[Photo: Oisin Keniry/R&A]
Ryan Fox is about as everyman as a player can be on the PGA Tour. He’s got the beefy forearms of a longshoreman and the paunch of a mostly fit bouncer, and when the New Zealander birdied four of the last six holes to capture the Open Championship in July, Fox was so humble about it that he no doubt gained thousands of fans who knew little about him otherwise.
The aftermath, then, has been somewhat predictable, if not a bit overwhelming, for a guy who is now signing autographs in hotel lobbies and getting meat pies delivered to his front door.
“The last month has been a bit crazy, to be honest,” Fox, 39, said on Tuesday at the BMW Championship – the second of three PGA Tour Playoffs events. “Obviously, my world has changed and I’m still trying to get used to that. So it was good to get back last week. It felt like I could kind of use the golf course a little bit as my sanctuary, that I can just go back and play golf.”
Fox, who took three weeks off after lifting the claret jug, struggled a bit to shake off the rust and tied for 58th in Memphis, but he was hardly regretting bringing the trophy home his Island country that has had only four major champions total among men and women. Fox is the first to win The Open since lefty Bob Charles in 1963.
Fox lit up social media on the day after his victory at Royal Birkdale when passengers got video of him trying to stuff the official claret jug and its replica into the overhead compartment of his commercial flight from London to Miami. The moment was all the more notable because he was seated near Cameron Young, whom he’d beaten by a stroke on Sunday.
Recalling this week that he was operating on zero sleep after the victory, Fox was sheepish about long it took him to get the trophies squared away.
“I never like holding people up when you get on a plane. Everyone just wants to get to their seat,” Fox said. “And I’m trying to figure out how to fit these two boxes in the overhead and take up all the space. Obviously, I’m not in a really good place mentally at that point either. All I want to do is just go to sleep and maybe have a couple glasses of water and stuff like that. So, yeah, it was interesting. But I made it to London and made it on the flight back to Miami.
“And then probably the worst about that was I had left my car in Miami, and I reckon I had had two hours sleep on the plane from London to Miami and had to drive an hour and a half back up to Jupiter. That was not a very fun drive.”
Fox soon flew to New Zealand, where he soaked up celebrations with family and friends, appeared at a Q&A in Auckland that drew an estimated 3,000 people, and he and the claret jug shared some time with the All Blacks rugby squad, for which his father once starred. He went to a steakhouse with executives from Srixon and planted the jug in the middle of the table and took it to his local course, where fans posed for pictures while Fox played a round.
He hasn’t much let it out of his sight since first holding it. “It’s in the back of the BMW right now, actually,” Fox said to laughter on Tuesday.
Photo: Andrew Redington
As for getting so much more attention than before, Fox is still coming to terms with it.
“In terms of commitments and stuff, there’s been, even for these two weeks, there’s been a lot more than I’ve probably ever had,” he said. “That’s obviously all good stuff to have, but it’s just time management is going to be a little more important going forward. Yeah, it’s just going to be something that I’m going to have to get used to.”
As the everyman who feels wholly approachable, Fox said the morning after he arrived in New Zealand a woman showed up at his front door with meat and fish pies after she heard in an interview that he was hankering from some local delicacies. “There was lots of stuff like that. It was nice to be home,” he said.
Fox noted that Tuesday’s formal media interview at Bellerive was probably his first pre-tournament appearance of the year. As for autograph hounds…
“Coming out of the hotel this week I got stopped going to dinner like five times to sign an autograph,” he said. “That has never really happened. It might happen obviously on the golf course, but not just randomly at the hotel. So there’s no more kind of flying under the radar.”
