OAKMONT, Pa. — Two years ago, Viktor Hovland strategized a Sunday in contention at the PGA Championship the way major champions in contention have strategized since the beginning of time.
“Yeah, another boring answer,” he said, repeating lines he’d said all week at Oak Hill. “I don’t think this is a course where you can kind of get too crazy. You have to play smart, play for middle of the greens and give yourself a lot of looks and hopefully get that putter hot.”
Hovland spoke like a man on the brink of a career-altering victory; comfortable but not placid, hungry but not desperate. For the better part of four rounds in Rochester back in 2023, his game agreed: He played brilliantly, tactically, and safely. He “wore out the center of the green.” He fired at pins carefully. He avoided mistakes. And when the scores were counted after 72 holes, a funny thing happened: He lost.
The two years that followed Hovland’s loss to Brooks Koepka at the 2023 PGA have been confounding, not just because Hovland has at times appeared to lose his golf swing, but also because he has appeared to lose his sanity. At various points in the last 24 months, each of the components that came together at the PGA to make Hovland appear on the brink of being golf’s next major-winning superstar have vanished into the mist. He has changed coaches and changed gear and changed swings. He called himself “certified nuts.” He has top-10’d at a major once, the 2024 PGA Championship, when his game appeared at its lowest.
Hovland arrived at this U.S. Open a fundamentally different player. He was two years older, with two years more scar tissue. He talked not with boring platitudes but with occasionally feisty rejoinders. He expounded the depth of his own struggle. He was, in a lot of ways, much less believably a major champion … and more much more believably himself.
Oakmont, the week’s tournament host, presented a chance for Hovland to resurrect his blueprint from Rochester. The course was a brutish test, much like Oak Hill two years ago. Success would be dictated not by having the best game but by having the steadiest hand.
But from the second play began Saturday, it was clear that Hovland’s game had decided on a different tact. He blasted his first tee shot OB, taking an unplayable and making a round-opening bogey. In largely dry and unusually still conditions, he hit just nine of 14 fairways on Saturday, right on par with his 60 percent average for the week, good for 27th in the field.
His highlight of the day came on the drivable par-4 17th, when he made a miraculous birdie save from deep in the rough after nearly blasting his tee shot into a grandstand. It was one of a handful of impossible saves in the midst of some decidedly topsy-turvy golf — hardly the kind of effort needed to win a career-first major at a course like Oakmont in a battle-tested field of 156.
And yet, when he walked off the 18th green at the 54-hole mark of the toughest major in recent memory, Hovland had better scores than all but 153.
So, how’d he do it? His answer was revealing.
“Sure, we would all like to win, that’s why we practice so hard,” he said. “But there’s also like a deep passion in me that I want to hit the shots. I want to stand up on the tee and hit the shots that I’m envisioning. When the ball’s not doing that, it bothers me.”
Hovland, it turns out, has lots of experience with the ball going sideways. It was how he learned the game. He has learned to tolerate it, which is how he has landed on the top of the leaderboard, but he has not learned to accept it.
“I feel like the way that I became good at golf was having something suboptimal that I had to play with,” Hovland said. “When I was a kid I played with like a big slice off the tee and I couldn’t hit anything but a big slice, but I learned to score with that. So I think that kind of sticks with you for the rest of your career. Then last few years obviously my swing’s been good, I’ve been hitting a lot better shots, it’s easier to score, and now when I’m not swinging it as good I still have the capability to get the ball in the hole.”
If this U.S. Open has proven successful for Hovland, it is to the end of getting the ball into the hole. He has done so furiously, and at times improbably, but that’s no accident.
“Feel like I’ve matured a lot more, just seen a lot more stuff happening,” Hovland said. “I know kind of what it takes to win a major championship, so I know the shots to try to hit and what shots not to try to hit. Feel like I’m way better equipped, just need to get that driver sorted, and I’ve got the game to do it. So it’s like I’m super proud that I’m that close, but it’s kind of frustrating that the driver is still just kind of holding me back a little bit.”
From our perch after his confounding last two years, it’s easy to forget that Hovland was frustrated at that PGA Championship in 2023, too. After his bland, confident press conference about playing boring golf, he returned to the range and bombed balls into the night, earning the praise of Rory McIlroy along the way for his effort.
As the sun set on Saturday evening at the U.S. Open in 2025, the range is where Hovland returned, searching for answers with the driver as the 9 p.m. hour neared.
This was the real Viktor Hovland. Same as the old guy, but so much different.
