Viktor Hovland can empathize with most amateur golfers in at least one easy-to-understand way.
He doesn’t enjoy being on the golf course when he’s playing poorly.
Of course, Hovland’s standards are quite different than the average Sunday duffer. The young Norwegian star was coming off winning the FedEx Cup and its $10 million bonus last year when he changed swing coaches.
It was part of a quest to hit a more consistent cut. But as has happened to so many elite players before him who have attempted swing changes, it backfired on Hovland.
After closing out 2023 with five consecutive top-10 finishes, Hovland opened this year with a T22 in the 59-player field at The Sentry. What’s followed has been a lone top-10 in his past 12 starts on tour — a solo third at the PGA Championship.
Hovland is coming off a T30 at the Olympics and sits in 57th place entering the first leg of the playoffs at the FedEx St. Jude Championship. Only the top 50 after this week advance to the BMW Championship, but Hovland is confident that he sees the light at the end of the tunnel of a very frustrating season to date.
“It feels like it’s been a lot of peaks and valleys. I mean, it’s just not that fun to play golf when you don’t know where the ball is going,” he said on Tuesday.
“I do pride myself in trying to make the best out of it, but it gets to a point where you kind of lose that belief — you just see a shot, and that’s not good enough. I can try to grind my hardest. I can try to chip in from there. But you do that too often, too many times during the course of a round or a tournament, it’s too much to overcome.
“And I feel like it’s a waste of time for me to be playing golf if that’s where I’m at. I’d rather be off the golf course and work on it, trying to figure out why I’m doing those things.”
Hovland has withdrawn from multiple events this year — the WM Phoenix Open after a T58 at Pebble Beach and later from the RBC Heritage, a signature event, after shooting an 81 to miss the cut at the Masters. Both WDs prompted rumors that Hovland was considering a move to LIV Golf, but he has insisted that he’d rather work on his game at home than struggle in competition.
Hovland returned in May to tie for 24th at the Wells Fargo and followed the PGA Championship with a T15 at the Memorial. However, it has been a mixed bag since with missed cuts at the U.S. Open and The Open Championship sandwiching a T20 at the Travelers and a T46 at the Scottish Open.
Known as a player who tinkers with his swing over countless hours on the range, Hovland said he now has “all the data and the facts on the table” to go about regaining the form that had him on top of the golf world less than 12 months ago.
“I’m not sure how long it’s going to take for me to play my best golf,” he said. “It might be this week. It might be next week. But at least now I’m on a path to progress. I’m on a path to improvement. Whereas before, one thing is playing bad, but you don’t know why and you don’t know how to fix it. That’s very challenging mentally.
“I might play terrible this week, but at least I feel like I’m on a path to improvement, and that’s all that kind of matters for me.”
–Field Level Media
