Ryan Fox became my golfing hero when he should have been in meltdown

Tuesday, 21 July 2026

Mark Reason is a Stuff sports columnist

OPINION: Ryan Fox, the 39-year-old New Zealander, won the Open by doing the impossible.

Twice Fox was cursed by bad luck in his final four holes and twice he pushed off the demons trying to get their claws into his brain and pull him down into a hell of petty resentment. Fox is now my hero. He is the man I will think of when next I want to hurl a club up a tree or snap the putter over my knee.

Just the other day my ball finished in three separate divots in my final six holes and boy, did I let the world know about it. The final divot might as well have been a hoof mark. I raged and ranted and made a hash of my final chip shot.

“Oh, do stop whingeing,’ said my playing partner, not unreasonably.

A couple of days later it was her turn to feel the slings and arrows of golf’s outrageous fortune. Her anger and club bashing shook the ground beneath our feet. Of course, I was tempted to say something, but her wretchedness was too great.

And the two of us were just out for a Sunday morning stroll. How Fox survived two thunderclaps of misfortune in the white heat of the final afternoon of the Open Championship, I will never know. He should have been in meltdown.

Earlier in his round Fox had attempted to chip up to a pin perched precariously atop a wicked bank. The ball did not make it to the summit. Fox walked backwards smartly as the ball hurtled back with some alacrity towards his feet. It was a point at which he could have imploded. But to his great credit, Fox got up and down for his bogey.

The Kiwi, wearing a black shirt as a nod to his All Blacks’ heritage, then started to play seriously well. He birdied the 13th and 14th and must have been feeling full of beans standing on the 15th tee.

But the 15th at Birkdale is a newly designed hole and not a very good one. Off the back tee, a good shot can finish in a much worse place than a bad shot. The green is at an angle and the run-offs are too severe. It needs a group of public-spirited sappers to come along and lay down a few well-placed explosives.

That must have been how Fox felt when he found out where his tee shot had finished. It was a good tee shot, but not quite good enough. It had just caught the face of the bunker and then ricocheted over towards the back lip. Fox had no shot. He decided that his only option was to come out backwards.

Up ahead Scottie Scheffler, a habitually equanimous Christian and the best golfer on the planet, was venting against the golfing gods. “Give me just one good bounce,' he raged as his head threatened to swivel through 360 degrees and spin off into the outer atmosphere. We all empathised with Scottie’s urge to break a club in what PG Wodehouse called “a calm and judicious spirit'.

I once saw a golfer become so enraged that he whirled the club round and round his head and then launched it violently until the club perched high in the branches of a nearby tree.

“You might want to throw a provisional,” the third member of our group said wryly.

So how must Fox have felt when he saw his ball in that bunker of doom? He admitted that he had dreamed of being out in the last group in the Open Championship almost every day since he was a boy of seven. Now his dream threatened to become a nightmare. He was faced with becoming another Open casualty whose humiliation was to be witnessed by millions. But there was no fuss. He did not hurl his toys out of the pram as Bryson de Chambeau would have done. Fox did not threaten to walk off the course.

Fox walked up to his ball and flipped it out of the bunker back towards where he had come. But let it never be said that Fox was in retreat. The New Zealander got his ball up and down and made one of the great bogeys in Open Championship history. He then smoked a drive almost 400 yards down the 16th to set up a birdie. This was courage.

Standing on the 17th tee, Fox was tied with the American Cameron Young for the lead. The 18th hole was more of a bogey hole than a birdie hole. Only four men had made birdie there all day. But the 17th was Fox’s chance, a short par five and one of the easiest holes on the course.

Fox had it all worked out. Such was the run and the wind that a 3-wood or driver would bring the bunkers into play on the right. Fox played his driving iron and it was a beauty. The ball bounced on the burnt white fairways so reminiscent of the Birkdale Open in 1976 when drought parched the British landscape and Bobby Cole four-putted the first green.

Then the ball bounced again. And again. And it kept on rolling. And rolling. The horror was now visible. Just as Greg Norman’s drive at Troon all those years ago reached a bunker that had been out of reach all week, now Fox was destined to finish in his own pit. Bad luck defined Norman’s career. Larry Mize had fluked a chip against him at the Masters, Bob Tway had holed from a bunker, Mark Calcavecchia had chipped in from a bush at that Troon Open.

Fox was surely now going the same way. Earlier in the year he had missed the Players Championship with kidney stones, giving the thumbs up from his hospital bed. His insides must now have felt as if they were full of boulders when his tee shot trickled into the sand.

The Kiwi looked at his ball and stared the devil in the eye. With his feet outside the bunker, Fox flicked the ball as far down the fairway as he dared, played a handy approach and just missed the putt for birdie. He now faced the dreaded 18th. Fox needed a par to force a play-off with Young, who was warming up on the range and there were hazards everywhere.

Back in 1923, the great golf writer Bernard Darwin, who was also a more than handy player, authored an article for Vanity Fair about the luck in the game.

Darwin wrote, “I have often felt very sorry for chess players. I do not myself play their game, though I have often read with awe the usually unpronounceable names of their champions. I am sorry for them because they can never talk aloud about their opponents' luck. Alone among games, theirs is—as I understand the matter—utterly inexorable, irredeemably logical; there are no bad lies, no bunkers jumped, no long putts: the best man always wins.”

Golf is not like that. Fox had been rent with bad luck. And now he was looking at the hardest finishing hole on the Open roster. There were demons everywhere.

Fox approached his tee peg with that lopsided walk of his, which reminds you of a man who has broken both hips. Then he smoked his ball down the middle of the fairway. Scheffler couldn’t do it. Young couldn’t do it. Rory couldn’t do it. Fox rose above them all.

Fox’s second shot was to a green that must have looked as wide as a set of rugby goalposts, the sort that his dad used to thread the ball between. Fox took his 8-iron and drilled it at the pin. The kid who dreamed now had a putt for the Open.

After 36 holes Fox had been tied for 52nd. He was now on the brink of history, on the edge of the biggest comeback in terms of position by anyone to win a men’s major. The trouble, as he said afterwards, was 'my hands were all over the place'.

And so was the final green, shimmering and moving in the heat. Luck has such a part in golf that the Royal and Ancient even wrote into the rules that “whatever happens to a ball by accident must be reckoned a rub of the green.' And Birkdale’s 18th green, crusty from heat and spike marks, was full of rubs.

Fox wasn’t going to hang around. Take a look, go up to the ball and bang. And luckily Fox holed the putt. As Darwin observed – Bernard, although it might as well have been Charles – “It is the brave men who get called lucky.” And they don’t get any braver than Fox.

The Kiwi set an example to all us hackers around the world. If you can dream and not make dreams your master. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs. And if you can hole a putt on the final green of the Open when the devil has spent the past hour throwing sand in your eyes…

Then you are more than a man. You are an example to us all.

Thank you, Ryan Fox. You showed us all how to triumph over golf’s misfortune. I’d like to vow that I will never throw another club or utter another moan of golfing frustration, but you are a better man than me, Foxy. To all us whingeing hackers out there, you are the champion golfer of the year and will be for many years to come.