Ryan Fox returns for another year of Chasing the Fox event in December

When Ryan Fox agreed to the Chasing the Fox concept, he didn’t expect the event would take off quite so quickly.

For the last three years, the New Zealand No 1 has been taking on celebrity invitational teams over a six-hole mini-tournament at the Royal Auckland and Grange Golf Club, playing his own ball against teams of three playing best-ball and the odd individual player.

“If you look at the first event, we probably got very lucky in the fact that [Sir] John Key’s viral hole-in-one kind of made the event and gave us a little bit to go on for year two,” Fox reflected, with the event set to return on December 12 for a fourth year.

“I think last year was probably towards what we were thinking that we might be able to get it to, but to have it happen so quickly was pretty incredible and hopefully we can carry on that momentum for this year.

“It’s a lot of fun; great to see so many people from so many different walks of life enjoying golf and it was pretty popular with people watching at home too, which is great.”

The current world No 30 tied with Team Cricket in 2022, before the New Zealand Warriors team won in 2023 and Team Media took out last year’s event.

Now, as he and promoters Podis put plans in place to build on the success of the event so far at the Royal Auckland and Grange again, he says the event could see some more changes.

“I think we’re definitely going to have to tweak the format a little bit,” Fox says.

“I think the first year, I played really good for the six holes and we thought it might work. Then year two and year three, it was pretty obvious [for] the guys playing their own ball, it’s pretty hard to compete with three guys playing the best ball.

“We’ll definitely look at trying to make it a bit more competitive. We’ve got some ideas in the works at the moment. I don’t want to let the cat out of the bag too early in that regard, but we’ve certainly got some ideas in the works to make it more interesting and make it more competitive.”

Last year’s event was the biggest yet, with the last of the six holes being broadcast live on TVNZ and having a grandstand set up at the tee box to help build the atmosphere. Podis is finalising an agreement that will again see the event broadcast free-to-air in prime time.

TVNZ said the 2024 broadcast reached 643,100 viewers, making it 14th overall for a sports broadcast event in the last 12 months. On TVNZ+, Chasing the Fox was in the top 20 of the streaming platform’s biggest sports over the past 12 months, streamed by over 38,000 households.

“That’s a good result for a one-off event that’s competing against seasons of sport in the same time period,” TVNZ said in a statement.

Unlike past years, the 2025 event will take place just a month before Fox begins his 2026 season, having qualified for The Sentry tournament in Hawaii in early January.

“It’s a bit closer to the start of my season next year, but it’s not a bad thing to play a little bit of competitive stuff before putting the clubs away for a couple of weeks and then getting back into it early January,” he said.

“It’s looking like it’s going to be pretty big again this year. Last year, I thought, was a huge step up for the event in terms of TV and everything, and the viewing figures were pretty incredible, to be honest.

“Hopefully we can do something very similar this year.”

Christopher Reive joined the Herald sports team in 2017, bringing the same versatility to his coverage as he does to his sports viewing habits.