Viktor Hovland is both jovial and forthright, but you can’t truly be forthright without it occasionally trumping joviality.
Like Tuesday morning behind a microphone at TPC Southwind in Memphis, Tennessee, where a PGA Tour media official opened up Hovland’s pre-FedEx St. Jude Championship press conference with a softball.
Overall thoughts on this season as you head into this week?
“Yeah, hasn’t been my best year,” Hovland said. “Struggled for basically the whole year. It’s been a little bit challenging.”
Hmm. About a minute later, a reporter asked him about the Olympic tournament played two weeks ago, where Hovland shot 67 and 68 on the weekend at Le Golf National. Decent, right? Maybe a confidence-builder? Perhaps a momentum-grower?
“Yeah, not really,” Hovland said. “That was kind of just a weekend where I just made a few putts. I missed on the right sides and I was able to score well. The first couple rounds [when he shot 70 and 75] I about hit it the same, but that golf course is very penal off the tee, and into the greens, it really penalizes the bad shots. But if you’re playing well, you can shoot low.
“I just missed it in the wrong spots because I didn’t have that much control over the ball flight. So the second round I was just at the mercy of the randomness of where my ball was going. Then over the weekend, I made a lot of putts and just was able to score well. That’s always nice, but the quality of the shots were not there. I was still a little upset with that.”
All of it offered somewhat of a window into Hovland’s past year, where just about 365 days ago, the 26-year-old Norwegian was world-beating. He tied for seventh at the Masters. Finished runner-up at the PGA. Won the Memorial. Then really went bananas. Won the BMW Championship the week after last year’s FedEx St. Jude. Won the Tour Championship the week after that. He became a Ryder Cup king, too.
But somewhere around that time, golf golfed. It’s a curious game. Things turned sour. Hovland and swing coach Joe Mayo mysteriously split. His results took a turn, at least in comparison to where they’d been. He’s missed just three cuts this PGA Tour season in 13 events. But he’s finished in the top 10 just once (a third at the PGA Championship). He’s 57th in the Tour’s regular-season standings. He’s been frustrated.
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Was there a moment, though, where Hovland’s frustration might have peaked?
Yes and no. He said there’ve been several “peaks and valleys.”
“I mean, it’s just not that fun to play golf when you don’t know where the ball is going,” Hovland said.
“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.
“But hey, that’s how it goes sometimes, and I feel like I’ve learned even more about my golf swing, which I didn’t really think I could, so there’s always stuff to learn, and I’m super pumped about kind of where I’m headed. I’m not sure how long it’s going to take for me to play my best golf. 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. But at least now we’re — 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.”
What had been the swing issue, in layman’s terms?
“Basically my pattern got off,” Hovland said. “The things that I did in my swing that made me good, that made me able to predict a certain ball flight, I went home and tried to do a certain move, not necessarily because I had in mind that I wanted to change my pattern; I knew my pattern was really good. But I was upset that I wasn’t cutting the ball as much as I would have liked. My ball flight started to become a little bit of a draw, which is fine. I was still hitting it good. But sometimes visually I would have liked to have seen the cut.
“Then in the offseason I made a conscious effort to try to cut the ball more, and when I did that, I ruined a relationship that happens in my swing that makes it really difficult for me to control the face coming down. So now it’s just kind of me learning from that. I know exactly why it happened. I know exactly what happens because I’ve gotten myself measured, and now it’s just kind of a process of getting back to where I was.
“But at least I know I have all the data and the facts on the table to go about it.”
Some of that joviality cracked through in those answers, didn’t it? Some positivity.
There’s hope.
Hovland reunited with Mayo around the time of this year’s PGA. They’re digging. An answer could be near.
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Notably, at last year’s FedEx St. Jude, Hovland and Mayo were grinding on Southwind’s range after a first-round 72, then the pro went on his march.
“I’m just trying to control the things that I can control,” Hovland said. “I know that I’ve slipped up a little bit this year. I haven’t been playing as well as I would have liked. I’m just working on the things that I need to work on to get back to where I was last year. Then I believe I can do some great things again.
