Ryan Fox of New Zealand plays his second shot on the 18th hole at Royal Birkdale. (Stuart Franklin/R&A/R&A via Getty Images)
Final Round By The Numbers
-10: Winning score of Ryan Fox
270: 72-hole score by Fox
T52: Fox’s position after 36 holes (Even par)
2nd: Player from New Zealand to win (Bob Charles, 1963)
64: Final round score by Cameron Young (2nd)
11 ft. 0 inches.: Stimpmeter speed
7,157: Final round yardage (7,223 max)
11 ft. 0 inches.: Stimpmeter speed
4 mm: Green mowing height
0.73 inches: (.001 inches firmer than Round 3)
2:20: Official starting time of the final Burns/Fox pairing
2:35: Actual starting time of the final pairing
Ryan Fox would wake up in the New Zealand night to watch The Open and dreamt of merely playing the world’s oldest professional championship.
“And now to be an Open champion, to be the Champion Golfer of the Year, it’s unbelievable, surreal, crazy,” he said moments after an electric finish at Royal Birkdale. “I don’t have enough words in my vocabulary to explain it, to be honest.”
After tying the lowest score ever shot in a major early in Saturday’s third round, the 39-year-old battled Sunday’s tougher conditions to reach the disaster-laden 18th. There, he improbably held off Cameron Young by a stroke to register the greatest 36-hole comeback by position in major championship history. Fox’s 130 weekend total tied Ian Baker-Finch’s record for low final 36 holes.
A late starter by modern standards and the son of rugby great Grant Fox, Ryab picked up his first club at 13. After toying with rugby and cricket in high school, he got serious about golf at 16 and dreamed of Sunday’s scenario. Sort of.
“To cap it off with a putt — everyone practices on the green, I guess, you’ve got to a putt to win a major championship, to win The Open,” Fox said. “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.”
With final-day wrecks breaking out all over the dead (ish) fescue fairways and heavily revamped links ahead of this championship, Fox kept up his crisp iron play and hot putting that started with Saturday’s third 62 of the week (and eighth in major championship history). Arriving at the 18th after three back-nine birdies, Fox needed another on the brutal closer to avoid a playoff with Young, who’d already returned to the range to prep for a playoff. Young finished over two hours before Fox and third-round leader Sam Burns walked up the 18th fairway.
Fox smoked a 331-yard beauty between the revamped bunkering to set up a slim chance at avoiding the first aggregate playoff since 2015 (set for the 14th, 15th and 18th holes). The landing area played narrow due to the dry conditions and wind out of the left, with only 445 drives finding the tight turf all week. Just 33% of second shots (155/467) even hit the green in regulation. Only 27 birdies had been made at No. 18 all week.
“That drive is not a very comfortable tee shot, obviously, and to hit it in the fairway and give myself a chance was huge.”
Factoring in adrenaline and the wind direction capable of taking the second to a pin cut 25 back and six from the right edge, Fox drew an ideal 176-yard nine-iron.
“I did say to my caddie, Dean [Smith] 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 flushed the approach.
“I think I screamed to it, ‘Please be good,’ in the air, and it was.”
Fox faced a gentle 11’5” uphiller to become the third to birdie Birkdale’s 18th to win an Open outright. (Though Johnny Miller and Lee Trevino birdied it to win when the hole was a par-5.)
“I didn’t feel anything for the putt, everything was shaking that much,” Fox said. “I was just happy to hit it somewhat near the hole, and to see it go in was incredible.”
Fox celebrates the winning putt (Stuart Kerr/R&A/R&A via Getty Images)
Ryan Fox celebrates his birdie putt in the 154th Open Championship at Royal Birkdale (Charlie Crowhurst/R&A/R&A via Getty Images)
Finishing just over two hours ahead of Fox, Young’s 64 started with three birdies, finished the front nine in just 29 strokes, and nearly played a bogey-free round on the championship’s windiest afternoon. Leading at 10-under after a 17th-hole birdie and with 54-hole leader Sam Burns faltering after reaching 11-under par, Young drove into the 18th hole’s fairway bunker. The Players champion earlier this year thinned his second into the bunker face and found his ball in the rough. He then dunked the next shot into a greenside bunker, where he was fortunate to salvage a bogey and get in at nine-under. Young gave himself little chance at that point.
“I thought 10 [under-par] had a decent chance,” Young said.
Still, his final round 64 came up one short of the all-time best closing score in The Open after Henrik Stenson’s 63 at Troon in 2016. Young also posted a closing 65 in 2022 at St Andrews.
Several other contenders made valiant efforts before Birkdale took its toll. Si Woo Kim, Scottie Scheffler, Tommy Fleetwood, and overnight leader Burns all lost key strokes to shots knocked around by the wind that finally gusted as predicted around 1:30 Sunday. But only Fox was able to manage it as well as early-starter Young.
Fox got into The 154th off of his 2023 BMW PGA Championship win. The Open victory comes as a surprise, at least based on his 2026, where his best PGA Tour was limited to a T7 at February’s Genesis Invitational and a T8 in last month’s RBC Canadian Open.
Fox has played nine Open Championships. His best finish was a T16 at Portrush in 2019. He has three missed cuts in nine appearances until Sunday’s win and had never posted a score lower than 67 until the course record and all-time major championship mark.
“I’ve just always loved links golf from the first time I played it,” Fox said moments after he’d gotten his first up-close look at the Claret Jug. “I just love the creativity needed. I think growing up in New Zealand, we play in a fair bit of wind, so getting to do that and having to control your ball and hit some not proper golf shots or not normal golf shots is really cool, and I enjoy — that’s probably what I enjoy about golf and links golf the most.”
“I feel like I’ve played well in Opens before but just never really put four rounds together. I probably wouldn’t say I put four rounds together this week either. I put three together, obviously, to give myself even a chance today after yesterday’s round. You’re not expecting that going out, even though you feel like you can shoot a low score early, to go out and shoot 62 and go from 52nd or whatever I was into the last group. That doesn’t happen very often.
“And to go out with the pressure on, with a chance to win The Open, and to actually do it — I didn’t know what I was going to feel going out there today. I did say to my caddie a few holes in, I feel better than I thought I was going to feel, but I probably still didn’t feel that comfortable. But got a little bit more comfortable down the stretch.”
Ryan Fox poses with the Claret Jug at Royal Birkdale (Oisin Keniry/R&A/R&A via Getty Images)
While making his case against a two-stroke penalty for violating Rule 8.1 following Friday’s second round, Bryson DeChambeau asked rules officials to bring President Donald Trump into the chippy conversation.
Sources with knowledge of the thirty-minute discussion said DeChambeau wanted the President to join a campaign against the eventual two-stroke penalty that ultimately dropped his score from 66 to 68. The request came after DeChambeau had already been given a rare bit of special dispensation to return to the scene where he’d stomped around tall fescue rough in his backswing. (The R&A’s hard card states that “a player’s scorecard is officially returned to the Committee when the player has physically left the recording office/area.”)
After returning from the fifth hole scene in a R&A Executive Director of Governance Grant Moir, and DP World Tour referee Mark Litton, DeChambeau and the officials reconvened in the Recorders trailer. They were R&A Chief Executive Mark Darbon and Executive Director of Championships Johnnie Cole-Hamilton. During the thirty-minute session, DeChambeau had still not signed his scorecard and late finishers coming off the 18th green were not able to sign for their rounds, causing tee time processing to be delayed until nearly midnight. DeChambeau was pleading his case and wanted the President of the United States to weigh in.
The request was denied, as were DeChambeau’s pleas not to penalize him for the breach.
“To hold the tournament hostage like that, and to have all of us, players, volunteers, everyone waiting on him to depart, I didn’t feel like it was a great look,” Rory McIlroy said of DeChambeau getting nearly an hour to make his case.
The R&A declined to comment on the discussions.
On Saturday, R&A Chief Executive Darbon was asked by BBC Radio 5 if he had received a phone call from President Trump over the situation.
“No,” Darbon said. “I have not received a call from President Trump, and we’ll see what happens from here.”
DeChambeau refused to speak to reporters after any of his rounds but did answer questions of an R&A media official after his opening 67. On Sunday, DeChambeau fired a final round 72 to finish the championship at 276 (-4) and a T14 finish.
An ardent supporter of Trump, DeChambeau has represented Trump Golf, celebrated his 2024 U.S. Open victory with the Trump family, and serves on the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition.
The Guardian’s Ewan Murray reported that DeChambeau also requested to keep his scorecard from the round with unclear intentions.
That’s a wrap from a warm and another fantastic Open at Birkdale.
There will be plenty more to unpack from The 154th over the coming days’ Winners, Cutmakers and (Point) Missers. As always, thank you to Quad subscribers for getting me to The Open.
One last goodnight from Birkdale,
Geoff
