Ryan Fox maintained his PGA Tour card for 2025 despite a tough run of things in 2024. Photo / Getty Images
Ryan Fox chalks up his rookie season on the PGA Tour as a year full of learning.
After playing in 13 events last year thanks to earning a special temporary membership, he was a fulltime Tour player in 2024. With that title came challenges both on and off the greens, leaving him fighting for his future towards the season’s end.
When all was said and done, the 37-year-old had done enough to maintain his Tour card for another season – fighting through tough travel schedules and a nomadic lifestyle, becoming disillusioned with the whole experience, and the flare-up of a niggling hip injury which turned out to be worse than expected.
There was plenty of good to savour in the season – a hole-in-one at TPC Sawgrass’ iconic par-three 17th during the Players Championship and leading the Masters during the first round at Augusta among the highlights – but he tells the Herald “there were definitely a few more lowlights than there’s been in the last couple of years”.
“If I was going to grade myself, I’d say it would probably be a C,” Fox says.
“I mean, it’s a pass. I kept my card over there which was probably the number one goal overall to tick off at the start of the year. I certainly would have liked to have played a little bit better a lot of the time.
“It’s good to have a job out there again next year, and I’ve got status in Europe [on the DP World Tour] until the end of 26, so yeah, let’s call this year a learning experience. That’s the best way to put it.”
Fox’s year began with two DP World Tour events in Dubai, before kicking off his PGA Tour campaign in the final week of January at the Farmer’s Insurance Open at Torrey Pines in San Diego, where he failed to make the cut.
It was the start of a tough stretch as he missed the cut in five of his first eight tournaments on the Tour, with a T35 his best result in that stretch.
“Early on I was struggling,” Fox reflects. “I’d missed a few cuts and hadn’t really had any decent results.
“The travel was getting hard, we didn’t have anyone over at the time, it was just my wife [Anneke] and I and the two kids [Isobel and Margot] travelling week to week to week, we’d had a couple of pretty bad travel experiences - I split my head open in the middle of the night getting something that my daughter had thrown away, we’d had vomit on a plane.
“It was one of those ones like ‘this is just too hard.’ I wasn’t enjoying being in the States and there was definitely a few conversations there.”
Things started to shore up when Fox returned to Augusta for his second appearance at the Masters, where he made a strong start en route to a T38 finish, before a T4 in the teams’ event in New Orleans playing alongside South African Garrick Higgo.
But it was a conversation with Scottish star Robert MacIntyre at the Myrtle Beach Classic in May that got Fox well and truly back on track.
“I know Bob pretty well from Europe and he was pretty chuffed to be playing with me. He just sort of said, ‘Foxy, let’s just go talk a bit of shit and have some fun’,” Fox recalls.
“It was like ‘oh yeah, I haven’t done that for a while.’”
Fox finished the tournament 15-under-par in a tie for fourth – his best finish of the season.
“It just kind of flipped it on his head. Like, okay I can still have fun out here. That’s a big part of it, and then I started playing a little bit better.”
In 15 events across the PGA Tour (12, including fall series), DP World Tour (2), and the Olympics, Fox only failed to make the cut twice more, and for the second year in a row made the cut at all four majors.
However, he faced more issues in the second half of the season after issues with his hip started to plague his play. Initially trying to play through and address it with physiotherapy, he eventually went for scans on a trip back to New Zealand at the suggestion of coach Marcus Wheelhouse.
“I remember having discussions with my coach, both in Europe and [with] Marcus back here, like, ‘oh, you’re doing this and I want you to feel this‘ and for the first time’ probably in my career, I’m like ‘I can’t do that. I can’t get that feeling’,” he says.
“It was all, in hindsight, related to the hip, but at the time it was like, I’m just playing bad and I’m in a bad headspace and something’s causing me some issues.”
Scans showed Fox had a labral tear and femoroacetabular impingement (FAI) in his right hip.
“Basically, the top of the femur doesn’t quite fit and it pinches,” he explains. “That’s probably what caused the labral tear and that’s what caused the discomfort. So, it was a labral tear causing the issues, the inflammation from that, but it was the bone actually that causes the labral tear.”
Fox hopes he is able to manage the issue and avoid an operation, however, it is likely to follow him around as he would require surgery to address the bone.
The injury isn’t something he notices while walking or in other aspects of day-to-day life, but it’s a different story when he swings a golf club.
“Not ideal in my line of work, to be fair, but there are plenty of golfers with labral tears. I talked to Gary Woodland; he’s had one for years. He’s had a few injections and various other things, but he’s still been able to play to a pretty damn good level with a labral tear. Then there’s the other end of the spectrum is someone like Trey Mullinax, he won on tour a couple of years ago, he was out for almost a whole season with a labral tear and surgery, so there’s a pretty big disparity between what can happen with it.”
Fox got a cortisone shot toward the back end of the year which helped, but while he was making cuts and playing better golf, he was still missing a couple of decent results to make his standing in the FedEx Cup rankings more comfortable at the back end of the year.
To keep his PGA Tour card, Fox needed to sit inside the top 125 at the conclusion of the PGA Tour fall series; a group of eight tournaments after the Tour Championship, giving athletes ranked 51 or worse more opportunities to lock away their card for the following year.
Sat just outside the top 100, Fox signed on for four of those tournaments, but felt he just needed one big result to sure his card for 2025.
He got that on his first outing of the fall series, with a T11 finish at the Sanderson Farms Championship giving him the breathing room he wanted to find and a bit more freedom in his final three events of the year.
“I think I probably checked out a little bit after Sanderson’s,” he admits of his finish to the season.
“I kind of felt like the job’s done. I made some silly mistakes but certainly felt a whole lot happier about where the golf game was.
“Hopefully I can start next year with those same feelings, be happy with the golf game going over there and not have as much pressure on the back end of the season to try to keep a job.”
Things will be different in 2025.
For the new season, Fox and his family will be basing themselves in the States, hoping to set themselves up somewhere in Florida which will allow Anneke, Isobel and Margot more freedom to pick and choose which events to follow him to, while also making it easier for family and friends to visit.
“We’re in on it, you know,” Fox says. “Get a house over there, be based over there, just see what it’s like. If we don’t like it, that’s cool.
“I’m not sure I was quite prepared to have done that earlier this year, so I’m definitely in a better place for it next year and hopefully that translates into some better golf.”
Christopher Reive joined the Herald sports team in 2017, bringing the same versatility to his coverage as he does to his sports viewing habits.
Fox finished T19 at Oakmont and heads into a limited field event this week in good form.