At his press conference Tuesday ahead of the BMW Championship, Ryan Fox recited the ways his life has changed since winning The Open Championship last month.
Starting with the fact that he was having a press conference.
“I mean, I’m sitting here,” the 39-year-old New Zealander told reporters at the Bellerive Country Club in St. Louis. “I haven’t done a press conference for an event pretty much all year. It’s just everything’s busier.
“Coming out of the hotel this week I got stopped going to dinner like five times to sign an autograph. Like, that has never really happened. It might happen obviously on the golf course, but not just randomly at the hotel. So, there’s no more kind of flying under the radar.”
Fox’s victory at Royal Birkdale in Southport, England, was the first major win of his career.
“In terms of commitments and stuff, there’s been, even for these two weeks, there’s been a lot more than I’ve probably ever had,” he said. “That’s, obviously, all good stuff to have, but it’s just time management is going to be a little more important going forward. Yeah, it’s just going to be something that I’m going to have to get used to.”
Those adjustments began on the flight home from England, when he struggled to find overhead space on the plane for the Claret Jug.
“Getting on the plane I felt bad, like, I’m, I never like holding people up when you get on a plane,” Fox said. “Like, everyone just wants to get to their seat. And I’m trying to figure out how to fit these two boxes in the overhead and take up all the space.”
Fox followed that experience with a T58 in last week’s PGA Tour playoff opener at the FedEx St. Jude Championship, salvaging his bumpy effort in Memphis with a closing 67 on Sunday.
“It’s a tough golf course if you don’t drive it in the fairway,” he said of TPC Southwind. “I kind of was always around the edge of the fairway last week. I never hit it bad enough to be way off line, but it was always just like, oh, in the rough, get a bad lie, and it was hard to make pars there. It was good to make that score on Sunday, see a few putts go in.”
Fox heads into Thursday’s opening round at No. 25 in the FedEx Cup standings, with the top 30 advancing to next week’s Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta.
“Yeah obviously that’s a big goal at the start of the year to get to East Lake,” he said. “I feel like I’ve done a decent chunk of the work. I would have liked a better week last week to take a little bit of pressure off this week. I’m still in a good place and I think the goal this week is going to be to go out and try to get myself in contention on Sunday and if I can do that, that takes care of next week pretty comfortably.
“If I worry about the positions and what I need to do, what position I technically need to finish in this week, I think that will probably dim my head in a little bit. So just go out and focus on trying to play good golf and then results take care of themselves.”
