Viktor Hovland is curious. It has been both a blessing and a curse for the Norwegian star, and it’s what will eventually deliver him to what he has been searching for.
Back in 2023, Viktor Hovland was one of the four best players in the world. He posted top 10s at the Players, the Masters and the PGA Championship before winning the Memorial, BMW and Tour Championship. It was the type of ascension Hovland had been destined to make ever since he turned pro in June of 2019. Everything pointed to Viktor Hovland continuing his rise, stacking wins and adding major championships to his resume. But Viktor Hovland is curious; he’s a dreamer and a wanderer and a tinkerer. So he decided to pick at his swing. Nitpicks became coaching changes and Viktor Hovland marched off on a path all his own making.
One he’s still trying to come back from.
“Now, especially looking back, I would say that it was more I was content with my game up until — my whole career up until 2023 in terms of my ball striking,” Hovland said on Tuesday ahead of the 2026 BMW Championship. “But it was always trying to nitpick and trying to find places where I can improve. Now, with kind of the struggles that I’ve had the last, I would say, three years, where my ball striking has just been drastically worse, you know, you take a little bit for granted how good it was before.”
And yet, Hovland doesn’t regret the decision to make changes — to search for something better. He just wishes he’d gone about it differently. But you can’t be great if you’re content staying in one place. If you’re not moving, you’re falling behind.
“I do think without having that mindset of trying to improve, I wouldn’t have gotten out here. I wouldn’t have had the career that I’ve had up to this point,” Hovland said. “So that’s definitely not been the problem, it’s just, you know, sometimes you make a couple bad decisions or you go down maybe a path that you shouldn’t have gone down, or I mean, we all, you know, obviously I would like to play like I played in 2023 every single year, but it’s not like you can just put it in neutral and keep playing like that the rest of your life. Like you’re always fighting entropy, there’s always stuff that’s going to be tossed at you, and you’ve got to deal with those problems. And sometimes you take a turn that you wouldn’t like to go down, but that, you know, there’s always a solution, there’s always a path back to where you want to be.”
Hovland has described his work to rebuild his swing and get back to being the consistently elite ball-striker he used to be as a “complicated puzzle.” He has had weeks and stretches where his confidence has returned, and there were even wins — like the 2025 Valspar — where he won despite hitting “gross” shots. That’s the talent of Viktor Hovland. Even while battling his own mind and his soul’s desire to do something new, to understand the unknowable, he can still tee it up and beat the best in the world on any given week.
Hovland probably could’ve kept things stagnant after the 2023 season and not reached the plateau he feared for some time. He could’ve made small tweaks and not had to deal with the frustration that comes when the thing you’ve always known is no longer there. And yet, his mind doesn’t allow him to regret the decision. He knows there are more places to look, more paths to traverse to find what he seeks. He’ll find it; it’s just a matter of time. You can’t let fear of the unknown hold you back. Curiosity can be a superpower; the results just won’t be immediate.
“I think it’s just interesting when you have an open mind and you question anything,” Hovland said ahead of the 2025 Masters. “I think even in the golf swing you can get very dogmatic and you look at things as, oh, this has to be a truth, this has to be correct, and sometimes the beliefs that you hold the most deeply can obfuscate yourself. When you question things and look at things from different angles, you might get to a deeper truth.”
“When you try to put yourself in a position where you can learn and try it out for yourself, kind of view the world as if you’re a scientist and you’re trying things for yourself and then writing down or seeing the results of the things that you try and then you try something different to see if that works better,” Hovland said. “I think that’s just an exciting way to go through life instead of just kind of being in a mundane routine where you do the same things every single day and hoping for a better result. That’s not really how I’m wired. I just like to try new things and see what happens.”
A few months after that dissertation, Hovland entered Sunday at the U.S. Open at Oakmont in contention. He watched as J.J. Spaun claimed the title, but left western Pennsylvania with a valuable lesson as he continued his search for the golf he’s still chasing.
“I’ve been tearing myself down a little too much,” Hovland said that evening at Oakmont. “Even though I do know I need to work on some stuff and get back to where I used to be in a way mechanically, but in the interim, I can still perform at a really high level, and there’s a lot of good stuff. Just got to take that with me and be a little bit kinder to myself.”
That week at soggy Oakmont, Hovland also pulled back the curtain on his journey. For most elite athletes, the endpoint of a journey into the wilderness is whatever gets you to the top — to trophies and money and career-defining moments. But the artist’s soul craves something different.
“We would all like to win; that’s why we practice so hard,” Hovland said 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.”
This season, Hovland’s hunt has continued.
He finished T18 at the Masters but missed the cut in the other three majors. He finished third at the RBC Canadian Open and then beat Scottie Scheffler in a playoff to win the Travelers Championship while still playing with a swing that didn’t feel quite right. Playing 36 holes with the best player in the world and coming out on top turned Hovland’s season from an F to “something that I can at least look back on with fond memories.”
Hovland is still trying to be kinder to himself, as he vowed after his near-miss at Oakmont. Those in his inner circle tell him he’s too hard on himself. He knows that comes from a good place, but it won’t stop him from being critical of every part of his game as he tries to come out of the other side of this odyssey as the best version of himself — the one he envisioned when it began almost three years ago.
“It’s like I have to be hard on myself to want to get up the next day and solve these problems,” Hovland said on Tuesday at Bellerive in St. Louis. “If everything is just happy-go-lucky and everything’s all right, which it is, my life’s good, but I have still got problems. I’ve still got things to solve. I think if you don’t want to solve them, then I feel like you’re kind of wasting your time.”
And in a never-ending journey to perfect the imperfectable, time and curiosity are Viktor Hovland’s most valuable resources — the ones that will eventually deliver him to where he wants to go.
ETA: To be determined.
