Viktor Hovland’s Tour Championship win puts him in another class on the PGA Tour
ATLANTA — There’s an aura around a player when they get this hot, when you can’t remember when they ever weren’t and you can’t imagine when they ever won’t, when fellow pros walk by them on the range with an “oh, this guy!” kind of playful banter. You know eventually, the bogeys will come. They always do. You know they’ll eventually become normal again. They always will. But it’s what happens after those mistakes that reminds us who is really ready for this. Ready to be thought of a little differently.
Viktor Hovland was that hot as he approached the first tee Sunday at the Tour Championship. The kind of hot that shot a Sunday 61 last week to steal the BMW Championship from Scottie Scheffler in Chicago. The kind of hot that after a first-hole birdie had written a 3 on the scorecard for 33 of his last 71 holes. Hovland, the 25-year-old Norwegian, has gone atomic. And you found yourself asking, “Why can’t he be the best in the world?”
That’s always been the question with Hovland. He was racking up top-20s as a 21-year-old PGA Tour rookie. By 23 he had three wins and a Ryder Cup appearance. Then you wondered: But when will he step up in a major? So he put himself in an Open Championship final group at 24 and went top 20 in all four majors at 25. He just kept improving. He won the Memorial in a playoff in June, showing he could win in the clutch at one of the biggest events on the tour. The last step was when he’d put it all together. Then came the 61 in Chicago.
So with a six-shot Sunday lead at the Tour Championship and on his way to claiming the biggest title of his career, Hovland drove his par-3 tee shot into the bunker. He couldn’t get close enough from the sand and left himself a 15-foot par putt.
OK, here was the next test. Who is Viktor Hovland when he’s no longer the young rising star chasing the top? Who is he when the golf world is chasing him?
There are fundamental contradictions in all of us, how the best parts of ourselves are often so intertwined with the worst, how one feeds into the other in a constant cycle of self-improvement and self-destruction. What if that was the best way to describe Hovland’s golf game until this year?
Hovland is one of the best drivers of the golf ball on tour. He’s one of the best iron players on tour. And those two things have never really changed since he left Oklahoma State in the summer of 2019, almost to an eerie extent. In his four full professional seasons, he’s gained between 0.65 to 0.79 strokes in approach compared to the field. And in all four he’s gained between 0.68 and 0.88 strokes off the tee. That’s silly consistency.
But he’s had this one extremely well-documented flaw. His short game. And because Hovland is such an affable person — OK, he’s a sweetheart — and he’s always talked openly about it, it only gives it more life. “I suck at chipping,” he famously said in 2020. It cost him majors and a multitude of regular tour tournaments. A bad shot would go from a possible par to a double bogey.
Then Hovland teamed up with Edoardo Molinari. The former tour pro and Ryder Cup participant (and 2023 vice captain) is also known as a stats guru, working with other pros like Matt Fitzpatrick and Thomas Pieters. And Molinari, along with Hovland’s coach Joe Mayo, found a statistical outlier in Hovland’s game.
“I would have a double bogey here or a double bogey there and it would mess up the whole tournament for me,” Hovland said Wednesday. “There was something that was missing. There was something that’s not right. In poker terms, it’s like my frequencies were a little bit off. There’s a certain percentage of the time you’re supposed to bet, you’re supposed to check, raise, or you’re supposed to bluff.”
What a putt!
Viktor Hovland comes up clutch to save par @TOURChamp 💪
He leads by 3 with 4 to play. pic.twitter.com/LGGFxLRAUb
— PGA TOUR (@PGATOUR) August 27, 2023
For Hovland, the outlier was that he was short-siding himself far more than the average player, which is to miss the green pin side. Short siding means the player has less green to work with on the chip and often worse angles. Barring a perfect shot, you’re probably rolling a good bit past the hole and leaving yourself a lengthy par putt at best. And Hovland was doing this “way more” than the normal percentage.
“So that was very revealing,” he said.
Suddenly it all made sense. It wasn’t just that Hovland was a subpar chipper. It was that the ways he missed exacerbated that weakness even more. He didn’t miss often, but if he missed a little bit right on a front right pin it asked the worst part of his game to do more work.
Hovland’s greatest strength was that he was this freewheeling, happy-go-lucky ball-striking whiz who wears ridiculous shirts and smiles all the time. He’s fun. Maybe his most lovable moment came during the 2021 PGA Championship at Kiawah in which the broadcast caught Hovland standing along the edge of a bunker debating his next shot with caddie Shay Knight. “How much to cover the crap?” he asked. And then he pulled out an aggressive club and decided to go for it.
“This might work,” he said.
This was in a major! That’s who we’re dealing with. And that’s who wants to aim for pins, because he can. And that same unteachable ability to go pin hunting and normally succeed is what fed into his chipping numbers costing him tournaments for four years.
Working with Molinari, Mayo and Knight, Hovland improved his course management. Plus, he’s improved the chipping itself. Last season, Hovland ranked No. 191 in strokes gained around the green. Entering this May’s PGA Championship, he was No. 170. Since then, he ranks No. 20 in the world. And it coincided with maybe the best run of his career. He finished T2 at Oak Hill, going toe-to-toe with Brooks Koepka. Two weeks later he won the Memorial, an elevated event with an elite field. He’s finished top 30 or better in 10 straight events, including three majors, and then won the BMW Championship against the rest of the top 50 golfers in the world.
But it would be a mistake to think Hovland is just some wild card who finally put on the reins. Knight called him a “bulldog” and a perfectionist, recalling late nights at the Scottish Open and Open Championship, on the range until 10:30 p.m. “He wants to get it right,” he said. He came up learning golf in Norway with a short golf season and limited daylight, making his parents wait in the car because he didn’t want to waste any of that sun. He’s always been somebody who uses math in golf. They just had to find this conclusion. “If the math tells him this is what he needs to do, this is what he’s gonna do,” Knight said.
“It’s not like I try new things willy-nilly,” Hovland said. “Usually there’s at least a somewhat reasonable hypothesis before you try something new. And I give it a couple chances. ‘OK, it didn’t work out. We’ll scrap that.’ But if you see an improvement it’s like, ‘OK, hang on, we’re on to something. Let’s go down this rabbit hole and see where it leads.’”
And while the Tour Championship carries an odd, staggered strokes format that meant Hovland entered the week second at 8 under par, he also came in knowing that winning in Atlanta would raise him to another tier among golf’s elite.
He’ll be 26 in three weeks. He’s not the same kid that first came on tour. That’s so much of growing up. Learning how to add discipline without losing what makes you you.
“I think just amassing really good experiences over the last year,” he said, “being in contention, failing in contention, being in contention and succeeding in contention. I think that’s been really cool to just try to learn from any experience.”
Hovland goes through life under less stress than normal people, or at least that’s the sense he gives out. They literally call him Happy Hovland. The other golfers he’s playing with — Scheffler, Collin Morikawa, Xander Schauffele — look like they’re playing in a four-day, 72-hole event for $18 million. Hovland? Not so much. He’s loudly laughing as he walks down the seventh fairway chatting with the security guard. He’s wrapping his arm around Scheffler on Friday while telling one story or spreading his arms out wide while telling a story to Schauffele on Sunday as if to motion, “The fish was this big.”
Maybe that’s part of why, facing that putt on the second green, in the kind of moment where six-shot Sunday leads normally dwindle, he could drain it from 15 feet.
Then, he put his approach shot on No. 4 to 4 feet. Birdie. On 5, he put it to 8 feet. Birdie. On 6, he put a bunker shot within 5 feet. Another birdie. There would be no window. There would be no stress. Hovland would remain the hottest golfer at this moment in time, shooting a 63 to hold off Schauffele’s exciting final round of 62 and take the title of PGA Tour season champion by five strokes.
If Hovland so chooses, this can be the most important and impactful season of his career. Let’s get nerdy. Think of Joseph Campbell. “The Hero’s Journey.” You don’t take down the dragon or defeat the emperor right away. You go through struggles. You pass tests. And then the hero must overcome an internal conflict to prepare for the big showdown.
Hovland’s 25-year-old season was the year he addressed his greatest flaw. He became the most consistent, reliable version of himself. He performed better in majors. He came up clutch to win big, tight tournaments. And then, when nobody was expecting him, he took over the sport with two weeks of dominance to take the Tour Championship.
After Saturday’s round to finish with a six-shot lead, Hovland was tired. He was the story of the week and got dragged to a half-dozen spots to do interviews. On his final appearance, the sweat dripping off him in the late-August Atlanta heat and humidity, Hovland was asked about his game at this moment, and he gave an answer that put it best. Because it’s not about Hovland’s best. It’s about his medium.
“I don’t think I’ve ever played this well before, with this stretch, just putting all the short game and stuff together,” he said. “I’ve certainly hit the ball this good before. I feel like I’ve hit the ball better than I have this week and even last week. But it’s just about putting it all together, and it seemed like the good weeks that I’ve had before I’ve always managed to short-side myself or chip a couple times and end up out of contention. But the last few weeks have been — even this year — I feel like I’ve just become a little bit more complete, and I don’t have to hit it my best to be in contention. I don’t have to hit every shot pure. I can miss it slightly and get up and down and move on.”
Every golfer on tour has a 61 in them on the right day. Each and every one. And some of the best have the ability to hit those 61s more often. But the best golfers are the ones who can hit that 61 but then follow it up with a 68 even when they don’t have their best stuff. The ones who hit a bad shot and completely forget it.
“If you want to get to the next level, you have to look introspectively,” Hovland said, “and you realize that, OK, when I’m in these moments and things are not going my way, I’m maybe reacting a little bit too much to it. Obviously if I hit it in the water, that’s a bad scenario. But you can — you have a choice whether you want to react to that shot and make it affect the next shot or the next few holes, or you can use that motivation or energy into something better and you can try to say, OK, let’s get past this, let’s see if we can get this round back together or just basically get the round — prevent it from going off the rails.”
We live in an era that’s become accustomed to prodigies. Jordan Spieth had three majors by 24 and Rory McIlroy had four by 26. One of Hovland’s peers, Collin Morikawa, had two by 24. In turn, we’ve come to expect this. But it doesn’t always work that way. Scheffler hit his breakout 2022 season at 25, and now he’s on top of the world at 27. Jon Rahm was on tour for a few years before he broke through at 25 and won his first major at 26. This is exactly where Hovland is, but he goes into 26 with six PGA Tour wins, a Tour Championship and plenty of lessons learned.
But to prove Happy Hovland is no robot, or to confirm that he truly cares, watch him on the 14th hole. His old flaw presented itself, and he butchered a safe chip to leave a 23-foot par putt with Schauffele just three behind. This was about to get tense. But Hovland hit a rounding slow putt that went right into the center of the cup. And there it was. Hovland lunged forward and swung his arms into a heavy fist pump, yelling “Yes!”
Because Hovland does want this. He does put the work in. He took his flaws and his strengths, studied them and made sure he came out one of the best golfers in the world.
“The belief was the final part,” he said.
Viktor Hovland: Superstar golfer. This might just work.
(Top photo: Kevin C. Cox / Getty Images)
Brody Miller covers golf and the LSU Tigers for The Athletic. He came to The Athletic from the New Orleans Times-Picayune. A South Jersey native, Miller graduated from Indiana University before going on to stops at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Indianapolis Star, the Clarion Ledger and NOLA.com. Follow Brody on Twitter @BrodyAMiller
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