By Estea Rademeyer, Sports Journalist.
@APPhoto.
Royal Birkdale had already given The Open one of its stranger nights by the time Sunday afternoon arrived. Bryson DeChambeau’s furious standoff with rules officials, his agent’s refusal to guarantee he’d tee it up, the late-night message posted after midnight, all of it had made for a Friday nobody at Royal Birkdale is likely to forget. But golf has a habit of moving on regardless of the drama that precedes it, and by the time the leaders reached the back nine on Sunday, the Championship had settled into a different story altogether.
It ended with Ryan Fox standing over a 10-foot birdie putt on the 72nd hole, needing it to win his first major.
He made it.
Fox had put himself in the frame the day before with a third-round 62 that tied the lowest round ever recorded in a men’s major. Sunday started less cleanly; a bogey at the 11th dropped him back to seven under, but he answered with four birdies across his final six holes, the kind of closing stretch that decides Championships rather than merely features in them.
The putt at 18 broke a tie with Cameron Young, the clubhouse leader, and the reaction said everything about what the moment meant. Fox let out a roar and threw both arms in the air, a rare release for a player who, at 39, had never finished inside the top 15 in 29 previous major starts.
He becomes the third New Zealander to win a major, following Bob Charles and Michael Campbell, and does so as the son of Grant Fox, the former All Blacks fly-half, and grandson of Merv Wallace, who captained New Zealand’s cricket side in the 1950s. It’s an athletic pedigree Fox has carried lightly through a career built more on steady accumulation than overnight arrival: a Challenge Tour graduate who worked his way up through the DP World Tour, won at Wentworth, then only broke through on the PGA Tour last year with victories at the Myrtle Beach Classic and the RBC Canadian Open, both, fittingly, sealed with clutch closing shots.
But spare a thought for Cameron Young.
He will wonder what might have been. He opened his final round with a front-nine 29 and looked, for a stretch, capable of matching the lowest final round in major championship history. A birdie at the par-5 17th moved him to 10 under, level with what he sensed was the number needed to win.
Then came the 18th. Young pulled driver at the hardest hole on the course, aware of the trade-off he was making. “Driver is aggressive there, but the only option to take out all the bunkers is to leave yourself like 265 in, which didn’t feel that smart to me either. I just figured go ahead and try to hit a good one,” he explained afterwards.
The tee shot found a fairway bunker, the same one that had cost him a bogey during Saturday’s round. Committed to the aggressive line regardless, he pulled a 6-iron and went for the green. “I felt like I had a chance to get the second one on the green,” Young said. “It was only 160-something yards to the front. So I felt like there was an off chance I could get something on the front edge.” The shot caught the face of the bunker and ricocheted into the rough. A third shot trickled into a greenside pot bunker, and though he nearly holed out from there, the bogey, his first of the day, left him a shot short at 9 under, a clubhouse 64 that in the end wasn’t quite enough.
Reflecting on the gamble afterwards, Young didn’t second-guess the decision itself: “I really felt like 10 had a good chance to win the golf tournament. It was just trying to win the golf tournament.”
Sam Burns had carried a two-shot lead into Sunday but found the front nine unforgiving, making three straight bogeys from the fourth and never recovering the pace he’d shown over the first three rounds. He finished third at 8 under, his only birdie of the day coming at the second.
Si Woo Kim briefly held the lead at the turn after birdies at five and six took him to 10 under, before back-to-back bogeys at 11 and 12, and another at 16, dropped him into a share of sixth.
Scottie Scheffler, chasing a rare repeat as Champion Golfer of the Year, made his own push with birdies at 16 and 17 to draw within one, only for his birdie attempt from off the green at 18 to slide past the hole. The resulting bogey left him tied for fourth alongside Tommy Fleetwood at 67.
As for the man whose Friday night had briefly threatened to overshadow the entire Championship, DeChambeau’s tournament never regained its earlier momentum. He closed with a 2-over 72 to finish tied for 14th, declining to speak with the media for the fourth consecutive day. Whatever fire the penalty had lit on Friday night, it didn’t carry him back into contention over the weekend, though for a player who has rarely done anything the conventional way, even a quiet finish came wrapped in one of the loudest storylines of the week.
For Ryan Fox, the moment underscores a career that has always trended upward without ever quite arriving at this scale. Two PGA Tour wins last year signalled the game was there; Sunday at Royal Birkdale confirmed it. Between Young’s bold, ultimately costly aggression at the last and Fox’s nerveless closing stretch, The Open delivered a finish as tightly contested as its opening rounds were chaotic, and, after everything Friday night threw at it, a result that had nothing to do with rules officials at all.