A year ago, Viktor Hovland withdrew from the US Open at Oakmont after a third-place finish with a pawn. The Norwegian star had been grinding hard, as he does, to find it that. His drive had felt wrong and he hadn’t been able to fix it, despite a win at Valspar earlier in the season.
Hovland’s Oath? Go easy on yourself. Play golf and trust that everything will fall into place.
“I’ve destroyed myself a little too much,” Hovland said that evening in western Pennsylvania. “Even though I know I have to work on some things and get back to where I was mechanically, in the meantime, I can perform at a really high level, and there are a lot of good things. I just have to take it with me and be kinder to myself.”
Hovland’s quest continued throughout the remainder of the season, where he had just one top-10 finish in his final six starts of the season. There was a Band-Aid fix that helped him finish T7 in the BMW Championship and an epiphany swing he thought he found in the Ryder Cup before being scratched by the Sunday singles due to a neck injury. Hovland has spent 2026 still trying to capture and recreate a swing he’s comfortable with. He split with coach Grant Waite and reunited with TJ Yeaton before this year’s Arnold Palmer Invitational. The changes, corrections, nudges and nudges continued.
“It’s a complicated puzzle, and sometimes it’s just a matter of a different perspective, just looking at it from a few different ways or just saying things a little bit differently,” Hovland said of his process before the API.
The results have not come. The 2023 FedEx Cup champion entered this week’s Travelers Championship with just two top 10s of the season. or Third place finish at the Canadian Open he had felt like he was cutting in the right direction, but then the pendulum swung the other way and he missed the cut at the US Open. But despite that MC at Shinnecock, Viktor Hovland left Long Island feeling good about his swing progress. The result wasn’t there, but he remained encouraged where he was on his endless quest.
“I’ve definitely been working a lot on my swing to try to get back technically to where I can, you know, not think about the swing as much and just go through the ball and wait to see a certain shot shape. I feel like I’ve gotten really close to that in the last few weeks as well,” Hovland said Friday at the Travelers Championship. “I thought in Canada it was very promising, and even the US Open I drove it much better. I just had an OB ball at the worst possible time. I hit a bad shot into the wind from left to right, and it went right.
“I just saw that the good shots are really good. It’s just that the bad ones have punished me a lot. I feel like my feel was in my swing and what I’ve been working on is starting to tighten up the delivery a little bit.”
Viktor Hovland has been fighting to be Viktor Hovland again, apparently since winning the 2023 FedEx Cup.
On Friday at TPC River Highlands, Viktor Hovland won another round in his duel with himself and his golf swing, shooting a second-round 61 to put himself in Saturday’s final group alongside world No. 1 Scottie Scheffler, who shot 60 on Friday.
“It was great stuff today. Obviously, I was struggling with some things,” Hovland said Friday. “You know, my golf swing hadn’t felt as comfortable. But, you know, I felt like things settled down a lot more today, and I was able to put the ball in the fairway, hit some great iron shots, and the player finally cooperated a little bit more today.”
The next step for Hovland was to back it up with another good round while battling the best player on the planet. Would his swing, which is still technically being rebuilt, hold up under the kind of pressure he hasn’t faced much this season?
The answer on Saturday was a resounding yes. Hovland hit 11 of 14 tee shots, 14 of 18 greens and was within one shot of the greens on Saturday. Even when Scheffler went on a run with birdies on the back nine, Hovland didn’t back down, didn’t pressure. He simply answered good putt with good putt, and then on 18, when Scheffler made a sloppy putt, Hovland rolled in a six-footer for birdie to go from one shot down to one shot ahead heading into Sunday.
“It was really fun. I just had a good time,” Hovland said Saturday after shooting a six-under 64 to head into Sunday at 20 under. “You know, it’s been a while since I’ve been in this position. You know, going head-to-head against the best player in the world and hitting some great shots, it was just a lot of fun.”
Viktor Hovland has been in a long battle with himself. On Sunday in Cromwell, Connecticut, Hovland will have to battle both his rebuilt pace and the No. 1 in the world to walk away victorious. This is the natural end point for such research. If you want to test your work, your process, your faith, it must be put up against the golf club.
But as Viktor Hovland told us a year ago at Oakmont, the trophy isn’t what he mostly hunts, it’s just a byproduct of what he’s after.
“We all want to win, that’s why we practice so much,” Hovland said at Oakmont. “But there’s also a deep passion in me to want to hit shots. To stand up and hit the shots I’m envisioning. When the ball doesn’t, it bothers me.”
On Saturday, as he walked off the course after being mobbed by a Norwegian World Cup crowd, Viktor Hovland echoed what he hopes Sunday will bring – not a title, but further proof that he has found what only he can discover.
“The result is good to get a good result, but I’m very process driven,” Hovland said. “Once I get a certain feel that I can trust and it produces a pretty reliable shot shape, I know I’m going to be able to shoot pretty well from there. So if I happen to shoot two-under or six-under or nine-under, it’s like that’s not the most important thing, in a way. It’s like as soon as I see what the nice shots give me, give me the shots and try for it. trust.”
Viktor Hovland is a wanderer by nature. He’s a lifelong tinkerer who will continue to shape his swing until he finds the feel he wants. Then, he will go in search of something else.
All of this — different swing thoughts, coaching changes, an improbable Valspar win, a big close loss, a trip to the desert and back — has brought Viktor Hovland Sunday into a duel with the best player in the world. One where regardless of the outcome, he can walk away with what he asked for.
Viktor Hovland’s faith has finally found Viktor Hovland again.
