Victor Hovland is ignoring his open US game plan … and winning

Oakmont, without. – Two years ago, Victor Hovland stratezed a Sunday in quarrel in the PGA Championship in the way they have key champions strategy in quarrels since the beginning of time.

“Yes, another boring answer,” he said, repeating the lines that would be said all week at OAK Hill. “I don’t think this is a course where you can go crazy a lot. You have to play awake, play for the green and give yourself a lot of views and hopefully heated it hot.”

Hovland spoke as a man on the verge of a career -changing victory; Comfortable but not quiet, hungry, but not desperate. For the best of the four rounds in Rochester in 2023, his game agreed: he played excellently, tactically and safely. He “wearing the green center”. He fired carefully at the pins. He avoided mistakes. And when the results were counted after 72 holes, a funny thing happened: he lost.

The two years that followed the loss of Hovland to Brooks Koepka in PGA 2023 have been confusing, not only because Hovland has sometimes seemed to lose his golf swing, but also because he seemed to lose his mind. At various points in the last 24 months, each of the ingredients that gathered in the PGA to make the hovland appear on the verge of being the other Golf winner has disappeared in the fog. He has changed coaches and changed gears and changed the oscillations. He called himself “Certified nuts.“He has Top-10’d in a big one time, the PGA 2024 championship when his game appeared at the lowest level.

Hovland reached this US Open a fundamentally different player. He was two years older, with two years more scar tissue. He did not speak with boring tiles, but with reunions occasionally Feisty. He explained the depth of his war. He was, in many ways, much less loyalty to a great champion … and more loyalty himself.

Oakmont, the host of the week’s tournament, presented a chance for hovland to revive his plan from Rochester. The course was a brutal test, just like OAK Hill two years ago. Success would be dictated not by having the best game, but having the most consistent hand.

But from the second show began on Saturday, it was clear that the hovland’s game had decided on another tact. He exploded his first target of OB, taking an unbearable and making a round noise. In mainly dry and unusual conditions, it only hit nine of the 14 Saturday roads, at the same time with its average 60 percent per week, good for the 27th in the field.

His day’s event came in par-4 17 17, when he made a wonderful bird of salvation from deep to fiercely after almost exploding his selling shot into a ancestor. It was one of the small part of the impossible savings in the midst of some golf set with a shocked ball-tight that the type of effort needed to win a first career in a course like Oakmont in a field tested by the battle of 156.

And yet, when he left the 18th Green in the sign 54-Grows the harshest in the last memory, Hovland had better results than everyone, but 153.

So how would he do it? His response was discovery.

“Of course, we would all want to win. That is why we practice so much,” he said. “But there is also a deep passion to me that I want to hit the shooting. I want to stand up and hit the shooting I am predicting. When the ball is not doing it, it bothers me.”

Hovland, it turns out, has a lot of experience with the ball that goes sideways. Was how he learned the game. He has learned to countenance That is the way he has landed at the top of the manager’s table, but he has not learned to accept it.

“I feel like the way I was done in Golf was to have something suboptimal I had to play with,” Hovland said. “When I was a kid with whom I played as a big slice from my finger and couldn’t hit anything, but a big slice but learned to score with it. So I think that kind of stick with you for the rest of your career. Then in recent years my swing has been good, I have been hitting much better, I am not to score. the ball in the hole. “

If this US Open has tried successful for hovland, it is by the end of the ball insertion into the hole. He has done it with anger, and sometimes impossible, but this is no coincidence.

“You feel like I have matured a lot more, I just saw much more things that happen,” Hovland said. “I know the type of what it takes to win a big championship, so I know the shooting to try to hit and what shots to avoid trying to hit. Feel like I’m better equipped, you just have to get that ranked driver, and I’ve got the game to do it.

From our noise after his confusion in the last two years, it is easy to forget that Hovland was frustrated in that PGA championship in 2023, too. After his press conference, safe for the press to play boring golf, he turned to the range and bombed balls at night, winning Rory Mcilroy’s praise on the way to his effort.

As the sun settles on Saturday evening at US Open in 2025, the range is where Hovland returned, looking for answers with the driver while at 9pm he approached.

That was Victor Hovland true. Just like the old boy, but very different.