Yep, Ryan Fox Is Putting the Open Championship’s Claret Jug to VERY Good Use!

The little golfer on the front always has to face forward. Ryan Fox got told that multiple times on Sunday, and it is now the first thing he passes along to anyone who asks about the Claret Jug.

Fox brought the real one to his appearance on the show, held it up to the camera on Rich's request, and gave the radio audience a guided tour of a trophy Rich admitted he had never seen up close.

The names are engraved all the way up. Rich asked Fox to pick one out. Fox squinted, conceded the lettering is pretty small, and landed on Harry Vardon, 1898 at Prestwick.

Then he had to rotate it to find his own.

"I don't know if I'm ever going to get used to reading that," Fox said.

There is also a piece you have to pull out in order to pour wine into it, a detail Fox says he figured out pretty quickly on Sunday night. Multiple bottles of red went through the jug that evening. How many, he could not tell you.

Who paid for them is an even better mystery. Fox still does not know.

"Was it the R and A? Am I going to get a bill for it in like a couple of months?" he said. "I don't care at this point. I'll take it."

He does know what went in first. Fox picked a French red off the wine list at Birkdale, a Leoville Barton from 2015. After that, he said, it did not really matter what went in.

The logistics of owning the thing are their own comedy. Fox gets a replica for life, and it is currently sitting on his dining room table. The real one he keeps for a year before returning it to St. Andrews. They hand it over with a couple of wheeled carry cases and essentially no further instruction.

"They just literally give it to you," Fox said. "They don't really tell you much else, basically. Like I just, this is it."

Which raised the only question that actually mattered to Rich. Did the Claret Jug fly in the overhead bin?

Both cases did.

Fox said he discussed checking it with his agent and quickly talked himself out of it. "You don't want to be that guy that checks the Claret Jug and loses it," he said. "I'm pretty sure you don't want to put that pressure on an airline as well."

Rich agreed that an airline losing the Claret Jug would not make for great press.

So Fox flew out Monday morning, straight after the Open Championship, and went to the gate agent to explain his situation. She asked what was in the boxes. He told her it was the Claret Jug, the Open Championship trophy.

Her response, per Fox: "Okay, yeah, you probably should take that on a plane."

Rich, a man with strong feelings about overhead bin real estate, related immediately to the need to board first. Fox confirmed the rest of the plane paid for it.

"I reckon I pissed a lot of people off, too, cuz they were waiting for me to figure out how to get those two big boxes up in the overhead and take up way too much space," Fox said. "But it was worth it."

Rich's ruling on the inconvenienced passengers was short and correct. Too bad. All you have to do is point at the leaderboard.

Worth noting for context on how far removed the host is from all of this: Rich opened by mentioning he picked up golf as a 17-year-old in Staten Island and just finished tied for 88th at the American Century Championship, in a field of 89.