The Four-Footer at 18: Brendon de Jonge, Ernie Els and the Afternoon They Beat Tiger Woods

The lights at Muirfield Village had not fully come on when Ernie Els walked to the 18th green on a damp Saturday afternoon. The ball sat four feet from the hole. Nearly five hours earlier, that same putter had slid a three-footer past the cup on the opening hole, forcing his young partner Brendon de Jonge to carry most of the pressure through the middle of the round. In golf, four feet on the final hole of a team match is the longest distance the sport can manufacture. Els read the line, stood tall, and rolled it in. It was the only point the International team won all afternoon.

Their opponents: Tiger Woods and Matt Kuchar.

More than a decade later, de Jonge — now 46, off the tour and working as a broadcaster — still tells the story on the PGA Tour's Subpar podcast, hosted by Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz. He calls it "an absolute dream," and says he could not have drawn it up any better.

A season is only one sentence in a decade-long book. But some sentences make you reread the whole chapter.

Context: a format that lets captains pick the fight

The 2026 Presidents Cup was played from October 3 to October 6 at Muirfield Village Golf Club in Dublin, Ohio — a Jack Nicklaus-designed parkland course where firm, fast greens reward precise iron play. The captains were Fred Couples for the United States and Nick Price for the International team.

The structural difference between the Presidents Cup and the Ryder Cup sits in the pairing mechanism. At the Presidents Cup, captains choose the matchups. That means when Price sent de Jonge and Els out against Woods and Kuchar, it was a deliberate decision, not the draw of a card. And Els's reaction on learning the pairing — as if the two had been handed the role of sacrificial lambs — shows that the International side itself viewed the match through the eyes of the underdog.

That is the most valuable detail in the story, and the one most easily lost when only the final putt is remembered.

Core: the record of a man who never won

Brendon de Jonge was born in Zimbabwe, raised in Australia, and spent 12 years on the PGA Tour with a résumé that reads plainly: 317 starts, zero victories, 10 top-fives, 28 top-tens, 68 top-25s.

That is the portrait of a player with a very high floor and a very low ceiling. Good enough to keep a card for a decade, consistent enough to earn steadily, yet never once the man who closed the door on the final hole. In a sport whose public memory keeps only winners, this archetype tends to be filed in the dimmest drawer.

Ernie Els was the opposite. Four major championships, including two U.S. Opens and two Open Championships. The teammate de Jonge had idolized since adolescence was the man beside him for all four sessions of that Presidents Cup — a level of trust from captain Price that is rare in a format built on rotation.

And at the center of the story sits the belly putter.

Els was one of the defining faces of the anchored-putting era — a method he adopted around 2026 and rode to the 2026 Open Championship. On January 1, 2026, the R&A and USGA brought Rule 14-1b into force, banning anchoring the club against the body. In other words, that afternoon at Muirfield Village sits squarely inside the window when the technique was still legal, and Els was its most prominent beneficiary before it disappeared.

Els's three-foot miss at the first and his four-foot make at the 18th are the two ends of one emotional arc, not a technical finding. In the middle of that arc stands a four-time major champion who had never before been placed in quite this position.

The arithmetic of that afternoon

To understand why this win is remembered so long, it has to be placed in the scoreboard. After the earlier sessions, the International team trailed 14–8. On Sunday they won 7.5 of the 12 singles points — one of the strongest singles surges the format has seen. They still lost 18.5–15.5.

Which means the Saturday foursomes match de Jonge and Els won was the only point the International team collected in that entire session. A losing team produced exactly one winning moment, and that moment landed on the pairing judged weakest on paper, against the most famous opponent of the generation.

That is why a team-format match can carry the weight of a final.

The contrarian angle: an afternoon that measures nothing

This is where I want to linger longer than most nostalgia content allows.

In my files tracking Presidents Cups, I always separate two kinds of evidence: the result of a match and the ability of a player. The foursomes match at Muirfield Village belongs to the first category. Match play is golf's highest-variance format — that is its nature, not its flaw. A four-foot putt decided the match, and Ernie Els struck that putt, not Brendon de Jonge.

Read that win as proof that de Jonge was Woods's equal and you have misread the format. What the match proves lies elsewhere: durability in alternate-shot play, the capacity to absorb a partner's early miss, and a measure of luck at the right moment.

The true value of a deal is never in the number; it is in the story nobody tells. The same holds here: the value of the win is not the 1-up result but what it reveals about how a captain chooses a matchup, how an older star accepts risk, and how a player who never won learns he can still be the one standing when everything closes.

There is another layer few mention: the provenance of the story itself. This is content owned by the PGA Tour, released through the tour's own podcast. When an organization both operates the event and produces nostalgic content about it, the information flow stops being neutral. It selects memories that serve the brand, and the underdog beating the biggest name is among the most profitable memories available.

They doubt the voice before they hear the argument. I learned to gather evidence first and expectations second. Here, the evidence lives in the scoreboard and in the timeline of an equipment rule — not in the emotion of the narrator.

Takeaway

This year marks a decade since Rule 14-1b took effect. A generation of golfers has grown up never having seen anyone anchor a putter against the body in official competition. Players like Els built their entire scoring threshold around a technique and then lost it, and they still had to walk out the next morning.

Perhaps that is what is worth remembering about Muirfield Village. Those four feet do not measure who was better. They measure only this: on an afternoon when their team earned exactly one point, two men refused to eliminate themselves from the contest before it began.