SOUTHPORT, ENGLAND | Say what you like about Royal Birkdale and there is plenty you can say. You can laud it to the skies as one of the best links courses in the world. You can hymn it to the heavens for its flat fairways that thread their way through towering dunes, making it a difficult but fair test. And you can widen your eyes in appreciation of the way that it sprawls over the landscape so that spectators and golfers never feel as though there is a shortage of space, never feel hemmed in as they might at Royal Lytham just up the road for example or St Andrews, where the Open will be staged this time next year.
And now an exciting Open Championship that was played out on four almost cloudless days over a sun-battered links has given us a winner who achieved this prized status in a way that is worthy of the setting in which he did it. Ryan Fox, 39, a good-as-gold New Zealander, is one of the most liked men on the DP World Tour as well as the PGA Tour, a man who works and plays hard, a no-nonsense Kiwi from a famous sporting family.
“I see things fast and my brain works fast. … It’s not that difficult to pick a shot and pick a club.”
Ryan Fox
In being so popular he is an echo of Aaron Rai, who learned his trade on the same tour and won the PGA Championship a couple of months ago. Two more admired men among their peers than Fox and Rai would be hard to find. What is it about three-letter surnames?
Fox plays at the speed of his animal namesake raiding a chicken coop at the dead of night. He talks fast, walks fast, thinks fast and swings fast with a technique that could be described as idiosyncratic. He does this every time, whether he is on the first or the 18th tee.
STUART FRANKLIN, R&A VIA GETTY IMAGES
“I was always that way as a kid,” Fox said. “I see things fast and my brain works fast. I played almost every sport growing up, and at tennis and cricket I wanted to hit the ball hard. I was never methodical at anything, to be honest, and it just carried over into golf.
“It’s not that difficult to pick a shot and pick a club,” he continued. “It’s always going to be between one or two clubs into a green, and I just see the shot quickly, pick a shot quickly, and the less time I have to think about it, the less bad stuff can creep in there. If you tried to slow me down and make me do everything slowly, I think I’d be pretty useless, to be honest.”
About the only thing Fox has not accomplished at speed is the arc of his career. He turned pro in his mid-20s, was a rookie on the DP World Tour when he was 30, a rookie on the PGA Tour at 37 and now he is a major champion at the ripe old age of 39.
“It’s a bit surreal,” he said an hour or so after holing the winning birdie putt on the 72nd hole, his head just visible over the top of Claret Jug that was comfortably within reach of his right hand. “It’s something you dream of. I used to get up in the middle of the night to watch this tournament back home. It was always something that was there just to be able to play in it, first up, and now to be an Open champion, to be the Champion Golfer of the Year, it’s unbelievable, surreal, crazy. I don’t have enough words in my vocabulary to explain it, to be honest.”
If you were writing a script for a Hollywood film about a late-blooming golfer in a major championship you might come up with the storyline of a genial hero within six months of his 40th birthday playing a startlingly good round on the third day to set up a rousing finish on the fourth. Fox’s 62 on Saturday, the third 8-under-par score of the championship after Sam Burns’ and Lucas Herbert’s on Friday, should have warned us that something was afoot. A Fox was on the prowl. Lock up the chickens.
Ryan Fox, already one of the more popular players on tour, will no doubt see an increase in fame as a major champion.
PETER BYRNE, R&A VIA GETTY IMAGES
He began the last day two strokes behind Burns, the leader, with whom he was paired in the last twosome. Playing his speedy game and remaining steady as his rivals came and went, he reached the pulpit tee of the 13th and, seeing the hole fall away from him to end in a green cupped like a hand by sand dunes, he pressed the accelerator, birdieing that hole and the next one.
He withstood a piece of ill luck on the short 15th when his tee shot didn’t just roll into a bunker but right up against the face. Bogey. There was nothing for it. He birdied the 16th, made a good recovery from a bunker on the 17th and moved to the 18th tee level with the leader, Cameron Young, who had posted a closing 64 two hours earlier.
This is where we really were transported from filmdom to reality. How many of us in our dreams have stood on a tee and said to ourselves: “Birdie this hole for victory?”
The answer is that many may have thought it and said it; few have done it.
Now Fox has. He staged a spectacular smash-and-grab raid on the Claret Jug to become the second New Zealander after Sir Bob Charles, the left-hander, to win it. He did it by crushing a drive to an ideal position on the fairway, hitting a pinpoint-precise 9-iron of 175 yards, followed by sinking a putt of 11 feet and 7 inches.
As the ball rolled towards the hole Fox began to straighten up. When it fell out of sight he threw his arms up in the air and let out a roar that was probably heard in his home country.
A fast-talking, fast-playing, highly admired man from a small country at the bottom of the earth had ensured that his name, his golf and his character would reverberate around the world in an admirable fashion. Chickens look out. A Fox is on the loose.
Top: Ryan Fox speeds his way to his first major championship.
ANDY BUCHANAN, AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
