A few days ago Jay Carter – Golf New Zealand’s National Team Coach, host of the Talking Performance podcast, and someone we’ve had the pleasure of working with when presenting to the NZ PGA – sent us a clip of Ryan Fox after listening to our episode on Güllich et al. (2021). He didn’t need to add much commentary. Foxy’s own story made the point for him. We liked the link so much we asked Jay to come on the show himself to talk it through, and this article – and the episode it’s drawn from – is the result.

Jay actually interviewed Ryan Fox on Talking Performance back in 2024, and republished the episode this August after Fox won The Open Championship at Royal Birkdale. Listening back to it with Güllich’s paper fresh in our heads, the interview came across to us as a case study that was a perfect fit for our discussions.

Not a golfer who happened to play other sports – the reverse

Given his background with New Zealand sporting royalty on both sides of the family, it is perhaps surprising that he became a golfer and not a rugby player or cricketer. His father Grant Fox was a World Cup-winning All Black and one of the most feared goal-kickers the game has produced; and early success in both sports would seem to suggest that the story would write itself. He had the genes and the nursery to become a legend in sports that New Zealand revere. It’s not the story Ryan tells.

“I had sport in my blood,” he says, but the sport wasn’t golf. His grandfather, Merv Wallace, played cricket for New Zealand through the 1930s, 40s and 50s and later coached the national side – and it’s cricket, not golf, that dominates Fox’s account of his own childhood. He played representative cricket for Auckland at under-12 and under-14, then First XI cricket first at St Kentigern (age 15) and then at King’s College after he changed schools. In his final two years at King’s, his team won the Gillette Cup – New Zealand secondary schools’ premier cricket competition – with a teammate named Tim Southee, who’d go on to play well over 100 Tests for the Black Caps. That’s not a participation trophy. King’s is one of Auckland’s premier schools, and making the First XI there is a significant achievement in itself. As Jay put it when he sat down with us: “he also made the First XV, which is rugby in New Zealand, again massive at such a school. Played and coached tennis, and just played a little bit of golf with his mates off a two handicap.” A genuinely high standard, reached in sports that weren’t the one he ended up famous for.

There was a common thread in the way he played all sports: whatever sport he played, he wanted to hit or throw the ball hard and worry about accuracy later – “I just wanted to smash the crap out of it, not really care where I went,” he says of both his cricket batting, tennis serves and his early golf swing. Golf, at that stage, was just one more thing he was good at without being remotely serious about – a two-or-three handicap as a schoolboy, playing club golf at Whitford Park, more interested in distance than the scorecard.

Jay’s point in bringing us the clip was less about the golf and more about the reminder underneath it: “he just looks like an ordinary dude who almost accidentally won the Open… but I remember he was a hell of an athlete. I felt like people probably needed a little bit of a reminder of that – that this isn’t accidental, this guy’s got some pedigree.”

Late Specialisation: The turn came at university

Here’s the detail that matters most for our purposes: Ryan Fox’s actual specialisation in golf didn’t happen in childhood at all. It happened at university, after he’d already stopped playing rugby, cricket and tennis. Partway through his first year studying law at Auckland University, a degree he “hated with a passion,” before switching to psychology, he found he couldn’t cope without something competitive in his life. Golf emerged as his competitive outlet of choice. “Let’s give golf a go, get a coach,” is how he remembers deciding. From a two-or-three handicap he got to scratch quickly once he actually applied himself, and it snowballed from there – provincial golf for Auckland, a tight-knit group of mates (several of them, like him, ex-cricketers and rugby players) pushing each other through the amateur ranks, and eventually a professional career now standing at a major championship.

It’s worth noting what didn’t carry over. Fox’s move away from cricket wasn’t really a golf decision – it happened before golf entered the picture, when men’s cricket stopped offering him what school cricket had. As Jay put it, senior cricket “didn’t offer the same as school cricket,” and he found himself wondering how many sports lose players at exactly that transition, “whether they become the Open champion or a Black Cap or not.” The exit from one sport and the entry into another weren’t the same event – easy to miss if you only look for the moment a champion “found” their sport.

The Link to Güllich et al.’s Findings

Our episode 103 on The Constraints Collective podcast dug into Güllich, Hardy, Kliegl and colleagues’ 2021 meta-analysis – 51 studies, roughly 6,000 athletes, across 15 countries. The headline finding cuts against a lot of youth-sport orthodoxy: athletes who went on to become senior champions typically specialised “later,” played a “wider” range of sports as children, and accumulated “less” structured, focused practice time in their teenage years than athletes who reached a high national standard but never quite broke through to elite level. Ryan Fox is close to a textbook illustration of that pattern – high-standard First XI cricket, First XV rugby, and competitive tennis, with serious, dedicated golf practice not starting until his late teens.

One caveat: the athletes inside studies like Güllich’s are, almost by definition, drawn from organised, coached sport – even a “wide” multi-sport childhood in that dataset is a childhood of clubs and someone’s mum or dad on the sideline. Fox’s own account, mates and a golf course used as an after-school playground, looks lighter on formal coaching than that. “Played more sports” and “was coached less” aren’t quite the same variable, even when they sit together in one athlete’s story.

But what about Tiger and The Williams Sisters?

None of this means early specialisation never works. It plainly does, sometimes spectacularly – golf’s own Tiger Woods is the example everyone reaches for, a child essentially raised inside one sport from toddlerhood who became the most dominant player of his generation. Venus and Serena Williams are the other case people reach for: Richard Williams famously wrote a 78-page plan for his daughters’ tennis careers before Venus had turned two, and had them drilling on the public courts of Compton not long after. Güllich’s data doesn’t erase cases like that; it contextualises them. They are visible precisely because they are unusual – survivorship stories that get told and retold, while the much larger, quieter base rate of late-specialising, multi-sport champions doesn’t make for as neat a highlight reel. The lesson isn’t “early specialisation never produces champions.” It is that a multi-sport childhood, and a golf career that didn’t get serious until university, is not a detour from a career like Ryan Fox’s – for most future champions, something close to it “is” the pathway.

Thanks to Jay for flagging the clip, and for joining us to talk it through properly – exactly the kind of real-world case study that makes the research land. Our full breakdown of Güllich et al. (2021) is Episode 103, “What Makes a Champion?”, this month’s Guest Review episode is our full conversation with Jay about Fox’s story, and Jay’s original interview with Ryan Fox is on Talking Performance – 197 other episodes there worth your time too.

If you have your own stories that look like Ryan Fox’s – kids who were genuinely good at more than one sport as a kid, before settling on the one they are known for now – we’d love to hear it.

This is part one of a two-part series. Part two digs into the ecological dynamics and constraints-led ideas hiding inside Fox’s own account of his development (to follow).