Letting Go: What Ryan Fox Taught Us at 2am

I was up at 2am on a Monday, in the dark, in New Zealand, watching a bloke from Auckland on the other side of the world, do something no golfer in the history of Major championships has ever done. And by the time the sun came up Ryan Fox was standing on the 18th green of Royal Birkdale with the Claret Jug, and I was wide awake.  

What a win. What a story. And, for anyone interested in resilience and performance — which is our business at Challenge of Change — what an example!

The Comeback Nobody Saw Coming

Let's start with the scoreboard, because the numbers alone are worth celebrating. After 36 holes, Ryan Fox was tied for 52nd. Not top 20. Not "lurking." 52nd. No player in Major championship history has ever come from that far back to win. Not Tiger. Not Rory. Nobody.

Then Fox shot a third-round 62 — one of the lowest rounds ever recorded in a Major — to vault himself into the final pairing. He followed it up with gutsy birdies in four of the last six holes, capped by an 11-foot putt on the 72nd hole to win by a single shot. Ranked outside the world's top 50 coming in, at 39 years old, he became the oldest first-time Major champion in a decade. It's the stuff of legend.

But the scores only tell half the story. The real story — the one we care about — is what happened in his head between the shots.

The Backward Shot

On the 15th hole on the last day, with a Claret Jug on the line, Fox's tee shot buried into the lip of a bunker. Impossible. The only shot available was backward, sideways almost, sacrificing 45 yards just to find grass he could actually swing from. It was the kind of break that could unravel a round, unravel a mind, unravel a dream.

Fox climbed into the bunker and played it backward with zero hesitation. No sulking. No re-litigating the unfairness of it. He got up and down for a bogey, gave a fist pump and walked to the next tee. Asked about it afterwards, he said he felt "a whole lot better walking off that green" than the lie itself deserved.

That is Letting Go in its purest form.

The Contrast: Bryson DeChambeau

Now compare that to what unfolded a few days earlier with Bryson DeChambeau. After a battling second round that should have put him one shot off the lead, DeChambeau found himself embroiled in a rules controversy — officials believed he'd stomped down grass behind his ball on the 5th hole to improve his lie. He was taken back out to the scene, visibly furious, waving his arms, arguing his case in front of the cameras. He copped a two-stroke penalty and dropped down the leaderboard. He threatened to quit the tournament.

By his own account, he was "fired up" — and stayed fired up. Reports had him still out on the range late that evening, long after his round had finished, working through his frustration ball after ball into the dark, declining to speak to media at all. He dropped from one off the lead and tied for fourth at the end of day one, to ending the tournament at 14^th, and a few million lighter in his pay cheque.  It's not the first time; DeChambeau has form for letting a bad break follow him for hours, even days, blaming clubs or officials in the heat of the moment before apologising later

There's no villain in this story — DeChambeau is an extraordinary talent and a fierce competitor, and frustration is human. But it's a perfect real-world contrast for what we teach in our Challenge of Change programme, because it shows just how differently two elite competitors can process the exact same kind of adversity — and how differently that shows up in performance.

Wake Up. Control Your Attention. Detach. Let Go.

In our programme, we talk about four steps: Wake Up — noticing what's actually happening, not the story you're telling yourself about it. Control Your Attention — bringing your focus back to this shot, right here, right now. Detach — separating yourself from the emotional charge of the moment. And finally, Let Go — releasing it completely, so it doesn't travel with you to the next shot, the next hole, the next hour.

Fox was undoubtedly disappointed by that lie on 15. He may well have been frustrated by other moments across the week — a horrible break here, a fatted iron there, a nightmare stance he had no right to recover from. He's human, just like DeChambeau. The difference wasn't the absence of emotion. The difference was speed. Fox controlled his attention on the shot directly in front of him, detached from the sting of the bad break, and let it go — quickly — so it couldn't compound into the next shot, or the next hole, or a whole round unravelling.

DeChambeau, by every account from Birkdale, carried his frustration for hours. And while he's an immense player who will win more Majors, on that week, in that moment, it was Fox — the underdog, the journeyman, the 39-year-old outside the world's top 50 — who had mastered the one skill that matters most when things go wrong: Letting Go.

Worth Losing Sleep Over

I'll happily lose sleep for that. Getting up at 2am to watch a fellow Kiwi produce the greatest comeback in Major championship history, and do it while modelling exactly the mental skills we spend our working lives teaching — that's a very good reason to set an alarm.

Congratulations, Ryan Fox. Champion Golfer of the Year. And a masterclass, shot by shot, in Letting Go.