If you didn’t see Ryan Fox coming, that might be because relative to many of his grind-it-out, stuck-in-the-mud peers, Fox blazes around the course like a greyhound chasing a hare. Ask Scottie Scheffler, who played alongside Fox and Zecheng Dou in the third round of the Phoenix Open earlier this year — or at least Scheffler thinks he played with Fox. “We walk off the 9th tee, and he goes, ‘Foxy, it doesn’t even feel like you’re in the group,’” the newly minted Champion Golfer of the Year said Sunday evening at Birkdale. “It just feels like we’re playing in a two-ball, you hit it so fast. It’s just in the air.”
Fox has always played with haste, dating back to his teen days in Auckland, New Zealand, when he’d join his father, Grant, a New Zealand rugby great, on corporate golf outings and intentionally waste little time to ensure he wasn’t holding up his playing partners. That Fox processed things quickly — not just on the golf course but also on the cricket pitch and tennis court — also didn’t hurt. See ball, hit ball.
“I need to make sure this comes across right,” he said at Birkdale. “It’s not that difficult to pick a shot and pick a club. It’s always going to be between one or two clubs into a green, and I just see the shot quickly, pick a shot quickly, and the less time I have to think about it, the less bad stuff can creep in there.”
In an era when many of the world’s best golfers require a Pentagon briefing before pulling the trigger on a 112-yard wedge shot, and fans have turned skewering sluggish golfers into bloodsport, watching Fox motor his way to the Claret Jug wasn’t just refreshing — it also made you wonder if more golfers wouldn’t benefit from stepping on the gas.
Among the Open observers appreciative of Fox’s pace was GOLF Top 100 Teacher Christopher Smith, who was watching the final round from eight time zones away, at home in Eugene, Ore. When it comes to briskly played golf, Smith can be a hard guy to impress. That’s because, in his prime, he played golf at a pace that would make Usain Bolt blush.
Take the 18-hole round Smith played at Jackson Park Golf Course in Chicago in October 2005; with just six clubs in his bag, Smith shot 65 — in 44 minutes, or the time it takes to bake a loaf of banana bread. Smith’s feat, which he achieved at the Chicago Speedgolf Classic, landed him in the “Guinness Book of World Records,” where you’ll still find his name today.
Smith, who is now 63, has slowed down a bit but has remained attuned to the benefits of keeping things moving on the course — and preaching those benefits to his students at Eugene Country Club and Puerto Los Cabos Golf Club in Mexico. “One of the ways I — and people can test themselves — time them is from the moment they address the ball,” Smith said. ”If you put the club on the ground behind the ball, if you hover it, whatever you do before impact, how many seconds does it take you? And what produces the best outcome? Where do you hit the best shots? Foxy looks like he’s around 8 seconds.”
The PGA Tour earlier this week shared a medley of clips of Fox over the ball at various tournaments, and that footage supports Smith’s estimate. “He does everything fast,” Smith told me of Fox in a phone interview Tuesday. “He walks fast, and as soon as he hits it, he’s grabbed the putter out of his bag, he’s ready to go.”
Smith continued: “I think it really helped him when he was super-nervous — which he was, he admitted that, especially on the last putt — to know that your normal routine and normal time over the ball is not very long. Probably the worst thing he could have done would be to start thinking about it and take more time.”
A la what happened to Greg Norman when he infamously frittered away a six-shot lead to Nick Faldo at the 1996 Masters. “At the end of the front nine and on the back nine, the sheer amount of time he took over the ball, it got longer and longer and longer,” Smith said. “And he got worse and worse and worse.”
None of this is to say that Fox doesn’t fight mental demons like the rest of us. He does. He even has a sports psychologist, Karl Morris, with whom Fox strategized in the run-up to the Open. Fox, they agreed, was relying too much on his South African caddie, Dean Smith, for club selections — and when those selections would go wrong, Fox found himself resenting Smith. To break the pattern, Fox, at Birkdale, accepted yardage, wind and other course intel from Smith but did the rest of the work — club choice, shot shape, etc. — himself. “I’m better when I create a shot,” Fox said Sunday.
At Birkdale, Fox also was intentional about his breathing, especially on the greens. He said he tends to get quick in tense spots. “Just taking a second longer, especially over a putt, just get myself ready, get myself relaxed,” he said Sunday. “I did that a lot down the stretch.”
It was hard to tell. On the 72nd hole, Fox hit his approach shot before the group ahead had fully cleared the green. Then came his 12-footer for the win. From the moment Fox’s playing partner, Sam Burns, holed out to clear the stage for Fox, to the moment Fox rocked back his putter and sent his own ball rolling toward immortality, all of 22.23 seconds elapsed.
“We’ve always said this in the Speedgolf world: see it and hit it,” Smith said. “Rather than see it, think about it or contemplate it, and then hit it.”
Not that there’s anything necessarily wrong with a more contemplative style of golf, Smith said. There’s some science at work here, related to eye and hand dominance. People who are cross-dominant, meaning left-eye and right-hand dominant, or vice versa, Smith said, are more likely to be “spontaneous and reactive.”
“If you’re homogeneous — let’s say you’re right-eye dominant and right-handed — you’re going to be more apt to kind of see it, plan it and then ponder it a little bit and then do it,” Smith said.
So as much as fans might like to see more Tour pros adopt Fox’s pep, his Claret Jug moment is unlikely to spawn an army of copycats and solve golf’s slow-play epidemic. For some players, 8 or 9 seconds might be plenty of time to get comfortable at address; for others, they might require 14 or 15 seconds. The key, Smith said, is knowing your personal sweet spot. “I always tell people, look at the results,” Smith said. “The ball tells you the story. Is it better or worse, or the same?”
As for Fox, don’t expect him to lay off the accelerator anytime soon.
“If you tried to slow me down and make me do everything slowly,” he said Sunday evening, “I think I’d be pretty useless.”
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