Has it really only been four days? Was it really just this week that Matthew Baldwin struck the first shot, that Jackson Suber had radio commentators scrambling for a proper pronunciation, swing analysts zooming in to explain his grip?
Perhaps it's because the 154th Open Championship was split into two parts: pre-penalty, post-penalty. Friday night's melodrama, sparked not by a rules official but by Bryson DeChambeau's heavy feet, overshadowed everything that came before it and just as events on the golf course were set to take over, out came Rory McIlroy to set fire to it all again.
One day later, all eyes were where they ought to be: on the golf course. Make no mistake, this was one of the great Open Championships. Only the absence of an all-star cast might rob it of that reputation in years to come, but we were here, and we will remember. When Ryan Fox somehow wrestled a Claret Jug out of the arms of Cameron Young, it was the end of something really special.
Ryan Fox. Nerves of steel.
— The Open (@TheOpen) July 19, 2026
That is how you win The 154th Open. pic.twitter.com/M6YxCYEuXA
Fox was playing in the final group of a major for the first time in his career. In fact, this might have been the first time he's teed off in the afternoon on Sunday, a product of the round of 62 he produced from Saturday morning. He wasn't supposed to win, wasn't supposed to be better than the US Open runner-up or the raft of world-class players walking menacingly ahead on the course, menacingly close behind on the leaderboard.
And when Cameron Young signed for a round of 64 to post nine-under, Fox wasn’t supposed to be the one to catch him. Si Woo Kim came up short, Sam Burns came up short, even Scottie Scheffler and his birdie by the grace of god came up short. Fox had every reason to: he was luckless at the 15th, luckless at the 17th, but it didn’t matter. He overcame not only the player of the season but the forces which really govern this sport, the ones nobody can control. And he did it the first time opportunity wandered by.
Young was right when he left the golf course feeling in his gut that he was a shot short. Given what happened to Fox when he entered bunkers late in the championship, Young would have been a slightly fortuitous winner. When he bravely took on his approach to the 18th he was lucky that the ball left that bunker rather than remaining in it. It was a brilliant bogey but during those moments when he ceded control, bogey could have been taken off the table.
Fox’s battle with the things they all know they’re meant to avoid saw him draw an awful lie just at the moment he’d appeared set to make his move. His bogey, of a different kind, was the best of his life and so was the birdie at the 16th which followed it, at least for half an hour or so. And so, when the New Zealander’s iron off the 17th tee travelled with the precision of something pre-programmed, we were another rat-a-tat swing from him placing one hand on the Claret Jug.
But luck failed him once more. Was he right when, during an interview last year, he talked about how you have to get in the mix for these regularly and then one might fall your way? Was it simply asking too much that the first hand he’d drawn would be a winning one? When that tee-shot on the 17th tipped into another bunker with its dying breath, it sure looked like it. An hour earlier, the great Scheffler had cursed his luck when his drive didn’t end up where he felt it deserved to. Fox is different, and Fox just got on with the new challenge in front of him.
He could only make par on the hole where a regulation birdie might have been inches away, and that left him with perhaps golf’s ultimate challenge. Par to win a major is hard. Par to earn a play-off, birdie on a brutal hole to win, is harder still. And yet he rose to this challenge too: perfect drive, another approach shot straight down the flag, and another putt in the region of a dozen feet.
Bob Charles, Michael Campbell, Lydia Ko. These are the greats of New Zealand golf. Fox’s father, Grant, is a great of New Zealand sport. Like father, like son, then. Fox holed the putt and he’d finished birdie-par-birdie to take this thing. How on earth did he do that? This was golf of another world. This was golf of a kind which is meant to come only from superstars. Except that this isn't really how golf works.
For those watching, up on the dunes of a resplendent Royal Birkdale or on televisions from New Zealand to New York and at all stops in between, did it really matter that this was Young versus Fox not McIlroy versus DeChambeau? To some, undoubtedly. To this writer? Since you asked, no. Not one single bit.
Off the course, this Open Championship was the most dramatic in memory. On it, the sport – small white ball at the mercy of mind, body, sky and earth – reminded us all of a truth some of today's players would do well to remember: not one of them is as important. You sense that Fox understands that better than most. Champion golfer of the year and of that you can be sure.
