Ryan Fox's golf swing is a brutal work of art, according to our man Matt Cleary, and for most of Friday he was one off the lead. While a late stutter saw him drop to five-under and five behind leader and fellow Kiwi, Kazuma Kobori, at the halfway mark of the Australian PGA Championship at Royal Queensland, Fox remains one to watch.
On the 13th of February, 1982, with his team six wickets down for 44 and chasing Australia’s 8/302, New Zealand No.8 Lance Cairns launched a glorious, doomed, one-man, one-handed assault on the Australian fast bowling attack of Rodney Hogg, Geoff Lawson and the great Dennis Lillee.
The burly all-rounder, wielding a shoulder-less bat he called “Excalibur”, smashed six sixes in 10 balls, including two in a row off Lillee, the second of which, launched one-handed over backward square leg, the great fast bowler stood mid-pitch and applauded.
Cairns was eventually out caught Smith, bowled Lawson for 52 off 25 balls, and New Zealand would lose by 149 runs. Yet his defiance lives on in the mind’s eye today; a paradigm of defiance, an allegory, an apocryphal tale that actually happened.
For whatever reason, Cairns reminds me another Kiwi, Ryan Fox, currently sitting in equal Xth-place at the halfway mark of this Australian PGA Championship at Royal Queensland. And more on him shortly.
First let’s hark back to Wednesday when I walked nine holes with Robbie Dolan who won a Melbourne Cup, Jesse “The Monstar” Williams who won a Super Bowl ring with the Seattle Seahawks, and Matt Denny who won a bronze medal at the Games of the XXXIIIrd Olympiad in Paris. Dolan weighs 50 kilograms, while both Williams and Denny weighed three times that at their zenith.
And yet all those guys play golf, and all to about the same standard, that being roughly 8-12 handicappers who plot their ball around the course in manifold ways yet write down roughly similar scores. The golf scorecard remains blessedly, absolutely egalitarian.
As it is in chopper land, so it is at the elite, pointy, professional end, where people move their ball to the hole in many and various ways. For every Jim Furyk, who waves at the top of his swing like a fancy man, a dandy – yoo-hoo! - there’s a synchronized powerhouse like Tiger Woods, a glorious artisan like Ernie Els, a beautiful machine like Adam Scott.
And then there are the brutalists; those who don’t so much dig the ball from the dirt as carve at it like super-fit Bobcats, like woodsmen angry at the tree, like Lance Cairns at the MCG.
Exhibit A: Ryan Fox.
We’re at Royal Queensland and the great Scott is paired with Fox and Elvis Smylie. It’s steamy here, shade’s a premium, luck’s a fortune and brollies are up. It’s just gone 1pm and the party tent is half-pumping, the yellow-clad patrons getting their groove one, feeling it, thinking, today’s gonna be a good, good day, and so.
From the tee on five Fox launches a bomb, a near abomination, that soars some 330 metres towards goal. He and Scott walk and talk, as they do most holes. Scott, classically proportioned; Fox with the bow-legged gait of Mongo the Magnificent, the cowboy from Blazing Saddles.
Not to say you could see the man shirtless, astride a rank Brahman bull from the Gulf Country, but I bet you can’t un-see it now either, particularly given the slight paunch Fox sports, the one that NFL experts might call the power-gut of the offensive lineman.
Fox's old man was an All Black, though a “pinhead” according to some, because he played flay-half or what the Kiwis call first five-eighth. Ryan is closer in build to a front-rower. He is part Bobcat.
He follows his drive with a strong, short-iron and a 12-footer for the bird. He is seven-under. He is right in this tournament.
Onto the seventh tee and I take slow-motion video of his swing. Apologies for the slight blurriness. But have a go at it. He flares his left foot and takes the club back conventionally to the top, but the move from there – well, check it out.
@golfaustraliamagazine Ryan Fox smashes one on the par-5 7th hole at Royal Queensland during day two of the Australian PGA Championship. The man can play.
♬ Ode to Joy- Symphony No.9 in D Minor 'choral' - Lorne Balfe & Russell Emanuel & Steve Kofsky
He’s dipping and gouging, his head goes low, darting down behind the ball, before he fairly carves it out there, the club linging through, in-to-out, and crack, the ball soars out with a boss-baby draw before Fox finishes at the top with the flourish of a portly matador. ¡Ole!
Onto the ninth tee and Fox fairly pumps one, long, into the breeze, it doesn’t matter, it’s gone 300 metres and change, 40 metres past Scott who’s hooked into the Boombah.
Fox’s ball seems impervious to a wind that commentator Ewan Porter reckons isn’t as thick or buffeting as other winds despite the flame trees bending on Thursday like activated fishing poles.
Fox’s length makes birdie on nine misère. He goes to eight-under. He doubles 15, though, and bogies 17, and ends up five-under, four behind runaway bride Brett Rankin but still well in the hunt to be the first Kiwi since Greg Turner in 1986 to win the Australian PGA Championship.
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