[Photo: Icon Sportswire]
Ryan Fox gave a full, detailed explanation for the reason he had to withdraw from the Players Championship at TPC Sawgrass earlier this month. And it’s something you will never be able to unhear.
Fox, winner of the Myrtle Beach Classic and the RBC Canadian Open last year, was a surprising pull-out at Sawgrass given how well he was playing leading in. Turns out it was for a very real, extremely painful reason, which he cited on Instagram the morning of the first round of the tour’s flagship event.
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“Unfortunately some kidney stones took me down on Tuesday night and then had to be dealt with surgically this afternoon,” Fox wrote. “Hoping to have a quick recovery and be back soon.”
Fortunately, the New Zealander has had a speedy recovery. He’s back in action this week at the Houston Open, and he hopped on Golf Channel to provide a health update. It was perhaps the most “too much information” moment in the history of Golf Channel.
“The doctor was actually pretty confident if I passed the stone naturally during the night, I would have been able to play on Thursday,” Fox told Eamon Lynch and Rex Hoggard. “Maybe with some pain relief, and maybe I’d be a little bit out of it. But I still would have been able to at least give it a try.
“Unfortunately, I had no relief during the night,” he continued. “Went back into the emergency room at about six o’clock in the morning on Thursday morning, and at that point I knew I definitely wasn’t playing. I saw the doctor again, and he’s like, ‘You’ve got no chance of passing it now, we’ve got to go in there and get rid of them.’ So they ended up shoving a laser somewhere it wasn’t supposed to get shoved up and [the stones] got broken up and vacuumed out and I had a little tube in there for a week. So, it wasn’t a very fun little period. I’m glad it’s over.”
Ryan Fox shares more on his recent kidney stone experience and how a laser helped him get back to normal 😳 pic.twitter.com/ZyDXyGmzmg
— Golf Channel (@GolfChannel) March 25, 2026
Good… Lord!
Kudos to Lynch and Hoggard for not bursting out in laughter, or, worse, cowering in fear, which I would have done. The way Fox described that, and we all know what ‘that’ is, is an image I’ll never be able to get out of my head. To be back on the golf course and in good spirits less than two weeks later is warrior stuff.
