Count Viktor Hovland among the PGA Tour players pleased to be welcoming back Brooks Koepka and eventually Patrick Reed.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust for my personal standpoint, I would say I enjoy playing against those guys,\u201d said Hovland, who is currently ranked 13th in the world rankings as he makes his season debut at this week\u2019s WM Phoenix Open.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re great players, and I want to compete against the greatest players out there. I think it just makes the products, the fields better.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Hovland wasn\u2019t done, as he switched hats for a moment.<\/p>\n
\u201cHowever, it does kind of put the Tour in a tricky position now,\u201d Hovland continued. \u201cYou\u2019ve said one thing for a long time, and now we\u2019re changing things. What precedent are you setting then to the future players now if I can go to a rival tour, get paid, and now seemingly come back again without the biggest consequences? I don\u2019t really have an opinion on that to be honest. That\u2019s something the Tour has to figure out. I\u2019m sure there are a lot of people not going to be super happy about that, but at the end of the day, I just want to compete against the best players in the world.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m in a place where I have to figure stuff out in my own game, and that\u2019s basically where I\u2019m focusing on. I don\u2019t really want to focus on what the Tour should be doing right now.\u201d<\/p>\n
Koepka and Reed, who both signed lucrative contracts with LIV in 2022, were provided different pathways back to the PGA Tour, Koepka through the one-time Returning Member Program, which was clearly created just for the four eligible players (Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Jon Rahm and Cameron Smith), and Reed after a one-year suspension that is set to end in mid-August. While Koepka still had full status via his 2023 PGA win, Reed will return as a past champion only. Both are not eligible for player equity grants through 2030, while Koepka also had to make a $5 million charitable donation.<\/p>\n
Considering Hovland has long been high on LIV\u2019s wish list but rejected those advances, he also was asked if the recent developments with Koepka and Reed have made him reconsider any past decisions regarding LIV.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot really,\u201d Hovland answered. \u201cI just see the news and I go, oh, that\u2019s interesting, and then I just go about my day. I got stuff to do, things to figure out, so that\u2019s about the amount of calories I\u2019m spending on reacting to things like that.\u201d<\/p>\n
As for Hovland this week at TPC Scottsdale, he\u2019s been spotted in practice carrying two drivers in his bag, both the new Ping G440 K. Hovland said he switched from the G425 LST into the G440 LST last April because it had better spin consistency and was faster. However, the G440 also launches higher, especially problematic with Hovland\u2019s miss already being high and right. When he put the G440 K in the bag at the start of the year, same thing, as he tied for 14th two weeks ago at the DP World Tour\u2019s Hero Dubai Desert Classic.<\/p>\n
So, after struggling on Monday with the new driver, he asked his Ping rep to bring him a G440 K head with a different shaft that was a quarter of an inch shorter.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust trying to find something I can put in play, and that seemed to be a lot better,\u201d Hovland said. \u201cThat was just last night, so the experimentation continues.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Count Viktor Hovland among the PGA Tour players pleased to be welcoming back Brooks Koepka and eventually Patrick…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":447490,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[71],"tags":[427,99],"class_list":["post-447489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-golf","tag-golf","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=447489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/447489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/447490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=447489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=447489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=447489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}