Golf fans may have been pleasantly surprised to see Viktor Hovland near the top of a PGA Tour leaderboard on Friday given his recent struggles. Turns out, Viktor Hovland felt the same.
The 2023 FedEx Cup champ hasn’t won since the Tour Championship that year, a winless drought that has now stretched to 19 frustrating months. In the meantime, Hovland has tried just about everything to get back to that form, from switching coaches to putters to even golf shoes.
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Nothing seemed to be working, especially last week when Hovland shot an opening 80 at the Players Championship. The 27-year-old bounced back with a second-round 68 at TPC Sawgrass, but didn’t enter this week at Innisbrook with much confidence, and he addressed the current “humbling” status of his game after Friday’s round in an extremely candid interview.
“Yeah, it sucks. You have an ability that you can almost sometimes take for granted,” Hovland told reporters. “You just wake up every day and you stand over the ball, and you just expect the ball to start in that direction and go that direction and end up somewhere close to the hole. Then it starts to not do that, it’s pretty frustrating.”
There was much less of that frustration on Friday as Hovland shot a 67 to move into contention heading into the weekend. Still, he knows he has a lot of work to do with swing coach Grant Waite, with whom he recently reunited.
“I still feel like I am kind of getting max out of my game right now. So not to put myself down, but for it to be sustainable at that level I need to strike it a bit better and it needs to be a bit more predictable,” said Hovland, whose five-under total through 36 holes had him tied for the lead after Friday’s morning wave with Ryo Hisatsune. “So I’m still working through some changes and, yeah, I just need to keep working on it. But it’s nice to see that the things that you’re working on is leading to better results immediately, and it’s always a good sign.”
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In fact, the six-time PGA Tour winner seemed almost stunned by those better results. Here was Hovland’s response when asked if he felt like he was “going to turn it around this week?”
“No, no, not really. I hit a lot of bad shots in the pro-am and like even, yeah, just in the practice rounds and stuff, they just didn’t feel great,” Hovland said. “Even yesterday I was very proud of how I was able to shoot one under par, because I hit a lot of bad shots and it felt like I was leaking oil. But it was nice to putt well, and did hit a couple of nice iron shots in the wind. But, yeah, I think today was a way bigger step than it was yesterday, so we just got to keep building on it.”
Hovland gained nearly four strokes on the field with his putter alone on Friday, so on one hand, you understand why he would wonder if he can keep that up. But on the other, that could spell trouble for the rest of the field if he does and his old ball-striking comes back.
“Yeah, at the end of the day like, yes, it’s awesome being a the top of the leaderboard right now, and have a chance going into the weekend,” Hovland said. “But it’s like I truly just care about the things that I’m working on. And if the ball is behaving and doing the things that I want it to do, I’m going to play a lot of great golf in the future. And if it’s not doing that, it’s harder to repeat what I already did the first couple of days. You just want something that’s sustainable. And if your technique’s good you’re going to play a lot of good golf in the future. That’s just how it works.”
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This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
