It was a wet and sloppy 7,347-yard track on Sunday, but Ryan Fox was the best mudder at the opposite-field event in Myrtle Beach, earning a playoff victory.
It was the New Zealander’s first career victory on the PGA Tour and first win since the 2023 BMW PGA Championship on the DP World Tour.
Since that victory, Fox had struggled to come close to winning on either tour.
Fox’s only top-10 in 2025 came on the DP World Tour in Dubai in January.
On the PGA Tour, where the Kiwi spends most of his time, his 10 starts have produced four missed cuts, and when he did make it to the weekend, he has not been very successful. His best finish in 2025 was a T15 at the Texas Children’s Houston Open at the end of March.
“It’s obviously just a different country, different culture,” Fox said. The transition to living in the U.S. has been difficult. “For me, I was really comfortable in Europe. I’d been out there, like, seven or eight years, knew how everything worked, knew the tournaments I wanted to play, knew a lot of the golf courses. Coming over here last year, everything was new. New golf courses, new cities.”
The playoff was short, with Fox producing the worst drive on the 18th hole. He missed the fairway, then missed the green but made a 54-foot chip from off the green and then waited for Harry Higgs and Mackenzie Hughes to miss their birdie putts for the win.
“Obviously, I knew the two guys had pretty good birdie chances, I just wanted to give the chip a run at it,” Fox said of his winning chip on the first playoff hole. “I had a really similar line in regulation and missed the putt right. My caddie, Dean, said to me, Remember, this doesn’t break that much. So, I just kind of aimed straight at it, and I hit the spot I wanted to hit, which is always a nice thing.”
The 38-year-old Fox benefits immediately with a spot in next week’s PGA Championship at Quail Hollow and a two-year exemption on the PGA Tour.
But the win likely has some therapeutic benefits as well.
“I kind of had a similar thing happen in ’22. I had had a couple of tricky years through COVID and won in Ras Al Khaimah, and that took all the pressure off, and I had a really great year after that,” Fox said. “So certainly, hoping the same thing happens this year, but in this game you don’t get to win very often, so that’s certainly nice to have that in the back of my mind and can feel like for the rest of the year I can kind of freewheel it a little bit.”
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