Last month, Viktor Hovland’s PGA Tour season ended with a near-miss at the Tour Championship. It was a week that started with Hovland finding “something’ that allowed him to “hit the ball straight” to vault into contention at East Lake. Hovland was in position to win entering the final round but stalled, shooting 2-over as Scottie Scheffler caught and passed him to take the title.
Hovland has been in search mode for a while. He has won each of the past two seasons with the combination of a hot putter and a knack for competition, but that’s not what he’s looking for. He’s looking for something that is both familiar and foreign: who he used to be.
“No,” Hovland said at East Lake when asked if he thought he’d ever find the perfect feeling. “You can say you’re chasing perfection, but you’ll never get there. But it’s not so much that I’m chasing perfection; it’s just that I’m chasing what I’ve done for most of my career. I know how good it is, and I know that statistically it’s not the same. I can feel it’s not the same. It doesn’t look the same. It doesn’t produce the same numbers. So it’s not the same. It’s not like I’m being unreasonable and confabulating things, but I know there’s always a solution, and I’m trying to resolve the problems that I have and get back to a position to where I can play like this week in, week out. That’s the goal.”
That near-miss in Atlanta forced Hovland to face a great “philosophical question.” With his PGA Tour season over, would he enter the offseason looking to make small adjustments to his swing or sweeping changes? He said he hoped to take some extended time off to really work on straightening things out, specifically his inconsistent ball-striking, which cost him at Atlanta. “In this game, you might feel like you’re really far away, but you’re never really that far away, maybe as you think,” Hovland said. “But at the same time, I would like to — because I’ve deviated so far off of my original DNA, I would like to push that closer to my DNA. We’ll see kind of how difficult that is.”
After taking a few weeks off, Hovland reemerged at the BMW PGA Championship on the DP World Tour. He finished T27 at Wentworth and then teed it up at the French Open last week, where he stumbled to a T33 finish due to what he called “pretty shocking” play off the tee. After his final round in France, it was clear that the length of this odyssey is wearing on Hovland.
“It’s supposed to be fun, and I want to go out there and enjoy myself,” Hovland said on Sunday, speaking about his overall disappointment with his game. “But it’s tough when you see some of those shots that go 150 yards left, and then the next shot it goes the other way, and you don’t know what to do about it. That’s pretty frustrating. And I still try to grind as hard as I can, and I do a pretty good job of even just finishing the tournament.”
Hovland loves to tinker. He has a searcher by nature and finds fulfillment in the quest. But eventually, frustration builds when around every curve you find only more endless road instead of the endpoint you seek. For Hovland, the endpoint, whenever he reaches it, will deliver him to the thing about golf that speaks to his soul.
“We would all like to win, that’s why we practice so hard,” Hovland said at the 2025 U.S. Open at Oakmont. “But there’s also like a deep passion in me that I want to hit the shots. Like I want to stand up on the tee and hit the shots that I’m envisioning. When the ball’s not doing that, it bothers me.”
Before he departed East Lake, Hovland was asked what makes Scheffler, the relentless World No. 1, so dominant. It wasn’t surprising that, to Viktor Hovland, what makes Scheffler great is that he has what Hovland is chasing — what Hovland used to be able to rely on.
“He knows where the ball’s going,” Hovland said of Scheffler. “I don’t think he’s trying to do too much with it. I think he knows that he’s got an edge on most guys out here. So he doesn’t have to do anything crazy. He can play smart and just kind of pick his spots, stay in it constantly.”
Hovland’s hope was that his desired destination was closer than it appeared. But in France, it was clear that Viktor Hovland’s quest to find Viktor Hovland is still nowhere near its conclusion.
