Writing from Town and Country, Missouri
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
Have Claret Jug, will travel.
So it goes for Ryan Fox these days.
When you win the British Open, as Fox did at Royal Birkdale last month, you are not only presented with the trophy – and your name engraved upon it – but a replica as well.
The latter, you get to keep. The former, you bring back to the R&A before the tournament next year.
The only problem, and it must be a delightful one to have, is lugging the old jug – officially known as the Golf Champion Trophy – around.
Fox’s first issue was stuffing both trophies – encased in protective cases – into the overhead carryon on his flight from Scotland to London and then again to Miami.
“So I get to the check in desk and I go, ‘Can these things go on the plane?’ ” Fox said to the attendant. “Like, they're probably a little bit too valuable to go underneath. And she's like, ‘What are they?’ And I'm, ‘Oh, they're the trophies. It's the Claret Jug.’ And then I had to explain that it was the British Open trophy and I had won it yesterday and everything.
“So she's like, ‘Yeah, no problem. Normally you would call us.’ I said, 'Well this only happened late last night, and I wasn't in really any state to call anyone about it.’
Security was interested as well, but eventually Fox got on the plane and searched for a spot to stash them.
“Getting on the plane I felt bad, like, I'm, I never like holding people up when you get on a plane,” Fox said. “Like, everyone just wants to get to their seat. And I'm trying to figure out how to fit these two boxes in the overhead and take up all the space. Obviously I'm not in a really good place mentally at that point either. Like, all I want to do is just go to sleep and maybe have a couple glasses of water and stuff like that. So, yeah, it was interesting. But I made it to London and made it on the flight back to Miami.”
And with Cameron Young, whom he beat down the stretch at Birkdale, right in front of him.
“I’m like, ‘Oh no.’ I feel a bit guilty about this. Cam was brilliant. We chatted and everything like that.”
It turns out the Claret Jug is akin to the Stanley Cup or the Masters green jacket. Everyone wants to see it, touch it, get a picture with it, and in the case of the cups, have a drink out of it. So Fox, as affable as they come, first took it to his native New Zealand for another celebration and at the moment has it in the trunk of the BMW courtesy car he’s tooling around with this week while chasing the J.K Wadley Trophy in the BMW Championship – a.k.a. the 123rd Western Open – at Bellerive Country Club.
“It's been cool,” Fox said with a canary-munching grin. “Last week we had a celebratory dinner with Srixon and I was like, ‘Well, do you want me to bring the trophy?’ And they're like, ‘Of course.’
“So we chucked it on the table of a steakhouse and the boys put some wine in it and had a little drink out of it at dinner which was really cool to be able to do. It was with me last week, came straight here, so made sense. I'm going to do it a lot this year, to be honest, it's cool to be able to show it off. Yeah, like I figured out how it fits in an overhead compartment now at least, so it's a little bit easier to travel with.”
There was also fun back home.
“To go home while it was still fresh, while it was still in everyone's like front of mind was I think the right thing to do,” Fox said. “Yeah, it was a cool experience for me. We had a public appearance and the middle of the city there and we had a few thousand people turn up. And I had the Claret Jug and did a little Q&A and we had a press conference at home. Which, like all of that stuff was a little bit foreign. It seemed like more than what I expected it was going to be. But the reception was amazing. I'm glad we did it. Yeah, we certainly also celebrated pretty well. We had a couple of, we had one really good party and got to celebrate, got to have some drinks with some family as well out of it as well.”
One gets the feeling it gets a nightly washing out at the kitchen sink. By hand, of course. Never the dishwasher.
“I took the Claret Jug out to our golf course and said to the guys in the pro shop, ‘Do you guys mind if I just leave it here?’ ” Fix said. “And a bunch of the members came out and took photos with it and stuff like that. It was great to be able to do that. Definitely do it again when I go home at the end of the year. But the buzz around the golf course was pretty incredible as well with it.”
Ya think?
Around Bellerive
Fox played the front nine holes Monday to refamiliarize himself with the course finished 27th at in the 2018 PGA Championship. “It’s strong,” he said. “You’ve got to control your ball really well. Even with all the rain it didn't feel like there was a blade of grass out of place yesterday. Yeah, just a place that you walk off and just go, yeah, that's a lot of good holes, a lot of good shots you have to hit around here.” … “It’s just a big golf course,” said Viktor Hovland, seeking a second BMW title to go with the one he won in record-setting fashion at Olympia Fields. “I can't believe it's already gone three years, but, yeah, I really enjoy playing this tournament,” he added. … The tournament is proving more popular than its previous visit in 2008, when it set a since-broken record for revenue returned to the Evans Scholars Foundation. The only weekend tickets remaining in WGA hands are for the Trophy Club on Sunday, at $55 to $225. An online scalper is asking $278 to $425 for a simple grounds ticket for Sunday.
– Tim Cronin