is a hallmark of the Four-Ball. Of the USGA’s 17 championships, all but four are individual competitions. The Walker Cup and the Curtis Cup, biennial amateur team events between the United States and Great Britain and Ireland, feature 10 players per side. Only the U.S. Amateur Four-Ball and the U.S. Women’s Amateur Four-Ball consist of two-player sides.
The Four-Ball debuted in 2015, replacing the U.S. Amateur Public Links, which was discontinued the year before. The impetus for the change was twofold, McCarthy says.
First, the Publinx, as it was widely known, had lost its reason for being. The championship was founded in 1922 as an everyman’s counterpart to the U.S. Amateur, which for decades was open only to players who belonged to private clubs. After the USGA lifted that restriction in 1980, the two events became redundant. The Publinx might have been discontinued earlier, McCarthy says, but the Women’s Publinx was established only in 1977, and eliminating that event soon after its inception seemed to make little sense.
Second, for years Mike Davis, the USGA’s director of competition and later its executive director, wanted to establish a partner event for men and women, either four-ball or foursomes (alternate shot). Ultimately, four-ball was chosen, McCarthy says, because it “represents how we play golf in America.”
As anyone who has played even a casual better-ball knows, having a partner can feel like a cushion. Struggle on a hole, and he or she is there to save you. That is, of course, unless both of you struggle on the same hole. And although having to count only one of your individual scores on each hole relieves some pressure, it can add pressure, too.
“It’s a double-edged sword,” says Daniel Abbondandolo, a 37-year-old commercial real estate broker from Huntington, N.Y., who with his friend Colin Dolph of Locust Valley shot 8-under 62 at Huntington Crescent Club to qualify for this year’s Four-Ball. Sure, knowing you have a partner helps, Abbondandolo says, but letting him down by missing a key shot or makeable putt feels awful.
He and Dolph are friends from junior and high school golf on Long Island. Dolph went to St. Anthony’s in Huntington Station, Abbondandolo to St. Dominic in Oyster Bay. Each played Huntington Crescent many times as a kid.
The pair, both former pros who regained their amateur status, failed to qualify for the Four-Ball in two previous attempts and were on the verge of breaking up their “marriage,” as Abbondandolo jokingly puts it. But, he adds, “we loved each other too much to endure the divorce, so we decided to finally make some putts and drop a couple birdies on a golf course that’s near and dear to us.”
This will be the second U.S. Four-Ball held in the Met Area, after Winged Foot hosted the championship in 2016. In Plainfield and Echo Lake, the USGA has chosen two Golden Age courses carved out of the North Jersey suburbs by Donald Ross and carefully restored in recent years.
Plainfield, which has hosted a long list of tournaments, including the Barclays on the PGA Tour, the U.S. Women’s Open, the U.S. Amateur, and prestigious state and MGA events, features flowing hills upon which, as Ross noted, “golf holes can roll across the landscape.” But over the years, the roll of the land and other features of Ross’s design – the routes off the tee, the bunkering, the angles of approach into the green – became obscured by rough and trees.
Seeking to bring back the course’s original character in the late 1990s the club hired Gil Hanse, then a little-known architect from the Philadelphia area. Hanse, whose reputation has since risen enormously, removed scores of trees, particularly dense white pines; restored bunkers and fairway lines; and created short-grass chipping areas. By doing so, he increased the number of strategic options players have, said Scott Paris, Plainfield’s director of golf.
Nowhere is this clearer than at the short par-4 fourth, which will be the 13th hole in the Four-Ball (part of a revised championship routing that will conclude at the dramatic, uphill ninth, with its two-tiered green behind the clubhouse). Hanse took out trees down the left side and replaced a cluster of pot bunkers that been removed, opening up a preferred angle into the green – for players willing to flirt with the looming out of bounds.
Though it occupies flatter land, Echo Lake presents its own share of intrigue, especially in the contours of its greens, by turns subtle and dramatic. The course, restored by Rees Jones, requires players to execute their approaches with care. At the 140-yard par-3 third, for example, two bunkers guard the high side of the green on the right while a false front wraps around the left. “The scoring average there is never what you would think it would be looking at the yardage,” says Raymond Ferrari, the club’s head pro.
Echo Lake has a history of identifying strong champions, Ferrari says, including Inbee Park, who won the U.S. Girls’ Junior there in 2002 and has gone on to capture seven majors on the LPGA Tour.
The winners of the U.S. Four-Ball will earn, in addition to a national title, a 10-year exemption into the championship and spots in the 2025 U.S. Amateur at The Olympic Club in San Francisco. Depending on their ages, they also will receive exemptions into the U.S. Junior, the U.S. Mid-Amateur and or the U.S. Senior Amateur.
The Met Area sides competing this year also include the veteran tandem of Brad Tilley and Pat Wilson, who made it to the Round of 16 in the 2023 Four-Ball at the Ocean Course at Kiawah Island, S.C. Both have experience competing at Plainfield, including in the 2012 Met Open, where Wilson shot 65 in the opening round to hold the overnight lead.
Tilley, 42, the MGA’s Jerry Courville Sr. Player of the Year in 2022, describes Plainfield as “a great old-school design” where local knowledge can help. “I can play the whole course in my head right now,” he says.
Along with the MGA’s international team events, the Carey Cup and the French-American Challenge, Tilley says, the U.S. Four-Ball offers a welcome departure from the go-it-alone nature of golf.