AUGUSTA, Ga. — Eight months ago, Viktor Hovland was the hottest golfer on the planet, the Norwegian supernova who shot two 63s on Sunday to win the Tour Championship, and who backed it up by dominating matches at the Ryder Cup in record fashion. He was expected to take another step forward in his age-26 season, surely winning a major tournament and officially positioning himself as Scottie Scheffler’s long-term rival.
Now he enters Masters week unsure if he’s even a contender. What happened?
Viktor Hovland has arrived.
The only person in golf who thought Hovland needed to change something was Hovland. By the time he won three iconic PGA Tour events in three months and ran away with the Ryder Cup in September, he was unanimously the best player in the world without a major. At that point, many claimed he was the better player, period. Keep everything the same and you’ll start collecting major championships.
But that’s not how Hovland sees things. Winning is not his only set of values. Beautiful golf is. So after reaching his peak as a professional golfer, Hovland took some time off, came back and things were never the same. So he decided to tinker. Instead of sticking with short game/swing coach Joe Mayo, whose presence was credited with being a big part of Hovland’s late summer run, he began working with Grant Waite . And this week in Augusta, he’s working with Dana Dahlquist. This is his fourth coach in less than a year.
“This is going to sound a little stupid, but I actually prefer a better golf swing in 2021,” Hovland said last month. “At the start of 2021, I feel like my ball striking was the best. I think – don’t get me wrong, I did really well last year – but it wasn’t as good as I would have liked.
Hovland went to the lab to fix something that wasn’t broken, and in turn, he’s having his worst start to a season since his professional career began. To be clear, he’s still the No. 5 player in the world on DataGolf, but he’s also finished in the top 20 in five starts. When he finished T58 at Pebble Beach, he changed his plans and skipped Phoenix to continue trying to fix it. He hasn’t played tournament golf since a T62 appearance at the Players Championship, to work on his swing. And now he’s at the Masters and feels more lost than ever.
But why? “I guess the crazy thing about my brain is I just like to hit a golf shot,” he said before the Arnold Palmer Invitational. “Obviously we’re here to compete and win tournaments, but I really enjoy being able to hit shots exactly the way I want. I think it’s a better indicator of how you’re going to play in the future.
While he was winning big tournaments and teaming with Ludvig Åberg to beat Scheffler and Brooks Koepka 9&7 Rome, Hovland believed he was maximizing an imperfect swing.
He spent seven to eight hours a day on the range at the Scottish Open and Open Championship in July trying to figure it out, so it surprised him as much as anyone when he turned on his two-month-old heater . “Yeah, I was playing really well, but I took a lot out of my game and it didn’t necessarily feel sustainable,” Hovland said Tuesday.
“I just felt like I reached the pinnacle of what my golf swing was capable of last year, and just as I look back on my swings from 2020, 2021, I really had more of control over the golf ball, in my opinion.”
This is as good a time as any to explain exactly who Hovland is deep down. He’s a nerd. An analyst. The kind of kid who grew up in Norway and searches for golf videos on YouTube and golf content on Google to learn as much as possible. He would find people he liked and then start going down the rabbit hole. Back when he was a teenager, he read articles by Kelvin Miyahira on the biomechanics of the swing. This process-obsessed kid still lives within the 26-year-old star.
“Sometimes when you ask a question and get answers, it takes you down a different path and opens up new questions and you go down a different path. I just want to see where it goes,” he said a month ago this week about working with Waite. Hovland reported to Georgia on Monday and is now working with Dahlquist. “I’m still seeking opinions, but I feel like I’m on the right track right now and we’ll see where that takes us.”
When Hovland finds himself struggling, he always stands in front of a mirror and does swing reps in slow motion, feeling the changes and grooves of each movement until he is comfortable speeding it up. He doesn’t have your traditional player-coach relationships, consulting different experts to help him grow. And on Monday, three days before the first major of the year, he was there on the Augusta practice field for hours and hours, stopping his swing in slow motion midway with Dahlquist discussing positions and elbow angles as if working with a golfer. start again from the beggining.
“If I look for my swing tomorrow afternoon, there’s a good chance I won’t find it,” Scheffler said of his own process.
This was supposed to be Hovland’s year. And that may still be the case. But did he hold back while trying to leap forward?
Yes, Hovland believes hitting the ball is the best indicator of future success, and he’s right, but as he admitted: “At the end of the day, we’re golfers, we’re not ball strikers.” » Because the same things that make Hovland a golf savant – technical excellence, obsession with details and a desire to keep learning – can be the things that bring a player down. Hovland came to the top with curiosity, and now he may be too involved.
Hovland’s defense in all of this is that he is in the middle of a process to create a more sustainable game of golf. It may not be ready by April, but the hope is that it will keep it going for much longer than a two-month heat-up.
He will still spend hours and hours at the booth trying to find the answers, joking that he often keeps going until he gets too tired or finds those answers. The goal in all of this is to reach the point where there are no more swing thoughts, no more worries in the back of your mind, just “blackout” and good golf.
In reality, he won’t find those answers by Thursday. The question is whether he can compete for a green jacket anyway.
“Now I played some really, really good golf again and I had to think about some things,” Hovland said. “So it’s not like I’m excluding myself from a tournament.”
(Top photo: Warren Little / Getty Images)