PONTE VEDRA BEACH, Fla. — Consecutive eagles highlighted a round that Ryan Fox has been looking for since the start of the year.
Shooting a three-under 69 in Thursday’s first round of the Players Championship, the reigning BMW PGA champion on the DP World Tour may have finally gotten the boost he needs to jumpstart a difficult season.
In 2024, Fox has struggled. The New Zealander has made two cuts in four starts, his best finish a T35 that included a final-round 65 at the Cognizant Classic.
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While not blaming any one thing, the combination of his wife and two young children traveling with Fox and the new schedule including signature events which Fox has not qualified for has made getting into a rhythm challenging.
“I've got this great opportunity this year to play full time on the PGA Tour, and the schedule and start of the year was tricky,” Fox said. “I was kind of in signature events to start with on world ranking, then I was out, and I was sort of not sure where I was going. And I've always been one of those guys that likes certainty.”
Not knowing what event was next and learning to travel with a 3-year-old and 10-month-old made Fox’s job more difficult.
It was the same during the COVID-19 pandemic, when Fox struggled to get comfortable with a helter-skelter schedule because of having to quarantine in order to return home to New Zealand.
With momentum coming out of the Cognizant two weeks ago, Fox recorded a first at TPC Sawgrass with an eagle at the par-5 16th hole after hitting his second shot to 2 feet and then hitting a gap wedge on the par-3 17th island hole that landed past the hole and rolled back in for an ace.
The gap wedge dunk completed a 3–1 on the scorecard, the first in Players history. It was also Fox's first ace in 472 par-3s played on the PGA Tour.
“Soon as COVID kind of disappeared and it was a lot easier to travel back and forth from New Zealand, I seemed to play a little bit better,” Fox said. “So hopefully, that now I've got a bit better idea of the schedule, but at least makes it a little bit easy to play well on the golf course.”
This week’s Players is the first of a five-week stretch of tournaments for Fox, cumulating at the Masters.
This week, Fox worked hard on the range before Thursday’s first round and believes that his game is close.
“It's amazing how two or three shots can kind of change you mentally,” Fox said. “And all of a sudden, I'm not looking to hang on or trying to make birdies and had a lot of good shots coming down my back nine just sort of didn't convert to many opportunities, but there was a lot of good.”
Consecutive bogeys in the middle of his first nine put Fox 1 over par, but his experience at Wentworth last year kicked in and what he learned in winning the biggest tournament of his career helped with the poor start.
“I think there's probably two things out of Wentworth: a bad hole doesn't ruin your round, and also the fact that's I always felt like I could compete with the best players in the world," Fox said. "But that's the first time I'm actually taking them on down the stretch and done it and I feel like when my game is on now that I can compete. I've just got to get the game on again.”
