Ryan Fox used to wake up in the middle of the night, home in New Zealand, to watch the Open Championship. The son of a cricketer and a late starter in golf, Fox reached one of golf’s highest peaks on Sunday, thriving when many struggled and winning his first major.
“It was always something that was there just to be able to play in it, first up, and now to be an Open champion, to be the Champion Golfer of the Year, it's unbelievable, surreal, crazy,” Fox said.
“I don't have enough words in my vocabulary to explain it, to be honest.”
After Fox tied the lowest score ever in a men’s major in the third round, a tidy 8-under 62 – he shot a 2-under 68 Sunday to eventually win by one over Cameron Young, who shot a 6-under 64, finished around 12 p.m. local time, and waited.
Fox topped 54-hole leader Sam Burns by two after his playing partner shot a 2-over 72, and a hard-charging Scottie Scheffler plus local lad Tommy Fleetwood by three, as that duo finished at 7 under for the week.
Fox got off to a fairly pedestrian start, making birdie on his second hole of the day but giving it back on the par-4 ninth. He dropped another shot on No. 11 and was staring up at the leaderboard at that point before hitting another “bad shot,” he said, on No. 12 but getting up-and-down to save par and essentially save his tournament.
Fox made back-to-back birdies on Nos. 13 and 14 to get himself back in the mix.
“That tee shot on 13, I hit driver off it every day this week and executed it twice and not executed it twice, but played it even par for the week, which I guess is pretty good overall. I kind of took the theory around the whole golf course this week that, if you take it on, at least if you miss it, you can kind of get it up to a wedge out,” Fox explained.
Fox added another birdie on 16 before it all came down to the final hole of the championship. He had just 172 yards to the hole and as it was in the air Fox admitted he yelled at the ball to “please be good” – and it was.
“Everyone practises on the green, I guess, ‘you've got to a putt to win a major championship, to win the Open.’ It's not like that in real life. It's not a very comfortable feeling. It's certainly very enjoyable when you see it go in,” Fox said with a smile.
“I hit two shots exactly how I wanted to hit them. I didn't feel anything for the putt; everything was shaking that much. I was just happy to hit it somewhat near the hole, and to see it go in was incredible. I did say to my caddie, Dean, on the tee that we were going to take it on, that I was going to try to win the tournament, and I'd live with the consequences if I stuffed it up.”
Fox isn’t the most famous golfer from New Zealand, certainly, as Lydia Ko has won three majors, won three Olympic medals, and has earned a spot in the LPGA Hall of Fame before turning 30. Fox was the first to bring up Ko’s name. But he knows this is a special moment for his home country. He felt that kind of love through the late stages of his magical Sunday as the crowd was in full voice cheering him on.
“There was a lot of Kiwi accents in the crowd. There seems to be Kiwis everywhere, especially in the UK. You could definitely hear them loudly over all of this week, especially today. It felt like the English crowd got behind me for whatever reason. I was trying not to get too caught up in it coming down the stretch, just kind of focus on what I could control,” Fox said.
“The reception coming into 18 was, even before I'd hit the putt, was one of the coolest things I've ever experienced.”
Fox, who won the 2025 RBC Canadian Open in a playoff over Burns, admitted that after he turned professional in his mid-20s his main goal was just to make it onto a major golf tour. Now Fox is a three-time winner on the PGA Tour, with all of them coming in the last 14 months. He joins Rory McIlroy, Aaron Rai, and Wyndham Clark as major champions in 2026. He is the third man to win a major from New Zealand, and the first to win an Open Championship since 1963. Fox admitted he wasn’t sure if this particular win and this particular day would even be possible.
But here we are.
Fox told his team the night prior to the final round that if he had been given his career until Saturday night when he turned professional, he would have jumped at it. Instead, he’s got something a little more special now.
“You dream of being a major champion. You want to do it, whether you think it’s a reality or not,” Fox said. “To be sitting I front of (you) now as the Champion Golfer of the Year is a bit crazy.”
Crazy, perhaps. But also, very deserved.
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