Glenview golfer on a hot streak
The first phone call Glenview golfer John Ramsey made when he won the Illinois State Mid-Amateur Championship was to his father.
Bob Ramsey introduced his son to the sport early. The little guy was whacking golf balls with plastic clubs in the basement of his house in Kirkwood, Missouri, outside of St. Louis, as soon as he could walk.
Surprisingly John Ramsey didn't play golf in high school or college. But after playing in his first tournament in 2001 at age 21 and then coming to Chicago to study law at DePaul, "I've been hooked ever since," he said.
Hooked? Ramsey hit them straight Aug. 24-25 at Edgewood Valley Country Club in LaGrange. On the first day he shot 72 and 74 over 36 holes. He came back the next day with a 68 to win at 2-under-par, a stroke better than former champion John Ehrgott of downstate Edwards, near Peoria.
It was Ramsey's second big win on the Chicago District Golf Association schedule. On July 29, Ramsey and longtime golf partner Chadd Slutzky of Deer Park beat 39 other teams to win the CDGA Amateur Four-Ball Championship at Skokie Country Club.
After COVID-19 canceled the CDGA's first four tournaments, Ramsey had a big hand in the circuit's first two victories of 2020.
"They're both rewarding," said Ramsey, who had several past top-six Mid-Amateur finishes and previously won the Four-Ball with Slutzky in 2017. The pair tuned up with a four-ball title in February in North Carolina, where they never stopped playing golf.
"The individual one I've been trying to do longer than the Four-Ball. The Four-Ball is different because you have a partner to lean on, but sometimes it can almost be more pressure when you've got someone depending on you," said the 40-year-old.
"This is a big check mark for me winning this CDGA title by myself."
He and his TaylorMade driver and putter, Srixon irons and Titleist short drivers and wedges erupted from the clubhouse on the second day of the Illinois Mid-Amateur, for golfers 25 and older. Ramsey birdied the first three holes with his longest put a 3-footer, and he scrambled to save par on No. 8.
"Pretty much everything in my bag was working at that point," said Ramsey, who held off Ehrgott late.
An in-house counsel for GE Healthcare with two boys attending Our Lady of Perpetual Help School in Glenview, Ramsey has played in two United States Mid-Amateur championships. Serving as his dependable caddie is one of his oldest pals from St. Louis Country Club, Brian Dobrynski. All it takes is a phone call for Dobrynski to drive in or fly out from St. Louis to carry Ramsey's bag.
Ramsey, whose home course is Glenview Park Golf Club, will rekindle the partnership with Slutzky in a United States Four-Ball qualifier Oct. 5 at Ridgemoor Country Club in Harwood Heights. They played in the first such national event in San Francisco in 2015.
What he'd really like to do, he said, is advance to individual match play in a US Mid-Amateur championship. The winner of that event receives a bye into the Masters.
Being on a hot streak, like Ramsey is, one can never say never.
"It's kind of like a drug," he said. "The better you do the more you'd like to keep going."