Ryan Fox will play on the 2024 PGA Tour after earning his card during the 2023 DP World Tour season. Photo / Getty Images
After earning his card for the 2024 PGA Tour, Ryan Fox opens up to Christopher Reive about his journey to the top.
“Everyone needs to get away from it. It sounds weird because a lot of people use golf to get away from various other things, but I use other things to get away from golf.”
It’s an honest admission from Ryan Fox, a man currently ranked among the 30 best male golfers in the world and one who, since returning to New Zealand in late November, has barely touched his clubs.
Sitting in a cafe in Northcote Point, 7-month-old daughter Margot on his lap entertaining herself with his phone, Fox is revelling in the chance to take a breath after a hectic year on and off the greens.
“It happens every year at the end of the year, I want to throw my clubs in a deep dark hole for a couple of weeks and leave them alone,” Fox says. “That’s where I was at at the end of the year. There was some frustration there that stuff wasn’t quite working how I wanted it to which always makes the fuse a little bit shorter.
“The travel had got me at the end of the year, too. I wasn’t looking forward to jumping on a plane again. I think it was my 20th long-haul flight home this year, which takes it out of you. I was pretty happy to just sit at home and not touch the clubs.”
It’s a break well-earned. Picking up right where he left off in 2022, the 36-year-old made his debut as a temporary member of the PGA Tour which saw him contest the likes of the Masters and the Open. He won the BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth, England - the DP World Tour’s showcase event, beating a field that included Rory McIlroy, Jon Rahm and Viktor Hovland – and earned his full-time PGA Tour card for 2024 by finishing fifth on the DP World Tour.
But he dealt with sickness and injury as well; a stomach bug, pneumonia and, late in the campaign, a bit of tennis elbow which he is still nursing. The pneumonia, in particular, knocked him around a bit as he lost some speed in his golf swing – one of his biggest assets which he says took a fair bit of time to recover.
Amongst all that, he and his wife Anneke welcomed Margot, their second daughter, in May, while in June, he flew home to farewell his father-in-law, Mike, who passed away after a short battle with cancer.
“I think I can look back and say 2023 was a better year career-wise than 2022. There’s been some personal stuff that’s taken away from that a little bit, and some personal stuff that has added to it as well with this little one sitting right here. It’s been a tough but pretty rewarding year.”
Tough but rewarding is a fitting reflection of Fox’s career and his often-complex relationship with the game he has found so much success in.
A decade ago, Fox had struggled through his second year as a professional and says there was “a little bit where I didn’t know what I wanted to do” following that.
He hadn’t been playing very well and had lost his love of the game.
“I was taking it – this sounds weird, but I was probably taking it a bit too seriously. Like, it was the be-all and end-all, how I played on the golf course and that affected everything else,” he says of his 2013 season.
His father, and former All Black, Grant Fox helped him remember he played golf for the fun of it and, when he rediscovered that, the results started to come back.
That wasn’t the last time his spark for the game waned, but it was an important moment in his career as it prepared him with effective ways to break out of such funks in the future – of which there have been a few, he says.
The key might sound a bit familiar to the casual golfers out there.
“It’s trying to get out on the golf course and be creative. That’s what I enjoy about the game, going back to why I played it as a kid. It wasn’t ever technical or anything else, it was just stand up, see a shot, try to hit it and deal with wherever it went,” Fox says.
“Yeah, life’s a whole lot more complicated than it was when I first picked up a golf club, but in the end, the golf game is still the same; see a shot, hit a shot and have fun trying to do that. If I can get away from that technical stuff for the most part and just go out and try to see it and hit it on the golf course, that’s when I have the most fun and that’s generally when the results come as well.
“If you play golf regularly, you’re always trying to get better, you’re always trying to find that one thing that makes you better and it seems to change every week. We’re the same at the top level.”
The casual approach has proven to be beneficial to Fox’s career not just in him enjoying himself and his performances, but also how he trains.
Reflecting on his early years on tour, Fox says he felt an obligation to work on his game in the same manner as some of the other professionals in the sport.
But standing on the range for hours at a time was never something he enjoyed, nor was it overly beneficial for him. Over the past few years, Fox has worked with a psychologist and come to the conclusion that he gets all of his confidence from actually being on the course.
“If I’m really struggling, doing 10-20 minutes of something and finding a good feeling is generally better than beating myself up for an hour or two on the range,” he explains.
“I could stand there and hit 50 perfect seven irons in a row on the range, and that doesn’t really mean anything to me. But if I hit two of them on the golf course, and hit the exact shot that I want to produce, I get far more from that.
“It’s been a weird transition to get to that point when playing social golf is actually more important than standing there beating balls. I still do the technical stuff that needs to be done to keep on top of the golf swing, but I’ve also got a unique golf swing. It’s mine, it’s repetitive, and as long as I can get the ball to do what I want, I don’t really care what it looks like.”
With seven weeks at home over the summer, Fox’s time on the greens will largely be limited to a few celebrations of golf; The Fox fishing and golf at Waihi Beach this weekend, the Chasing The Fox ambrose tournament at Royal Auckland and Grange on December 14, with a few rounds of charity golf to play through that time as well.
It’s a beneficial stretch. He can rest, forced to do so as he continues to look after his tennis elbow issue, but will have enough time on the course to keep things ticking along ahead of what shapes up as yet another massive year in his career.
“I can probably find a list somewhere of goals I wanted to achieve in golf,” Fox says.
“Over the last couple of years, I’ve ticked off a fair decent amount of them.”
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.