It’s tempting, when you see a tidy second-round 67 and HOVLAND tied for the lead at the Valspar Championship, to declare that Norway’s greatest golfing talent is back. That would, of course, be far too neat. It’s just one tournament. We’re only halfway through. And in golf there is no “back”, anyway. No reverse. No undo. There’s only figuring out what’s next. So we’ll offer this simple truth instead: For Viktor Hovland, Friday was a good day.
The Norwegian star’s second round consisted of five birdies against just a single bogey. At Innisbrook’s Copperhead Course, four-under 67 is a special round; when he signed his card, he was tied for the lead at five under par and he sat T2 near the conclusion of play. It also guaranteed that Hovland would make the weekend at an event with a cut for the first time in 2025. Trending up, right?
“Not to put myself down, but for it to be sustainable at that level I need to strike it a bit better and it needs to be a bit more predictable,” Hovland said post-round.
Oh.
It’s important to remember here that golf is a silly and unusually cruel game. If the guy in second place is dissatisfied, what do the 150 behind him think?! But Hovland wasn’t being flippant or pessimistic — he was just being honest. The 27-year-old Ryder Cup star, who somehow balances being both candid and mysterious, spoke to the media for several minutes post-round. He sounded, as he has for 12 months or more, like a mechanic who’s rebuilding a car as he’s driving it. But he also offered us a look under the hood; valuable insight into one of the sport’s most fascinating figures.
“Yeah, it sucks,” he began on Friday, characteristically direct when asked about his rollercoaster journey the last year-plus.
If you think it’s odd to be nitpicking when you’re T2, just remember that Hovland wasn’t satisfied at his peak, either; he felt like he was duct-taping his game together at the end of 2023, when he won the Tour Championship in a blowout the week after winning the BMW Championship and several weeks after winning the Memorial that same summer, plus nearly the PGA Championship. He was the hottest player in the world but something within him knew definitively that he needed to be better. That launched an overhaul of everything: swing changes, coaching changes, more swing changes, more coaching changes. Despite some bright spots in 2024 — third at the PGA Championship, T2 at the FedEx St. Jude — his play has fallen short of his high standard, and he’s fallen from No. 3 in the world to No. 19. Though not for lack of effort.
This season began with a broken toe, another coaching change and a set of suspect results: he enters this week off missed cuts at Riviera, Bay Hill and the Players, and his 80-68 at TPC Sawgrass suggested a golf game in flux.
Which brings us to Hovland on Friday. What’s all that been like?
“You have an ability that you can almost sometimes take for granted,” he said. “You just wake up every day and you stand over the ball, and you just expect the ball to start in that direction and go in that direction and end up somewhere close to the hole. When it starts to not do that, it’s pretty frustrating. You start thinking things you’ve never thought before. And this game becomes infinitely more challenging — and it’s already really challenging.”
Woof. That’s simple but it’s heavy. One day you hit it where you’re looking. And then at some point you look up and it’s going somewhere else. A game that has been hard for everyone else but easy for you is suddenly hard for you, too. That’s what golf is for the elite, after all. It’s swinging, looking up and seeing it on your line. Everything else flows from there.
Hovland, to his credit, makes no excuses. (You could argue he’d actually benefit from at least a few.) He’d rather be in command of his game, no doubt — but he’s clearly comfortable being deep in the process.
“It is really humbling, and kind of handling those moments, I mean, I think there’s a lot of lessons to be learned there,” he said.
One reporter pointed out — and he’s hardly the first to think it — that Hovland sounds like he’s hard on himself. Isn’t he in excellent position in the tournament?
“I am hard on myself, yeah. But that’s also why I’m good,” he countered. “If I wasn’t hard on myself I probably wouldn’t be out here. And yeah, I know that even with terrible mechanics I can still get out here and shoot a couple of nice scores. But that can also lead to 80 shots at the Players. Because it’s just, I don’t have control over what I’m doing.”
That’s a theme: Hovland is seeking control. He wants a swing that he can depend on. He was dismissive of his opening-round success because his score looked better because he made a bunch of putts, because he feels like he’s squeezing everything out of his game, because he played poorly in practice rounds, because he hit “a lot of bad shots” in the pro-am. He’s obsessed with something that can hold up under pressure and over time. He beats that drum again and again.
“You just want something that’s sustainable. And if your technique’s good you’re going to play a lot of good golf in the future. That’s just how it works,” he said.
And he makes that bit — something that’s sustainable — sound simple and logical. It’s only once you get to specifics that it becomes clear just how difficult that all really is. That you step back and wonder if that’s even possible. Hovland has re-enlisted Grant Waite as his swing coach; the two are working together on an overhaul. The biggest problem, he says, is that he can’t trust his instincts.
“It’s tricky, because you can’t really rely on your feels anymore, you have to reverse engineer things a little bit and start from scratch,” he said. “But we’re making progress.”
That, more than good shots or good scores, seems like Hovland’s most positive measuring stick. Progress. Hovland’s thinking big-picture, after all.
“At the end of the day like, yes, it’s awesome being at the top of the leaderboard right now, and to have a chance going into the weekend. But I truly just care about the things that I’m working on,” he said. “And if the ball is behaving and doing the things that I want it to do, I’m going to play a lot of great golf in the future.”
The long-view strategy is essential for survival in a sport that can kick you and kick you and kick you again. The only downside is if you forget to appreciate the little wins along the way. While Hovland is chasing great golf in the future he might just stumble on some great golf in the present. His commitment to the pursuit — and his candidness explaining it — means plenty of golf fans are desperately hoping he does.
And either way he’ll have something more to learn from.
