Temporary Immovable Obstacles

As Ryan Fox wins The Open at the age of 39, we bring you the how-to guide to breaking through barriers…

It was Day Four of the 154^th Open at Royal Birkdale.  The crowds were cheering for the Fabulous Mister Fox, the brilliant New Zealander on the verge of winning his first major at the age of 39.  That probably sounds a bit lame, to anyone who doesn’t follow the game, but golf has many, many heroes who never get their hands on a Claret Jug (The Open) or Green Blazer (The Masters). Take the great Colin Montgomerie, one-time World Number Two and Ryder Cup legend, who was runner up in a total of five majors without ever making that final, seemingly impossible, step.

Winning Majors has not been a problem for current World Number One, Scottie Scheffler, who, at the age of thirty, already has four under his belt.  But he had a major problem last Sunday. On the seventeenth hole his shot misfired and he lost sight of his ball. The canny Scheffler claimed that his ball had almost certainly finished inside the championship hospitality area, considered a Temporary Immovable Obstacle (TIO) under R & A rules, and club officials agreed, allowing him to relocate it to a much more favourable position before playing his next shot. A HUGE advantage from which he, somewhat controversially, birdied the hole.

Meanwhile, on the fifteenth hole, Ryan Fox suffered a (potentially) massive blow when his ball ricocheted off the revetted face of the bunker and landed so close to the near-vertical side wall that it would have taken a JCB to get it out. But Fox didn’t give it a second thought. He simply hit the ball out sideways, thereby making his Immovable Obstruction …Temporary. All the while knowing that the inevitable bogey (or worse) could totally demolish his chances of achieving the dream of a lifetime.

In Richard P. Rumelt’s excellent ‘Good Strategy, Bad Strategy: The Difference and Why it Matters’, the author writes:

“If you fail to identify and analyze the obstacles, you don’t have a strategy. Instead, you either have a stretch goal, a budget, or a list of things you wish would happen.”

But it doesn’t always pay to over-think things either, as one write up of last week's Open points out*

‘Amid a chaotic Sunday of leads lost, charging stars and racing minds of contenders falling apart, the quickest of them all stayed ahead of the fray.  Fox isn’t the best player in the world, but his superpower won him the open championship -his speed…

Fox is the hallmark of an endangered breed of golfer. He see things fast. He always has. It was that way when he played cricket and tennis growing up…. That makes him an outlier in the world of golf, where five-hour rounds are the norm and pre-shot routines make your gimpy grandfather look speedy. It’s the antithesis of modern sports psychology, where playing “sped up” is viewed as a hindrance and slowing down is championed.

“I was never methodical at anything, to be honest,” Fox said. “The less time I have to think about it, the less bad stuff can creep in there.” ’

Or perhaps Ryan Fox’s approach only appears ‘fast’ (to us mere mortals) while, under the bonnet, it is really a mix of Fast and Slow thinking, as some ground breaking 1985 research among US firefighters suggests:**

‘The recognition-primed decision (RPD) model describes how people use their experience in the form of a repertoire of patterns. These patterns describe the primary causal factors operating in the situation. The patterns highlight the most relevant cues, provide expectancies, identify plausible goals and suggest typical types of reaction in that situation. When people need to make a decision they can quickly match the situation to the patterns they have learned.  If they find a clear match, they can carry out the most typical course of action.  In that way, people can make extremely rapid decisions without comparing options. 

However there is more to the RPD model than pattern matching.  How can a person evaluate an option without comparing it with others?  We found that fireground commanders we studied evaluated a course of action by using mental simulation to imagine how it would play out within the context of the current situation.  If it would work, then the commanders could initiate the action.  If it almost worked, they could try to adapt it or else consider other actions that were somewhat less typical, continuing until they found an option that felt less comfortable. This process exemplifies Herbert Simon’s (1957) notion of satisficing – looking for the first workable option rather than trying to find the best possible option. Because fires grow exponentially, the faster the fire commanders could react, the easier their job.

Therefore the RPD model is a blend of intuition and analysis. The pattern matching is the intuitive part, and the mental simulation is the conscious, deliberate part. This blend corresponds to the System 1 (fast and unconscious) / System 2 (slow and deliberate) account of cognition put forward by Kahneman (2003), Epstein (2004) and others.’

Either way, perhaps Ryan Fox’s speedy approach is not quite as endangered as some would wish it, given Eugenio Chacarra’s back to back wins at this year’s KLM Open and Italian Open. Indeed, even as I write there may be some talented teenager (perhaps a Fox-Cub or a Tiger-Cub?) banging out a bucket of balls in Beijing, or maybe battling the gales in Benbecula, who’ll become golf’s ‘Hurricane Higgins’ and bring new generations of audiences to 'the greatest game mankind has ever invented' ? ***

But will they do it with Ryan Fox’s style and class??

I doubt it.

DT 23 July 2026

 *Paul Hodowanic, PGA website, 2oth July

**Rapid Decision Making on Fire Ground: The Original Study Plus a Postscript, Gary Klein, Roberta Calderwood, Anne Clinto-Cirocco Journal of Cognitive Engineering and Decision Making December 2010

***"Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated; it satisfies the soul and frustrates the intellect. It is at the same time rewarding and maddening – and it is without a doubt the greatest game mankind has ever invented." Arnold Palmer, 2004