AUGUSTA, Ga., Earth, Milky Way Galaxy — Eleven words into the question, Viktor Hovland laughed.
To be fair, it was out there, literally in a sense.
“Hi, Viktor. I listened to your appearance on the UAP podcast …”
UAPs, short for unidentified anomalous phenomena and also known as UFOs, in a pre-Masters press conference? It may have been a first at Augusta National. But there’s a point here, a golf one even, which the reporter got to, amidst Hovland’s smile.
“… I was curious how questioning things like UAPs and UFOs help you on the golf course and then vice versa?”
Curious actually is a good word there. That’s Hovland. He’s a beautiful mind. Why may be his favorite word. With some publicity, that’s become well known in the golf space. He’s a tinkerer.
But inquisitiveness has led him to other mysteries. To the unknown. To the unidentified. People talk about such things as UAPs. But the facts are scarce. So folks like Hovland dig — and his unearthing led to a guest appearance on the UAP Files Podcast. But he was more of the host. He was asking the questions.
And he also connected his hobby back to his 9-to-5 job.
“Just to relate this to golf,” Hovland said, “the past couple years have been a little bit challenging for me on the golf course and it’s made me have to question a lot of the things that I’ve done. Because when you make an instinctual move that I’ve done for, I’d say, maybe the past 10 years of my life and the ball is going one direction, it’s going pretty straight, it’s going where I want it to go and then suddenly it’s not doing that, you have to really question everything and look at all the things that you’re doing to re-engineer the golf swing that you had before.
“And when you do that, it’s quite addicting, really. It might give you some short-term discomfort because you look at things that you regard as facts and then maybe they weren’t as true as you thought they were. And that original discomfort goes away quickly when you realize that on the other side, there’s lessons to be learned and you can actually improve because of that.
“And then when you extrapolate that to other things in society or how you live your life in general, it’s quite freeing and it almost becomes a little addicting — you just want to question everything, although within reason; you still need to put on your shoes and put on clothes and go out there and work and get better at the things you want to get better at. But yeah, it’s just fascinating so that’s kind of what led me to this topic.”
Back to the reporter’s question then.
Does this all really help his golf?
Yes, Hovland said.
To him, it’s interesting when you have an open mind.
“I think even in the golf swing,” Hovland said, “you can get very dogmatic and you look at things as, oh, this has to be a truth, this has to be correct, and sometimes the beliefs that you hold the most deeply can obfuscate yourself. When you question things and look at things from different angles, you might get to a deeper truth.
“I think that’s just a fascinating endeavor to engage in, and hopefully it leads you closer to the right direction, but that’s kind of the fun of it.”
Of course, one can fall down a rabbit hole while either searching for ways to find the golf hole, or reasons behind black holes. The journey could be endless.
Does Hovland know when to pause?
He says he does.
“Pause, it’s more like, OK, I know this is getting into territory that’s very speculative,” Hovland said. “But I think as long as you have an objective kind of mindset while looking into this information, I think it’s just fun.
“You don’t have to live and die by every word you read or thing you hear. It’s more like you observe it from a different place, an objective place, and then you go, hey, maybe this is true, maybe it’s not, and then you put that into a placeholder of, OK, let’s just wait for more information to see if that corroborates what you already read.”
