World No. 11 Viktor Hovland may be the best medal hopeful for Norway at the Summer Olympics, but he and fellow Norwegian Kristian Johannessen, who ranks No. 297 in the world and plays primarily on the European Tour’s Challenge Tour, delivered a Gold-medal level pre-tournament press conference on Wednesday in Tokyo ahead of the men’s golf competition.
Traditionally, Norway is a trophy collector at the Winter Olympics, especially in the alpine sports. Summer games? Not so much.
“We usually crush it in those and get a lot of medals,” Hovland said. “That hasn’t been the case with the summer Olympics as much, but we’re going to try to change that.”
As a matter of fact, Johannessen’s father was a ski jumper. Asked why he didn’t follow in his father’s skis, he cracked, “I’m just too fat.”
Olympic men’s golf competition: Preview | Tee times
That was also how Johannessen remembered Hovland when he first met him at age 13 or 14.
“He came up like a, yeah, a fat little kid and started to play really well,” Johannessen said.
“I feel like our relationship has gotten better every year, even though we started out hating each other, but it’s getting better, still a work in progress,” Hovland said with a laugh.
When a reporter asked Johannessen why he “hated” Hovland, he said, “No, I think it was the other way around, really.”
“I hated him,” Hovland interjected.
Then he explained that they first met in Spain at a junior tournament.
“At the time he was in high school (Wang Topidrett in Oslo) and I was thinking about starting at this high school so they let me kind of come a couple years early and stay with the school team as well as play the event,” Hovland said.
That week in Spain, the team rented a villa and Hovland’s roommate had a girlfriend and they were hogging the room.
“I might have, like, complained a lot about that and I had never met Kristian before, but I knew who he was and after I like told this to a couple of different people he just asked me straight up, ‘Well, what did you shoot the first two days of the tournament?’ Because we had already played two rounds. And I just said, ‘Well, I shot 82, 82.’ And he was just like, ‘Well does it matter where you’re sleeping if you’re shooting 82, 82?’
“Never met the guy before and I’m like, ‘All right, we’re off to a good start,'” Hovland said. “And I was thinking, when I start at this school in a couple years, we’re probably going to butt heads a lot. But yeah, despite the nasty comments he’s actually a pretty decent guy.”
Asked what Hovland does better than him on and off the golf course, Johannessen continued with his brand of self-deprecating humor. “On the course you can just tell by his scores he does everything a bit better than me and he’s said that before himself,” Johannessen said. “I like the way Viktor just don’t give a (crap) about anything other than what’s best for him and I can definitely learn from that.”
Hovland also was reminded that as a junior, he failed to medal at the Youth Olympics.
“I think I was leading after two or three rounds and I can’t remember if we played three or four rounds, but I remember I shot 68 and 68 the first two days and played really well, but struggled with my putter the last day and I ended up in a playoff for the bronze and I lost that playoff,” he recalled. “Hopefully, I got a little taste of what it is to compete for a medal and hopefully this time I do a little bit better.”
And what would be more meaningful back home for Norwegian fans – winning an Olympic medal or a major?
“I don’t know how to answer that,” Hovland said. “I think winning a major is bigger, personally, and I think most people think that way and I think maybe the Norwegian people would interpret it that way, just based off of the reaction of other people. But people not knowing anything about golf and there are plenty of those people in Norway, I think would probably be more excited about an Olympic medal compared to a major because they might not know what a major is, but everyone’s heard of the Olympics and an Olympic medal carries a lot more weight than a major maybe does for some people.”
[listicle id=778118860]
[lawrence-related id=778119011,778118342,778118986]