It’s hard to be the underdog as the reigning FedEx Cup champion but Viktor Hovland found a way.
He’s recorded just one top-10 finish all season – finishing third at the PGA Championship in May – in 13 starts and enters the week at No. 57 in the FedEx Cup standings. That means if he doesn’t get his act together this week at the FedEx St. Jude Championship, which is contested at TPC Southwind in Memphis, the first of three playoff events, and leap into the top 50, he’ll be out of the playoffs. No winner of the BMW Championship, the second playoff event, has failed to qualify and defend his title since the playoffs began in 2007. (It should be noted that the top 70 made the BMW until it was reduced to the top 50 last year.) Even if Hovland does squeeze his way into the BMW at Castle Pines in Denver, he’ll need to vault inside the top 30 to make the Tour Championship in Atlanta to defend that title. So, Hovland, who grew up in Norway, where the chances of finding one’s way to the PGA Tour let alone to becoming a world-beater and FedEx Cup champ are slim to none, is in some way right where he likes to be.
“I feel like maybe I’ve been an underdog in some way my whole life,” he said on Tuesday during his pre-tournament press conference ahead of the FedEx St. Jude Championship.
A year ago, Hovland finished T-13 in Memphis and noted that if not for making a mess at the 18th hole, he might have won that tournament too. He then went on to win the remaining two playoff events with a final-round 61 at the BMW and a 63 at the Tour Championship. He was a trendy pick to win his first major this year and knock Scottie Scheffler from the title of world No. 1.
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But he made a curious coaching change at the end of the season and went down a few different rabbit holes in search of perfecting his swing and it backfired. He’s dropped from fifth in Strokes Gained: Tee to Green last season to 65th this go-round. All of his attention on his full swing has hurt his short game, which had long been his Achille’s Heel. After improving to No. 86 last season, he has fallen back to No. 174 this season.
“I’m just working on the things that I need to work on to get back to where I was last year,” Hovland said. “Then I believe I can do some great things again.”
But Hovland, who has won six times on Tour and at 26 seemed well on his way to having a Hall of Fame caliber career, looked lost at times this season. He returned to working with swing instructor Joe Mayo, who guided him to the FedEx Cup last season, but other than being a one-week wonder at the PGA at Valhalla, it has been a baffling year for Hovland.
“It’s just not that fun to play golf when you don’t know where the ball is going,” he said, which are words the average duffer can relate to. “I feel like it’s a waste of time for me to be playing golf if that’s where I’m at. I’d rather be off the golf course and work on it, trying to figure out why I’m doing those things.”
Someday, Hovland could probably write a book on what went wrong with his swing this season or at least a lengthy chapter for his autobiography, but on Tuesday he chalked it up to changing his “pattern.”
“I knew my pattern was really good. But I was upset that I wasn’t cutting the ball as much as I would have liked. My ball flight started to become a little bit of a draw, which is fine. I was still hitting it good. But sometimes visually I would have liked to have seen the cut,” he explained. “Then in the off-season I made a conscious effort to try to cut the ball more, and when I did that, I ruined a relationship that happens in my swing that makes it really difficult for me to control the face coming down. So now it’s just kind of me learning from that. I know exactly why it happened. I know exactly what happens because I’ve gotten myself measured, and now it’s just kind of a process of getting back to where I was.”
The process of rediscovering his old pattern and the confidence he once had in it is what makes golf great. Even for some of the game’s best, finding it can be fleeting, and Hovland knows that there’s no guarantee he will ever play as well as he did a year ago during the FedEx Cup Playoffs. Perhaps it’s the part of him that loves being the underdog that enjoys the search for something close to perfection in his swing.
“I’m not sure how long it’s going to take for me to play my best golf. It might be this week. It might be next week. But at least now I’m on a path to progress. I’m on a path to improvement,” he said. “Whereas before, one thing is playing bad, but you don’t know why and you don’t know how to fix it. That’s very challenging mentally. I might play terrible this week, but at least I feel like I’m on a path to improvement, and that’s all that kind of matters for me.”