Ryan Fox, who won the Open Championship at Royal Birkdale on Sunday, has an unfashionable view on one of golf's most tedious modern arguments. Playing quickly, he thinks, is not the ordeal it is often made out to be.
The evidence is his own final hole. According to ESPN, Fox took 22 seconds over the birdie putt that won him the tournament, his first major. Under the greatest pressure the sport offers, he did the thing that supposedly cannot be rushed, quickly.
What he said
Fox's account of his own method is almost dismissive of the difficulty.
"It's not that difficult to pick a shot and pick a club," he said. "I get in there, and it all happens quick." His explanation for why speed helps rather than hurts is a psychological one: "The less time I have to think about it, the less bad stuff can creep in there."
That is the whole of his theory, and it is the opposite of how slow players tend to justify themselves. The argument for taking a long time is that a major shot deserves careful thought. Fox's argument is that the thinking is where the mistakes come from, and that committing fast is a way of getting out of your own way.
He is fast enough that playing partners notice. Fox recalled Scottie Scheffler, the world's top-ranked player, telling him during a round: "Foxy, it doesn't even feel like you're in the group. It just feels like we're playing in a two-ball, you hit so fast."
Why golf is arguing about this at all
For readers who do not follow the sport, the pace-of-play row needs a word of context, because it has become a genuine grievance.
Professional rounds have grown steadily longer, and the sight of elite players standing over a shot for a minute or more, consulting notes and pacing out yardages, has become a familiar complaint from broadcasters and spectators. Slow play makes for poor television and long days, and it filters down: amateurs copy the professionals they watch. Golf's authorities have periodically threatened stricter timing and penalties, mostly without much effect.
Into that argument, a newly-crowned Open champion saying that fast play is simply not that hard is a useful data point. It is easy to dismiss the complaint about slow players as impatience. It is harder to dismiss when the man who just won the championship, playing quickly throughout, is the one making it.
The company he keeps
Fox is not a lone eccentric on this. ESPN notes a lineage of notably fast professionals, among them Dustin Johnson, Brooks Koepka, Lucas Glover, Bill Haas, Joe Ogilvie and Matt Jones, with Fox suggesting the Italian Renato Paratore may be quicker still.
That list matters because it includes major winners and world-class players. It undercuts the assumption that speed and success trade off against each other, that a careful, slow player is a more thorough one. The fast players have won plenty.
None of this resolves golf's pace problem, which is structural and will not be fixed by one champion's example. But it reframes it slightly. The question is usually put as whether players can be made to go faster. Fox's answer, delivered by winning, is that the good ones already can, and that the difficulty is mostly in the mind.
