No one saw Alex Noren coming at this PGA Championship.
How could you have?
Yes, he’s won 10 times on the DP World Tour, and, yes, he played in a signature PGA Tour event at Philadelphia Cricket Club a week ago, placing 51st among the 69 finishers, but his last start before that came seven months ago, at the Dunhill Links Championship in Scotland.
Noren had been on a sabbatical to heal a torn tendon in his hamstring. No golf, no running, no squat rack. Just extended downtime with his family, which is not something the 42-year-old Swede has enjoyed much of in his career.
“It’s good to take a break sometimes,” Noren said Saturday evening at Quail Hollow Club shortly after he’d posted a spectacular seven-birdie 66 that moved him to eight under for the tournament and, ultimately, into Sunday’s final pairing with the leader by three, Scottie Scheffler. “I missed it, but I also liked what I had at the time, which helps me maybe realize a little bit that I don’t think it’s the end of the world if you play bad.”
Those are stunning words to hear coming from Noren, because he’s not exactly one to curl up on the couch with an Afghan blanket and a People magazine. Noren, in fact, has a reputation for being one of the hardest workers in professional golf, or at least that’s how Rory McIlroy once described Noren. He just gets after it. On the course, in the gym, at the Ryder Cup, on the range. Especially on the range. That much became clear to golf fans when, in 2017, a photo of Noren’s badly calloused hands began making the rounds on social media.
As Noren tells it, the image was first posted by his fellow Swedish pro, Kristoffer Broberg, after Noren had completed an arduous practice session at the Abu Dhabi HSBC Championship. The DP World Tour’s social team then reposted the image with a caption that read: “Noren is known as one of the hardest workers on Tour and has said before that he now often wears two gloves during practice to protect his hands from the effects of hitting hundreds of shots in a day.”
In 2022, Noren spoke about the photo on a podcast hosted by his former college coach at Oklahoma State, Mike McGraw. In explaining how his hands had become so gnarled, he said, “It’s a mix of hard training and dedication — but also a lot of anxiety. They wouldn’t look like this if I hit it like Rory McIlroy.”
He added, “I need to hit a lot of balls to be competitive, and maybe the club slides around a little bit [in my grip], maybe there’s friction, I don’t know. But it’s just how it is.”
Noren said not long after the photo was posted, Tiger Woods approached him in the locker room at a Tour event and said, “’Alex, Can I see your hands?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, sure,’ to my idol Tiger. So, I showed him and he goes, ‘Yeah, not too bad,’ and I was like, ‘There we go, finally somebody who’s not impressed by my hands or not disgusted by them. He was like, ‘I understand.’”
Noren will play the biggest round of his life Sunday at Quail Hollow, going toe-to-toe and callous-to-callous with the world No. 1.
Scheffler might outplay Noren but he will not outwork him.
