Viktor Hovland opens up with TG about his constant swing changes, the leadership at the PGA Tour and why he could end his wait for a major victory in 2026…
There was a flicker of light relief inside the snug interview room at Bethpage last September, briefly interrupting a Ryder Cup pre-amble fixated on player greed and misbehaving fans.
Unsurprisingly, it came from Viktor Hovland.
The Norwegian veered off script when asked how he planned to cope with the taunts and insults that would be hurled at him by the venomous crowd on Long Island. “There’s going to be some comments here and there,” he laughed. “But they won’t really come close to the thoughts that I have in my own head. Just smile it off and make a few birdies. That usually seems to do the trick.”
Hovland, of course, was proven right.
He’s a famously deep thinker who spends his days manically searching for information that will further either his golf game or his curious mind. He’s a hoarder of swing thoughts and likes to read classics about philosophy “because even though it’s old knowledge it’s very relevant today”. He’ll then zone out by getting lost in Scandinavian death metal. Hovland was far too pre-occupied to concern himself with any bile aimed his way by a bunch of beer-fueled New Yorkers.
“Most of the comments were either about aliens or smoking weed so it wasn’t that big a deal,” he recalls in an interview with TG. “I didn’t really take offence to anything and if you let people get to you it’s just going to get worse so I think the best strategy was to try to be as stoic as possible.”
Indeed. It’s also that Hovland might be the least antagonistic figure in professional golf. His deranged approach to his craft has often felt frantic and exhausting, yet he still somehow manages to look like he’s loving every minute of it. His authenticity and humor has warmed him to even the most intolerant of fans.
“All the perks that come with playing good golf are nice,” he says. “There’s no denying that. But that’s not what gets me up in the morning. I like solving problems and try to get better and see what I can accomplish in this game.”
In truth, Hovland has far exceeded expectation already. Never destined to be a superstar, he was only plucked by the revered golf college program at Oklahoma State University when head coach Alan Bratton spotted him at the 2013 European Boys’ Team Championship on a scouting mission for his Norwegian teammate Kristoffer Ventura.
“I never thought I was the most gifted athlete but I was my talent in a way,” Hovland explains. “I was very good at problem solving or making myself better so if I wasn’t hitting the ball very far, or if I was slicing it, or my short game wasn’t very good, or I couldn’t read greens, there’s always a solution.
“I never thought, ‘Oh well, I’m just not good enough.’ I always believed that if I find the solution I can make myself good enough to figure this out and through doing that you have to be super honest.”
Ironically, it is this level of inquisitiveness that cannot be taught. Hovland spent countless hours of his childhood inside a converted aircraft hangar, escaping Oslo’s unforgiving winters by pounding balls into a makeshift net while his parents waited for him in the car park. More recently on PGA Tour driving ranges, Hovland has gone viral for his new training aid: swimming armbands wrapped around his biceps. His pursuit of perfection has always been as endearing as it is perplexing.
“You can’t have much ego or arrogance,” Hovland says. “You have to look at the information objectively and if things aren’t good enough you have to change that. If you’re not inquisitive and if you’re not trying to learn then it’s not making you any better and you limit yourself.”
This perspective has helped propel Hovland to the highest echelons of the game but has also left him open to scrutiny. Most notable was the head-scratching split with Joseph Mayo, the man who transformed his short game, at the end of the 2023 season. Under Mayo’s tutelage Hovland had just become the FedEx Cup champion, returned 3.5 points for the European Ryder Cup team and, for a brief period at least, was arguably the best golfer in the world.
Then he decided to go in a different direction.
“Some of that has been misconstrued a little bit,” Hovland says. “It’s not like I had the best year of my life and now I’m just going to explode everything and start from scratch. You always have tendencies you want to revert back to and there’s always things that you’re fighting.
“When you get to that level what you want to do is try to fight entropy, but certain things were creeping away from my pattern. I was starting to just draw it more and more and it was difficult for me to stay over stand over the ball and feel the fade that I’d hit all my career.
Like this article? See more TG content in your feed! Click here to add Today’s Golfer as a preferred source on Google.
“Towards the end of ’23 I played the game very well but I didn’t feel super confident in what I was doing. I might be a little bit different compared to some of the other guys out here but I really value just standing over the ball and it doesn’t necessarily have to go to two feet, but it gives me more confidence if I hit a flush shot that matches what I was trying to do. Let’s say it goes to 15 or 20 feet, that feels like that’s something that’s repeatable and I didn’t just get lucky.
“Maybe my ceiling for that is a little bit higher than it should be but that’s also what drives me. That’s why I wake up in the morning and try to get better at this game.”
Even since this conversation, Hovland has mixed things up again. Grant Waite, whom Hovland re-hired after the worst season of his career in 2024, is the latest coach he has jettisoned. The former PGA Tour pro helped dig Hovland out of a crisis early last year when he conjured an unlikely win at the Valspar Championship just days after shooting a first-round 80 at The Players.
He had gone eight months without making a 36-hole cut in a full field tournament and only decided to play in the Valspar after a productive range session at the Innisbrook resort on the Monday of tournament week. Another quirk of Hovland, even in this era of inordinate prize purses, is that if he’s not comfortable with his game, he’ll simply choose not to compete. He’ll spend seven hours digging dirt into the practice facility instead. But on this occasion, he enjoyed the best putting week of his career as he edged out Justin Thomas for his seventh PGA Tour win.
Now though, with major season on the horizon, Waite has been replaced by Hovland’s former instructor TJ Yeaton, and he’s been encouraged by the progress he has made as he seeks more control off the tee.
“I’ve almost been addicted to changing a little too much because I’m always looking for the next thing that’s going to be a little bit better and in that process you might make some mistakes as well,” Hovland admits. “But without that mindset I don’t think I would have been here today.”
It is hardly surprising that Hovland does not have much brain space left to ponder golf’s constantly shifting landscape. He has largely stayed out of the so-called civil war that has coincided with his rise, rejecting a move to LIV Golf after the 2023 Ryder Cup as he did not feel the league was fertile ground to improve his game.
“I respect other people trying to change it up and come up with new ideas and but it’s hard to go against that much history on the PGA Tour and European Tour,” he says. “Especially when you’ve got the best players over here. Whatever pushes me to become the best player that I want to be then then that’s the answer for me.”
While admitting he “doesn’t pay too close attention” to tour politics, Hovland says he was impressed with the speed with which new PGA Tour chief executive Brian Rolapp resolved Brooks Koepka’s complex return from LIV Golf. He had been publicly critical of Rolapp’s predecessor, Jay Monahan, for failing to take ownership of his mistakes during LIV’s insurgence.
“At least it does seem like there’s leadership now and there’s decisions that are being made a bit quicker instead of dragging things out,” he says of Rolapp. “It seems like he at least has a vision for the PGA Tour. I don’t know how long it was but Jay didn’t really address the media there for many, many months and I think that’s probably not the best look for a commissioner.
“But I don’t know all the ins and outs of what’s going on so it’s hard for me to comment as to what’s supposed to be done. I’ve had enough to deal with in those couple years with whatever’s going on in the PGA Tour meetings. I’d rather try to focus on trying to play good golf.”
With Hovland, it is sometimes difficult to know what “good golf” constitutes. It certainly can’t be defined by something as arbitrary as his results.
“I base it a lot more just on my game,” he says. “I can be in contention quite a bit and not win that many times but I would still classify that as a good year, because my level of play was very consistent and I was in contention a lot. Sometimes it’s a bit random whether you close out a tournament or not. If I’m only in contention three times and maybe get two wins, two wins is a good year yes, but I’d rather be in contention ten times and if you win twice that might seem like a disappointment but at least you’re playing damn good golf.”
Along with Tommy Fleetwood, Hovland is still arguably the best – and equally the most popular – current golfer yet to win a major championship. He’s getting closer, though. There has been a top-three finish in one of the majors in each of the last three years. Even at the height of his driver woes last summer, Hovland only just came up short of winning the US Open at deluged Oakmont.
“I didn’t feel comfortable over a single tee shot so to have a chance to win a US Open doing that is really cool,” he says. “That golf course was one of the hardest courses I’ve ever played. This year, if I get to a point where know what the ball’s gonna do then I can expect to be in a situation like that. Coming down the last few holes it’s a lot easier to execute if you’re not fighting your golf swing.”
It must give Hovland huge belief, however, that he can contend on the most fiendish of layouts armed only with his C-game. “Yes,” he laughs, “but it’s still very stressful.”
There’s a part of Hovland that wouldn’t want it any other way.
_
Viktor Hovland was speaking with TG at the Hero Dubai Desert Classic, the prestigious DP World Tour event he won in 2022.