Ryan Fox won his maiden major championship in impressive fashion on Sunday at Royal Birkdale, birdieing four of his final six holes, including the 18th, where he hit a masterful approach to 11 feet and then drained the putt to claim the Open title by a single shot over clubhouse leader Cameron Young.
One of the most notable details of Fox’s final hole was the way he wasted no time over his life-changing putt. In fact, it took only 22 seconds after Fox’s playing partner, Sam Burns, tapped in for his par for Fox to send his winning putt on its way to the hole.
On this week’s episode of Subpar, the newly-minted champ revisited his crucial 18th-hole moment with hosts Colt Knost and Drew Stoltz.
“While Sam was reading his putt, like, I’ve done all my work before Sam had hit his putt,” Fox said. “I make sure I’m ready to go when it’s my turn. So I’d read the putt, and I go over the back of the green there, like behind the hole, and it hit me at the time, like, I’m not going to repeat exactly what went through my head, but something along the lines of, ‘I’ve got a putt in the Open.’ And I almost lost it at that point.
“It was pretty overwhelming, and it was kind of like, how am I gonna hit this putt?” Fox continued. “And I just had to kind of get to the back of the green, stop looking at the putt, just go, hey, it’s just a putt. Take a couple of deep breaths, go look at it again, see what you see and try to hit it online.”
Fox said there was only one thing he wanted to avoid doing as he prepared to hit the putt.
“Walking into the ball, the only thing I didn’t want to do is be an idiot and absolutely gun it,” he said. “I wanted to try to make the putt, obviously, but you don’t want to lip out high side and have three-and-a-half feet to get back in the playoff. That wouldn’t be a lot of fun.”
Luckily for Fox, he didn’t have to worry about making a comebacker, because he delivered the ball into the cup, despite having what he described as very shaky hands.
“Didn’t have to go in the middle, it just had to finish in the hole. And it did,” he said. “My caddie Dean probably said the coolest thing to me a few hours after. We’re probably a couple of drinks deep at this point, he goes, ‘Foxy, you might only ever have one putt in your career, in your life, to win a major championship, and you just effin’ holed it.’
“I was like, yeah, I haven’t thought of it that way,” Fox continued. “I might never get that opportunity again, and I was pretty proud of myself to actually pull it off in that moment.”
For more from Fox, including his explanation on why slowing down simply isn’t in his DNA, check out the full episode of Subpar below.
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