Chad Ramey hit a shot in the final round of the Players Championship that you don’t see every day: a 7-iron from 183 yards on the Stadium Course’s par-3 13th that landed softly on the left side of the green, caught a slope and didn’t stop rolling until it had disappeared into the hole.
An ace.
Ramey’s first in competition.
“I couldn’t get any putts to fall, so to not have to putt, that was nice,” Ramey joked after signing for a one-under 71 that moved him to three under for the week and likely with a top-30 finish in what is his fourth Players appearance.
Amazingly, though, the 1 wasn’t Ramey’s most unusual shot of the day.
That came on another par-3 — the island-green 17th — where Ramey’s tee shot rolled through the back of the green and clung to the strip of rough that separates the putting surface from the wood plank that rings the green. But his ball didn’t cling for long. A moment or two after it came to rest in the rough, it dislodged itself and dropped down to the plank. The ball seemed destined for the water, but instead of bounding forward, it spun backward and stopped hard against the turf line, leaving Ramey with a chip shot you wouldn’t wish on your worst enemy.
Ramey has a history at 17. In the second round of the 2023 Players, he arrived on this hole with the lead. But then disaster struck. Tee shot. Kerplunk. Third shot from the drop zone. Kerplunk. He eventually holed out for a quadruple-bogey 7, surrendered the lead and shot 75. On Sunday, he finished T27.
On this Sunday, if Ramey didn’t want to play his second from the plank, he had the option of taking a penalty stroke and playing his third shot from the drop zone. But, with the hole cut on the lower tier on the far right side of the green, Ramey wanted no part of a drop. “Where that pin is,” he said later, “[the drop zone] is not where you want to be. So I just kind of weighed the odds and we determined it was worth taking the chance.”
Brad Faxon, calling the action on the NBC telecast, said he’d never seen a player face this particular predicament on 17.
Just an all-time bogey at the 17th from Chad Ramey pic.twitter.com/90HaNCmSzO
— Fore Play (@ForePlayPod) March 15, 2026
With one foot in the rough and another on the plank, Ramey drew back what looked to be a lob wedge and drove the club into his ball. The high-wire act paid off. Ramey’s ball popped up and advanced about five yards onto the green, from where Ramey two-putted for an adventurous bogey.
“Right before I hit it, I was just like, please, just get the ball on the green,” Ramey said after the round. “It couldn’t have worked more perfectly.”
As Faxon reviewed a replay of the shot on the telecast, he said, “You could hear [his club] hit the wood first. He almost hit it off the toe like he was trying to take the bounce away from it.”
Asked whether he’d ever practiced such a shot, Ramey responded with a single syllable.
“No.”
