Viktor Hovland will face Scottie Scheffler on Sunday. That won’t be his biggest opponent
Last year, Viktor Hovland left the US Open at Oakmont after a promising third place finish. The Norwegian star struggles, as he does, to find it. His swing felt wrong and he couldn’t fix it, even though he won at Valspar earlier in the season.
Hovland’s promise? Go easy on them. Play golf and trust that everything will go well.
“I’ve been tearing myself apart a little bit,” Hovland said that night in western Pennsylvania. “Even though I know I need to work on something and get back to where I was mechanically, but right now, I can still perform at a very high level, and there’s a lot of positives. I have to take that with me and be a little kinder to myself.”
Hovland’s pursuit continued throughout the remainder of the season, where he finished in the top 10 in his final start of the season. There was a “Band-Aid fix” that helped him finish T7 in the BMW Championship and the swing ephihany he thought he had in the Ryder Cup before he was scratched from Sunday’s tracks with a neck injury. Hovland spent 2026 trying to capture and recreate the swing he was most comfortable with. He parted ways with coach Grant Waite and reunited with TJ Yeaton ahead of this year’s Arnold Palmer Invitational. Changes, tweaks, poking and prodding continued.
“It’s a complex puzzle and sometimes it’s a matter of a different perspective, looking at it a few different ways or saying things a little bit differently,” Hovland said of his process before the API.
The results are not yet in. The 2023 FedEx Cup champion entered this week’s Travelers Championship with only two top 10 finishes on the season. A third-place finish at the Canadian Open made him feel like he was trending in the right direction, but the pendulum swung the other way, and he missed the cut at the US Open. But aside from that MC at Shinnecock, Viktor Hovland left Long Island feeling good about his progress. The result was not there, but he remained motivated about it there he was on his endless quest.
“Obviously I’ve been working a lot on my swing to try to get back technically where I can, you know, not think too much about the swing and just go over the ball and wait to see some kind of shot. I feel like I’ve gotten a lot closer to that in recent weeks,” Hovland said Friday at the Travelers Championship. “I thought in Canada there was a lot of promise, even at the US Open I hit it a lot better. I just had one OB ball at the worst time. I hit one bad shot in the air from left to right, and it went right.
“I’m already seeing really good shots. It’s just that the bad ones are punishing me a lot. I feel like my emotions were there in my swingand what I’ve been working on is starting to make the dispersion of the shot a little stronger.”
Viktor Hovland has been fighting to be Viktor Hovland again, it seems, ever since he won the 2023 FedEx Cup.
On Friday at TPC River Highlands, Viktor Hovland won another qualifying round with his golf swing, firing 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 amazing today. Obviously, I was struggling with some things,” Hovland said Friday. “You know, my golf swing wasn’t that comfortable. But, you know, I felt like things settled down a lot today, and I was able to put the ball in a weird spot, I hit some iron shots, and the putter ended up being more consistent today.”
Hovland’s next step was to back it up with another good round, while battling the best player in the world. Will his swing, which is still technically being rebuilt, hold up under the kind of pressure it hasn’t faced much this season?
The answer on Saturday was a resounding yes. Hovland hit 11 of 14 fairways, 14 of 18 greens and took a stroke off the green on Saturday. Even when Scheffler birdied the back-nine, Hovland didn’t budge, he didn’t press. He just answered a good shot with a good shot, and, on 18, when Scheffler made a smooth bogey, Hovland rolled in a six-footer for birdie from one shot down to another for Sunday.
“It was really fun. I had a great time,” Hovland said Saturday after shooting a 6-under 64 to enter Sunday at 20 under. “You know, it’s been a while since I’ve been in this position. You know, going head-to-head with the best player in the world and hitting good shots, it was great.”
Viktor Hovland has been fighting him for a long time. On Sunday in Cromwell, Connecticut, Hovland will have to battle both his rebuilt swing and the No. 1 player in the world to walk away victorious. That is the natural conclusion of such a search. If you want to evaluate your work, your process, your belief, it should stick to the golf measuring stick.
But as Viktor Hovland told us last year at Oakmont, the trophy is not what he chases so much, it is the result of what he chases.
“We all want to win, that’s why we practice so hard,” said Hovland at Oakmont. “But there is also a deep love in me that I want to hit shots. Like I want to stand up and hit the shots I think. If the ball doesn’t do that, it bothers me.”
On Saturday, as he walked off the course after being mobbed by Norway’s World Cup warm-up crowd, Viktor Hovland echoed what he hopes Sunday will bring – not a title but more proof that he got what he can only get.
“Scores are good to shoot good scores, but I’m driven by the process,” Hovland said. “As soon as I get a certain feeling that I can trust and it produces a very reliable shooting situation, I know I’m going to be able to score 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 the shots that hit me and it gives me confidence.”
Viktor Hovland is a traveler by nature. He is a constant thinker who will continue to shape his swing until he gets the feel he wants. Then, he will go and look for something different.
All of that – various shifting thoughts, coaching changes, an unexpected victory for Valspar, a big miss, a trip to the desert and back – brought Viktor Hovland on Sunday, to a match against the best player in the world. One where regardless of the outcome, he can go with what he’s been looking for.
Believer Viktor Hovland has finally found Viktor Hovland again.
