Viktor Hovland and Smylie Kaufman took a DEEP dive into the details of its 2023 transformation.
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I first became aware of Viktor Hovland’s eccentric interests in May 2021. We were at Karsten Creek, in Stillwater, Oklahoma, where he went to school and spent his early years as a professional. As part of a walking and talking interviewI asked Hov a simple question: are you a morning person or a night owl?
“Definitely not a morning person,” he said. Okay, next question: what’s keeping you up so late?
“I end up binge-watching stuff and then I look at the clock and it’s way too late and I just can’t go to bed. So I end up finding these rabbit holes.
Rabbit holes…interesting! So, what was the last movie you watched?
“It was a weird movie. It’s called The experience. It’s a true story, about the Stanford experiment. (On prisoners and guards.) They go crazy after a while.
If Hovland is anything – besides perhaps the best golfer on the planet – this is it. curious. I’m not afraid to spend all night in the heart of a documentary. He is perhaps the most curious professional golfer in the elite ranks. Hovland recently took these excessive talents to a show called The ancient Apocalypse on Netflix, and was so intrigued by it that he took a trip with his mother to some of the sites featured in the series.
“I thought my mom and I could have a nice time on the island, enjoy the warmth and check out a few things,” Hovland told Smiley Kaufman on The Smylie Show this week. When Kaufman asked him (sarcastic) questions about the Roman Empire, as has become common in Internet circles, Hovland didn’t blink:
“I think the story is really cool, but I would even like to think about it more. wayyy further away. A thousand years ago, that’s not interesting enough.
Let that be a sense of who Hovland is in his spare time, when he’s not winning tournaments or playing in the Ryder Cup. But when it comes to one’s career, the same curiosity tends to apply. He is interested in the concepts and physics of his profession. You don’t need to spend more than a few minutes listening to his recent conversation with Smylie Kaufman to understand that Hovland is capable of hyper-fixation. This applies to his swing but also to his obsession with heavy metal music. In this week’s episode The Smylie show, Kaufman guided Hovland through topics and just let him loose, where he explained the highly technical aspects of his swing, his record-breaking Ryder Cup performance and, perhaps most importantly, how he transformed his game short. Below are some of the best tracks. For the full episode you can find The Smylie show on various podcast platforms And also on YouTube.
How he got up. And got up. And got up.
When you hear Hovland explain the journey from growing up in Norway to becoming one of the top three players in the world, it seems pretty simple. “I was good and I had a nice golf swing…but I was never the best or anything. I looked up to the guys around me – my peers – they were way better than me, way more talented. They looked prettier. But what I did was I got better every year. Some of my friends, they were the best, or prodigies, at the time, their development kind of stopped a few years later. As I continued to train and work on things and got a little better each year.
“Obviously you have to have talent to play on the PGA Tour, but my talent wasn’t so much physical, it was more about understanding concepts, taking information and applying it to myself, and improve over time.
You can stretch that explanation out to 2023. Hovland never shied away from a short game flaw during his early years as a pro. But he started working with coach Joseph Mayo and completely revolutionized that aspect of his game. It’s still the worst category in his arsenal, but he continues to slowly improve year after year. And in 2023, Hovland had finally become an average Strokes Gained player of the short game. Combine that with talent from around the world everywhere else and you get the best of the best.
His experience of the ‘Hallelujah’ bunker
Hovland and Kaufmann spent nearly 20 minutes talking about this short-game transformation, but it was the bunker shots that really provided something of an epiphany.
“Honestly, the bunker stuff was the biggest hallelujah experience I’ve had,” Hovland said. “I used to get so much sand in the bunker. I just remember if I played at Memorial – which I won this year – I just didn’t have a chance. Honestly, I thought it was a stupid move on my part. Because it’s so difficult to hit the fairways and greens, I can strip it and only hit 11 or 12 greens. With these bunkers you will always be on a downhill and downhill slope. If you can’t catch the ball cleanly out of the bunkers, I don’t even stop a ball on the green when I miss the green.
Strictly aimed at the more nerdy golf enthusiast, Hovland then details how Before his pelvis moves and his left knee flexes during his bunker shots. “I get really close to the ball and run the daylights out of it,” he said. When you turn the light of day, no bunker shot is too difficult. Every jamming opportunity seems feasible. It’s the confidence that has been exuding from his bunker play and short game lately.
Become the best in the world
The Official World Golf Ranking will tell you that Scottie Scheffler is No. 1 in the world. DataGolf will tell you that the honor goes to Rory McIlroy. Nowhere, ever, has Hovland been ranked #1, but isn’t he somehow feel I like this?
Hovland is No. 2 in the DataGolf rankings, for what that’s worth, and is coming off his FedEx Cup victory, before a record-breaking performance at the Ryder Cup. And Kaufman, who has been flying the Hovland flag for a few months now, asked Hovland how it felt to be considered for this top spot and if he thought it was a good fit for him.
“It’s very flattering,” Hovland said. “Yes, given the way I have played over the last few months, I would say I believe so. But at the same time, what Scottie has done, what Jon Rahm has done and the consistency that Rory has played with this year. I think any of us could be the best player in the world in any given week. How important is this? We’re all really good when we play our best.
It’s a good question. How many times do these elite players play well at the same time? Not always. But Hovland believes he’s in a good position to really take the top spot in the months and years to come.
“I’m very optimistic for next year and the years to come if I can obviously maintain what I’ve been doing,” he said. “But at the same time, keep improving like I do every year. I’m super excited. We’ll see how this ends. The other guys are also playing really good golf.
