NASSAU, Bahamas — There’s no faking it in windy conditions that send golf balls astray. A glance at Viktor Hovland’s scorecard — a 2-under 70 on Friday at Albany Club that included an eagle and four birdies — and he made it look easy. But did it feel easy to him?
“It didn’t feel like it, certainly not, no,” he said.
Hovland, the defending champion, says he doesn’t have his ‘A game,’ something Tiger Woods, the tournament host, used to say, but despite battling his swing and struggling with his putter, he has played well enough to grab a one-stroke lead at the Hero World Challenge.
“It’s kind of strange, like I knew it was windy and I feel like I missed so many putts. And I still don’t feel like I’m hitting it very good, like I’m not comfortable over the ball, but the ball’s going straight and I’m giving myself looks,” he said. “It just doesn’t feel that great, and I’m missing a lot of putts and somehow we ended up at 2 under today, so yeah, happy with that.”
Hovland carded three birdies in a row starting at No. 13, but the highlight of the round was holing out his third shot from 84 yards in the right rough for eagle on the par-5 sixth.
“Kind of had a little weird lie on the upslope. The wind was off the right so it wasn’t that comfortable of a shot,” he said. “I basically aimed it 30 feet right of the pin and I hit like a 50-degree just trying to hit it as low as possible to try to get under the wind. And I saw it spinning at the end a little bit and I yelled ‘go’ and yeah, just slam dunked right in. That was the first time I’ve done that.”
But this is hardly the first time the former Oklahoma State Cowboy has played in windy conditions.
“Yeah, it blows like this all the time in Oklahoma,” said Hovland, who recalled competing in the Big 12 conference tournament at Prairie Dunes in Kansas. “My freshman year, I could hardly get the ball up above the ground, so I was loving it. I shot 1 under the front nine and was probably leading by three or four shots in nine holes. That was the best I’ve ever played in that much wind, so that was fun.”
But putting in the wind, he argued, is the hardest part of playing in the wind.
“You’re grinding on three-footers,” said Hovland, who shot in the 70s at Albany Club for the first time in six rounds. “It’s windy and it’s grainy, and the greens are fast so it’s not like you can just ram the putts in, you’ve got to actually kind of die the putts in and that’s when the wind can hit it a little bit harder.”
So far, so good for Hovland, who holds a one-stroke lead over Scottie Scheffler, Xander Schauffele, Cameron Young and Collin Morikawa — all of whom represented Team USA at the Presidents Cup in September.
