Just days out from the start of The Players Championship, Ryan Fox found himself writhing on the floor with an agony he could not escape.
It was a week that turned from potential to painful, as the Kiwi golfer was set to return to TPC Sawgrass in Florida for the PGA Tour’s unofficial fifth major in terrific form.
Instead, he woke up with stomach pain on Tuesday night (local time) – two days from the start of the tournament - at around 11pm and quickly made his way to the bathroom.
“Basically, as soon as I got to the toilet, I knew it wasn’t for the toilet. It was one side and pretty intense and yeah, kidney stones,“ Fox recalled to the Herald.
“It went from zero to 100 pretty quick there. I was screaming on the floor and saying a few words that I can’t repeat. I knew at that point it wasn’t very good.”
Fortunately for the Fox family, his coach Marcus Wheelhouse was in town and drove the ailing golfer to the emergency room. The pain passed pretty quickly and Fox thought he had passed the stone when he got home.
The 39-year-old took a conservative approach to practicing on Wednesday, playing a couple of holes to see how his body felt. He was fine at lunchtime, but at around 2pm, the pain returned.
“It came back with a vengeance and was a lot worse than what I had it on Tuesday night,” he said.
Another trip to the emergency room and some morphine to numb the pain gave Fox some remaining optimism that he would pass the stone before the tournament started on Thursday.
He was discharged again at around 6pm on Wednesday, but that relief never came.
“[I] got to a point where I couldn’t deal with it anymore and went back in. They said, ‘okay, at this point you’re not going to pass it, we’ve got to do the procedure and break it up with some lasers and put a stent in for the inflammation’. That happened about lunchtime on Thursday.
“Obviously, as soon as I went back in on Thursday morning, I knew I wasn’t playing and withdrew pretty promptly. From 2pm Wednesday afternoon until about 2pm Thursday after the operation, it wasn’t a real fun 24 hours there.”
Reflecting on the ordeal, Fox said it was horrendous, but the worst part of it all was that “there’s no escape from the pain.”
“There was some vomiting involved as well. Apparently, the symptoms make you nauseous and yeah, that’s just a great addition to rolling around on the floor in pain.”
He was, however, thankful that Wheelhouse was around to deal with him so his wife, Anneke Fox, and children Isobel and Margot Fox, didn’t have to see him in the state he was.
“We didn’t have to disrupt the kids too much, which was probably a good thing. I don’t think I would have liked them to see me dealing with what I was going through there and it would have probably added an extra layer to things, waking them up in the middle of the night and stuff like that.
“So I was very thankful that Marcus was there to help out. He probably heard some words and saw some stuff that he probably didn’t need to hear, but [I] kind of didn’t have much of a choice over those 24, 48 hours there.”
Having surgery meant Fox was forced to withdraw from this week’s PGA Tour tournament in Tampa, as well as being unable to compete in The Players.
It was the second time Fox had had a medical issue during The Players, with a case of hand, foot and mouth disease getting the better of him in 2024. On that occasion, he played through the illness but missed the cut.
“Thankfully, I had a decent start to the year, so it was a little bit easier to reconcile that,” he said of having to withdraw from last week’s and this week’s tournaments.
“If I’d started how I have done the last couple of years on the PGA Tour, had a slow start, I would have been a bit more disappointed. But obviously a few top 25s in a row and a top 10, I don’t feel bad about where my golf game is and it’s just one of those things that happens. It’s unfortunate.”
Fox was set to have the stent removed later this week, and would plan his next few weeks from there with an eye to The Masters, which begins on April 10 (NZT).
He was, however, hopeful of making a return for the Texas Children’s Houston Open next week.
“I was originally planning to play this week in Tampa, so I pulled out of that on Friday when I woke up the day after the surgery and was like, ‘no, there’s no way I’m even contemplating playing golf next week as well’. I’m glad I made that decision; I certainly wouldn’t want to be trying to swing drivers right now.
“It’s sort of take it as it comes and having started the year reasonably well makes it a little bit easier to make that decision. If I had a slow start, I’d certainly be really disappointed to miss this week as well, but after it being a bit better start, I’m quite happy to push the recovery another week, make sure I’m 100% ready to go for Houston hopefully.”
Christopher Reive joined the Herald sports team in 2017, bringing the same versatility to his coverage as he does to his sports viewing habits.