This week’s Golf Legends series profiles Viktor Hovland, the smiling Norwegian who has taken professional golf by storm. Let’s review his career milestones before you place your bets at top sportsbooks.
How It All Began?
Viktor Hovland was born in Oslo in 1997 and introduced to the game of golf at the age of eleven by his father, Harald who was working in the United States at the time. His improvement through those early teens was rapid and five years later won the Norwegian Amateur Championship.
Viktor Hovland’s Glittering Amateur Career
That Norwegian Amateur Championship win launched a stellar collegiate career for Oklahoma State and in 2018, Hovland won the prestigious U.S. Amateur Championship which gained Hovland entry into the major championships of 2019. He made those invitations pay when winning top amateur at the Masters Tournament and U.S. Open where he set the record amateur score for the prestigious major championship, which funnily enough was at Pebble Beach, the scene of his U.S. Amateur win.
2019 also saw Hovland’s success continue just before he turned pro when he won the Ben Hogan Award which is given to the leading collegiate player of the year.
2023 Viktor Hovland Won the FedEx Cup
2023 was the year that Vitor Hovland reached the summit of the PGA Tour when he won back-to-back weeks to bookend a brilliant year.
The whole year was a consistent one and a glimpse of things to come came at the second major championship of the year, the PGA Championship when he was involved in a brilliant duel with multiple major champion, Brooks Koepka. Despite the disappointment of not winning, it was obvious Hovland had reached the elite level of golf as he lost nothing in his brave defeat to Koepka.
A couple of weeks later, the newfound confidence was evident as Hovland won the Memorial Tournament in a sudden-death play-off against Denny McCarthy.
The penultimate event of the year, the BMW Championship played at Olympia Fields, a championship test that hosted the 2003 U.S. Open and Hovland closed with a course record round of 61 to win the event.
After that win at the BMW Championship, he entered the final week of the season, the Tour Championship at East Lake in a strong position. The twenty-five-year-old didn’t disappoint, as he won by five strokes to end the year in style and become the third youngest ever winner of the prestigious season ending big-money event.
Hovland Came Back to Earth in 2024 With a Bump!
I think most golf fans and pundits expected Viktor Hovland’s natural progression to continue and attain his first major championship win in 2024.
Hovland raised the eyebrows of golf onlookers when he sought the advice of a new coach, at the start of 2024.
The biggest transformation in Hovland’s game in 2023, was his improved short game which was one of the reasons he enlisted Joe Mayo as his coach at the start of that year, but despite all the success, he made the change at the beginning of this year.
Hindsight is a great thing, but I am sure that Hovland now wishes he never changed coach and indeed a few months into the year he was back under Mayo’s tutelage.
The momentum changed immediately when at the PGA Championship, Hovland produced a brilliant final day charge that saw him look the likely winner a few holes from home. Unfortunately, he fell a little short as Xander Schauffele won his first major championship, but it appeared the Oslo man was back close to the top of the sport.
Since then, he has regressed slightly once again, and that PGA Championship was his only top 10 of 2024 as his FedEx ranking stood outside the top 50 at last week’s FedEx St. Jude Championship where he needed a good week to elongate his year further.
However, he produced exactly that, to finish runner up and goes into this week’s BMW Championship as one of the favourites.
What Does the Future Hold for Viktor Hovland?
2024 has been a jarring year for Viktor Hovland having started the year as world #4 and currently fallen to #8.
There has been promise, however, last week at the FedEx St. Jude Championship and particularly the PGA Championship. Interestingly, he has chosen a very light schedule as his year has progressed, which shows a level of maturity. Hovland not panicking and treating his slump in form as his career journey, seems to have limited the damage to his confidence.
At Today’s Lines, we expect Viktor Hovland to climb back to the top of the sport in the coming months, and perhaps last week’s encouraging performance in Memphis was a harbinger of things to come for the popular Norwegian.
