Mental resilience behind the making of Ryan Fox
Inaccurate long hitter learns to manufacture shots by necessity, playing out of the ‘tree lines’.
The back of the main stand at Rugby Park in New Plymouth on an August afternoon in 1990. A group of us are watching a sturdy threeyear-old boy doing a very fair job of catching and kicking a small plastic rugby ball with his dad, World Cup-winning All Black Grant Fox, whose Auckland team has just beaten Taranaki.
To all of us a wager on the little boy, Ryan, growing up to become a rugby player seemed a sure bet, rather than the world class golfer he actually is.
What we weren’t to know, says Grant now, is that as well as the footy, back home in Waterview in Auckland there was also a plastic cricket set, and, yes, a toy golf set.
It’s true, recalls Grant, that the golf set took a pounding, but ‘‘it really wasn’t anything different from what all little kids do’’.
In Ryan’s case, he was a little kid with sport running strongly through the family DNA, as it does with other Kiwi golfers. Look at Greg Turner, with one older brother Glenn, a New Zealand cricket opener for 14 years, and another, Brian, a New Zealand representative in hockey. Or Phil Tataurangi, whose father Teroi was an Auckland and New Zealand Juniors rugby star.
You could see, if you’d followed Grant’s career, where Ryan might get the determination, concentration, and work ethic to be in the top 100 golfers in the world. But those who played with Grant also recall an intensity that burned as high, and was sometimes as volatile, as anyone who ever played the game.
So where does Ryan get the Zen-like calm that a golfer needs to call on as he approaches the ball? Ask Grant and he laughs, and immediately says: ‘‘From his mother. Merv Wallace (a former New Zealand cricket captain and coach) was Adele’s dad, and he was a famously calm, thoughtful man. So there is no doubt that gene line runs through Ryan.
‘‘There is a calm demeanour about him, which belies a fierce competitiveness. You wonder sometimes what’s simmering away underneath.’’
The golf bug really bit when Ryan was in his mid-teens, and the family moved to live in Beachlands, in the east of Auckland, close to the Whitford Country Club.
Ryan’s Sundays started when he’d be dropped off at the club. ‘‘He’d hit balls all day,’’ says Grant, ‘‘go with his mates, look in the rough and find lost balls in the estuary area. We’d take him there at nine o’clock and pick him up at four.’’
From the time he graduated to competitive play for Whitford, Ryan hit a long ball. As a teenager the long drives weren’t always that accurate. A family joke is that he played a lot of military golf, going ‘‘left-right, left-right’’.
Grant swears that the ‘‘time in the tree lines’’ would prove, in the long run, to be a help. ‘‘He’s got a good range of shots in his bag, and I think part of that might be because he spent a good amount of time in the trees, learning to play low running burners, low hooks or high hooks, low burning fades. To navigate trees he had to learn how to do all that.’’
Thankfully his coaches Bob McDonald and then Brian Doyle, never tried to rein in the long hitting. They let him, in the words of Arnold Palmer, ‘‘go for the green’’ first, and worked on straightening things up over time.
It’s probably appropriate, in a sport where mental skills play such a massive role, that Fox completed a degree in psychology at Auckland University before he plunged fulltime into golf.
The experts say that golfers need to play as if it doesn’t matter. Which is fine if you’re playing for fun. Not so great if your livelihood depends on the game.
Fox plays the European circuit, which means that he’s in the northern hemisphere playing in Europe from April to November, and then returns to New Zealand from December to March, travelling from Auckland to tournaments in Asia and the Middle East, which, as strange as it sounds, are also part of the ‘‘European’’ circuit.
It costs around NZ$100,000 each GETTY IMAGES year for travel and accommodation. Last year Fox made $1.73 million in prizemoney so what he once described as ‘‘keeping my mind clear while I walk between shots’’ would have been a breeze. It may not have been so easy in 2016 (when he won $43,655) or 2015 ($73,771).
But in 2018 his future looks as settled as he does when he steps to the tee. He and his fiancee Anneke have bought an apartment in Addlestone near Heathrow airport outside London, and when they’re in New Zealand have a house in Onehunga. In the early days they were constant customers of Airbnb.
And his father has seen at close range, caddying for Ryan, the grit beneath the laid back exterior. ‘‘We went to America a couple of times to play [when Ryan was an amateur]. That’s when you find out where your levels at.
‘‘The first year he went he was already known in the amateur ranks here as a long hitter, but when he went to tournaments there he found guys who could hit it way past him. It was a bit like, ‘O...kay.’
‘‘He got his backside kicked, and to his credit he said, ‘Well, now I see the level I’ve got to get to’. We went back a year later and had some really good results. He’s always had a real mental resilience about him.’’