After winning the BMW Championship and then following up by taking the Tour Championship and with it, the FedEx Cup and the $18 million bonus for first place, Viktor Hovland was the hottest player on the planet when the Ryder Cup rolled around, and he did little to dispel that notion, taking Ludvig Aberg under his wing and putting 3.5 points on the board for team Europe.
He hasn’t quite been able to bring that form into 2024, however, but the 26-year-old is returning to one of his favourite courses and one that puts a premium on accuracy tee-to-green, something that plays very much into the world number four’s favour.
“Yeah, I like this golf course a lot,” he explains. “I’m a big fan of Pete Dye golf courses in general. I think this course does a really good job of separating the players that are on their game that week, and if you’re a little bit off you get penalized. There’s a lot of really tough visually tee shots and small greens, and there’s good opportunities to shoot low scores, but at the same time there’s a lot of water and other things going on, so I love the golf course and played good here the last two years, so hopefully try to build on that.
“I just think he builds fair golf courses, but off the tee it might not necessarily look that there’s a whole lot of room, but when you get up there, there’s plenty of room. It’s just visually intimidating, and I like how he uses angles really well, particularly on par-3 holes.
“For example I play Oak Tree National a lot when I’m in Oklahoma, and there’s a lot of greens that are tilted on the sides where you usually have water on left side, and if you bail out right, now you have a really tough chip from a collection area where the green kind of runs away from you, things like that. It might only be 170 or 180 or 190 yards, and it’s enough room on the green to work with, but it just tests every single shot that you have.
“I think he’s just a genius, and I really like a lot of his golf courses.”
Widely tipped as the potential heir to the throne of the men’s professional game, it hasn’t quite materialised yet, and given Scottie Scheffler’s return to form with his putter at last week’s Arnold Palmer Invitational, that gap has grown once again.
“I feel like I’ve gotten a little bit off track and I just need to start working in the right way again,” he said when asked to dissect why he hasn’t quite been firing on all cylinders this year. “I think things are going to fall into place a little bit more, but it’s not, I wish it was as simple as just kind of an overnight, one feel and then we’re back on it. This is kind of a little bit of a project, but gives me something to work on and I believe that when this starts to get easier and easier to do, it’s going to be right back to where we were.”
Hovland can sympathise with Scheffler, whose weakness had been subject of such high-level scrutiny that it was clearly getting under Scheffler’s skin, having had his own chipping issues in the past. But the affable Norwegian didn’t allow any of that to bother him.
“I really don’t care,” he shrugged. “I just, like I know what my game is like. I know that, yeah, that was a bad week in chipping or, yeah, I know I struggle with chipping, like I don’t have to keep that a secret because it’s all out there, everyone can see. I’m not trying to prove to everyone else that, oh, yeah, I am a good chipper now. It’s, like, I’m going to show ’em all. It’s like, no, I just want to improve for myself and I go about my business.
“I’m pretty open about it, I’m not trying to hide it, because it’s all out there for everyone to see. I keep working on it. I know I can fix these things, because I have shown it. In the last year I was chipping it great and was making some huge strides. Yeah, you guys can keep asking about it, but I keep working on it and trying to fix it.”
Hovland doesn’t really concern himself with the politics of golf, admitting that he knows little about the ‘behind the scenes’ dealings with the PGA Tour or what direction the game should go, concedes that, as a player, he has relatively no idea what the fans want to see and isn’t sure what the ideal field size for a big-ticket PGA Tour event should be.
He does, however, think that Jay Monahan has been a little slow in putting his hand up and admitting that errors were made, which they clearly have.
“There were some things that were said that has been walked back on and then things have been very contradictory,” Hovland said. “As a leader of an organization, I will want a person like that to take some ownership and say, hey, we made a couple of mistakes, but this is how we’re going to rectify it, instead of kind of sweeping it under the rug, which I felt like has been done to a certain degree.
“So I don’t mind people making mistakes. We all make mistakes. But I think when you make a mistake you got to own up to it and say, hey, we’re trying to do better here, and this is how we’re going to do it.”
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