Opinion: Viktor Hovland returns to Memorial after spending time in golf swing wilderness

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Golf is such a roller coaster ride that the game even has a name for the ups and downs. It’s called getting up and down. Not exactly original, but it perfectly encapsulates the highs and lows of what may be the most mentally maddening sport on earth.

To get up and down is to make amends after messing up. You miss the green in regulation but follow with a chip and putt to make par or limit further damage. Failure followed by success. Getting up and down feels good, which is both an emotional contradiction. It should be called down and up.

But that’s golf. What’s up is down and what’s down is up. Or to put a face on it: Viktor Hovland.

Hovland was up last season. Way up. The 26-year-old Norwegian made the biggest splash of his young career by winning the Memorial Tournament in June, earning a handshake from event host Jack Nicklaus and a $3.5 million winner’s check for his first victory on U.S. soil.

Twelve weeks later, Hovland’s season crescendoed with a FedEx Playoff win at the BMW Championship followed by victory at the Tour Championship, which filled his pockets with $18 million in bonus money for winning the FedEx Cup title.

Then came the down. As it always does. Even for Nicklaus and Tiger Woods.

Despite his stellar achievements, Hovland was not completely satisfied with the process that led to his success. He was not content simply to win tournaments. He wanted to understand why his golf ball was not going where he aimed it.

“I wasn’t quite as comfortable hitting the cut shots I normally hit, and actually ended up hitting a lot of draws, even when I won the FedEx Cup,” he said. “I’m standing over the ball and feeling a cut but the ball draws. You don’t get the most confidence from that.”

Pleased with the tournament results but frustrated with his swing, which he contends was more reliable in 2021, Hovland parted company with his swing coach, Joe Mayo, after winning the FedEx Cup. The move backfired, as Hovland went into a performance dive that lasted most of this season, prompting him to consider not even entering the PGA Championship, played three weeks ago at Valhalla Golf Club in Louisville.

Good thing he reconsidered, because he finished third. Not coincidentally, he had re-connected with Mayo the week before the PGA.

Golf instructor Rick Smith is happy Hovland rebounded so quickly after reuniting with Mayo. Smith, a former teaching pro at Scioto Country Club who has worked with Nicklaus, Phil Mickelson and Vijay Singh, has seen too many players fall off a cliff after prioritizing swing mechanics over scoring.

Changing golf swing can be slippery slope

“The key is you have to be careful in your quest to be better,” said Smith, who runs a golf academy in Florida. “What exactly are you looking for? A different shot? A mechanical change that makes a significant difference in being more consistently longer? Many of those chasing trajectory or curve have never come back. When Chip Beck tried to hit higher, when David Duval wanted to hit a draw … and when Ian Baker-Finch tried to hit it longer. That’s when you run into serious trouble.”

Beck, Duval and Baker-Finch never recovered after altering their natural swings, which they eventually lost after months of making biomechanical adjustments.

“Everybody has their own swing,” Smith said. “But how do you find it? I’m not talking the perfect swing but the swing that works day in and day out, because we’re not machines.”

Another nationally-recognized instructor, former Ohio State golfer Brian Mogg, cautioned that too many tour players change swing coaches and tinker with their games without knowing the end game.

“Everybody wants to get better,” said Mogg, who like Smith runs a golf academy in Florida. “Sometimes you go back before you go forward, but you have to have a plan in place.”

Amateur golfers can relate. We experiment so much – “Fire the hips” … “Strengthen the grip” – we often make matters worse. Getting the club in the right position becomes the objective, when the goal should be getting the ball in the hole.

Personally, I suffer from something called “can’t leave well enough alone” syndrome, which leads victims into believing that even good scores are not good enough. So I tinker incessantly, watching instructional YouTube videos and torquing my body into unnatural positions that even Gumby would not attempt. My plan, if I even have one, gets eaten by the process.

Fortunately, Hovland is not me. He knows where he wants to go. He has a plan. The question is whether he can follow it?

Million-dollar question: how to improve without getting worse?

“There’s a constant urge to, ‘OK, how do I improve?’ And to improve you have to change and do things differently,” Hovland said. “You can’t just do the same thing and expect different results. But going about how you get better, that’s the million-dollar question. How do you do that? Then it’s trying to find the path of least resistance that leads to the improvement you’re looking for.”

Seeking improvement should not be confused with pursuing perfection, which is impossible.

“I think we all know we’re human and are not going to be perfect. I don’t have a problem with that,” Hovland said. “But I also know what I’ve done in the past and what I’m capable of, and what is physically possible for me to do, so that’s my own standard. I have high expectations, so I know what to work toward, and when I don’t meet them it’s frustrating and back to the drawing board.”

Makes sense, but some inside the golf world still think Hovland was messing with fire when he walked away from Mayo. Talk about not leaving well enough alone. For two weeks in August, Hovland was the best golfer on the planet.

“I kept saying, ‘Why?’ with Viktor as dominant as he was,” Smith said of Hovland’s split with Mayo.

Hovland is mum on what prompted the breakup with Mayo, and at the PGA Championship he did not detail why he went back to his old coach. But in early May, before reconnecting with Mayo, Hovland laid out his thought process in general terms.

“There’s some personal reasons that I wanted to go in a different direction,” he said, before adding that when choosing a coach – and he went through several after splitting from Mayo – the instructor needs to answer questions specifically about his swing without straying into other areas of his game. Or life.

“Not to say these coaches are bad; they’re really smart people, and I’ve enjoyed working with all of them,” he said. “But I just enjoy the process of improving and getting better, and I felt like I had to go somewhere else for some different answers.”

Mayo did not respond to an interview request, but months ago he told Kevin Van Valkenburg of No Laying Up that his strong personality probably had something to do with coach and player separating in November 2023.

“I am hard to take in large doses,” Mayo said. “I realize being around me (for) a year full time, like we were, is probably pretty tough. … If I had to be honest, if you threatened me with going to prison if I wasn’t honest with you, then I’d say my personality was probably part of Viktor wanting to do it on his own.”

Hovland may have needed a break from Mayo’s intensity but at some point decided that pairing a demanding coach with a cerebral player made for a winning team. It probably didn’t hurt that both men love crunching numbers. Hovland gets into golf analytics with fantasy football league intensity.

“When you have access to more (statistical) information, why wouldn’t you use it to get better?” he said. “A lot of guys who are older have been good just because they’re talented and have an instinctual feel or intuitive way of doing things. But not everybody is like that.”

Hovland was not an elite junior player growing up in Norway, but became better by working on the “right things.”

“A guy like me needs (analytics) tools to accentuate the improvement process,” he said.

Hovland’s refreshing honesty in assessing his game is borne from the self confidence that comes from being his own man. Ever since becoming obsessed with golf at age 11 – he practiced Taekwondo and played soccer until golf moved front and center – Hovland has forged his own path, unfazed by what the rest of the crowd is doing.

As someone not afraid to form his own opinions, he rolls his eyes at groupthink.

“It seems to be in the media that I have this obsession to change just to change. That’s not the case,” he said. “This game is crazy, and you will do different things, whether you try to or not. It’s not like you just wake up and shoot 66 every single day. This game is hard. I’m just constantly trying to figure it out.”

Then he doubled down.

“I don’t have the urge to tinker, but if something is not right you have to tinker to fix a problem; that’s how I made it to this point,” he said. “You don’t just go, ‘Yeah, I’m not as quite happy with where I’m at, but, Oh, well, I’m not going to tinker and try to fix it.’ That’s how you don’t get better.”

Being comfortable in his own skin also explains why Hovland was able to seek out Mayo a second time. Some pros would be too proud to reconnect with a former coach so quickly, seeing it as an admission of mistaken decision-making. But Hovland puts results over reputation. He is all about facts, not facade.

And the fact is that after analyzing the data, the logical decision was to take his tinkering back to Mayo.

“Good for Viktor,” Smith said. “He found someone he can communicate with and even disagree with. I always liked when a student or pro would say, ‘I don’t agree with that.’ I’d come back with, ‘OK, I’ll prove it to you.’ It’s important to have someone to bounce ideas off, who you can trust.”

Mogg appreciates Hovland’s refusal to be satisfied with the status quo.

“Go back to Tiger and Butch (Harmon),” Mogg said, referencing one of the more famous player-coach combos. “Tiger hit the pinnacle, and at that point Butch was probably just monitoring. But Tiger wanted to be pushed.”

Woods left Harmon for Hank Haney, then left Haney for Sean Foley, and finally jettisoned Foley for Chris Como before becoming his own swing instructor.

“I remember when Alex Rodriguez was at the peak of his baseball stuff, he was, ‘I know I’m doing good but I’m leaving a lot of talent on the table,’ ” Mogg said. “A-Rod was asking, ‘What can I do to bring more talent out?’ If that is Viktor’s approach, good for him.”

Only Hovland knows if that is his approach. Only he can decide to follow a plan to unleash more talent or give in to the temptation to never leave well enough alone.