After year-low round, Viktor Hovland is finding himself again

You don’t need to hear from Viktor Hovland to know it’s been a hard 2024.

A year ago, Hovland entered the PGA Tour postseason on the brink of a career-defining month. He’d battled into Sunday in contention at three of the four major championships, climbed into the top five of the Official World Golf Ranking, and now, with three playoff events on the horizon, Hovland was ready for the next step.

You know what happened next. Three playoff starts, two wins, and one FedEx Cup trophy. Hovland’s career ascension was complete with a dominant Ryder Cup performance the next month. Now, only one prize remained: major championship glory.

If this is the last you heard of Viktor Hovland, well, you’re not alone. Spare for an out-of-nowhere third-place finish at the PGA Championship in May, the 26-year-old pro fell off the map for much of the 2024 season. After a season with no missed cuts and top-10s in each of the four majors, Hovland missed three of four major cuts in ’24, and played the PGA Tour regular season following his Tour Championship win without a victory.

What went wrong? It’s golf, so the answers are both simple and endlessly complicated. But the easy answer, at least at this moment, is Hovland’s curious change in swing coaches after the best season of his life.

Now, with Hovland and longtime coach Joe Mayo back in action together, the game is coming back, too. On Friday at the FedEx St. Jude, Hovland shot his low round of the year, a seven-under 63 that vaulted him straight up the leaderboard and into a tie for seventh place. There’s still work to be done, Hovland says, but this vision of his golf game is finally starting to feel familiar again.

“I feel like things are headed in the right direction,” he said. “At least now I can hit some shots where, okay, that’s the old stuff, that’s looking like — that looks like and feels like what it used to. So that’s very positive. Then other shots I revert back to some old habits. It’s just kind of continuing to work on the things that I’m working on, and hopefully I’ll see more of the good swings again.”

Hovland, for the uninitiated, is no stranger to hard work. He’s spoken often about his love and appreciation for “the grind” of pro golf, and he’s an unabashed swing nerd. Some of this obsession may explain why he elected to change coaches even in the aftermath of a historic season, but it also explains how Hovland has been able to get the train back on the tracks.

The bad news is that he made a mistake in his approach, the good news is that he had the humility to admit it and move on. In a sport that is so often punishing, the latter choice speaks volumes.

“Maybe there is something to having your back up against the wall and having to perform,” Hovland said Friday. “I feel like it kind of gives you a little bit of that sense of urgency of having to perform. Maybe I just squeeze a little bit more out of what I’ve normally got.”

There are still two long days ahead in Memphis for Hovland, which means any number of opportunities for the sort of “old habit” mistake that has undone many a round in the months since Mayo and Hovland got back together in May. But that means there’s still two long days for Hovland to turn his season around in kind.

It might not be the major championship glory he was hoping for when the season started, and it might not be after the season he would have wanted, but Hovland doesn’t need to say it to know a win would be massive for him.

Sometimes, the results speak for themselves.