A CHUBBY, 5-FOOT-6 KID
One of the traditional ways tour players have got good is to play for a blue-chip college programme like Oklahoma State. OSU has produced a lot of them, from Bob Tway and Scott Verplank to Charles Howell and Rickie Fowler – players who helped the programme win 11 national titles. Those titles require talent, and Cowboys coach Alan Bratton was in Scotland at the European Boys Team Championship in 2013 to fill the pool. His main target on the Norwegian team was Kristof- fer Ventura, a 6-foot-3 specimen equipped with a tour-player starter set of skills who would end up playing four years in Stillwater. But Bratton couldn’t stop watching a chubby, 5-foot-6 kid with an untucked shirt and Oakley blade sunglasses who came from the same high school in Oslo as Ventura – who today plays the Korn Ferry Tour and is one of Viktor’s closest friends. “Viktor was a little soft and had a different-look- ing swing, but that swing repeated, and I loved how he competed,” Bratton says. “He might have been only the fourth or fifth best player on that team, but I fell in love with him. I’ve been fortunate to be around a lot of great players, and I thought I saw some of the same traits in him. When I was re- cruiting Rickie Fowler, I had a plan to watch him and then watch other people, but I couldn’t stop watching Rickie. It’s rare to see him frustrated. He tries shots, and he’s fun to watch. Viktor is the same way.” That Hovland was even swinging a golf club as a high schooler was an act of providence. His father, Harald, had spent a year in the United States as a visiting engineer on a project in St Louis and had bought some clubs during that stretch to kill time at a practice range that was on his way to work. When the year was up, he brought a junior set of clubs back to Norway for his son to try, and by age 11, Viktor was committed. The Hovlands entrusted Viktor’s embryonic game to James McGowan, a transplanted Austra- lian who has been teaching at Norway’s Drobak Golf Club since the 1990s. From the start, Hov- land’s thirst for information and work ethic set him
VIKTOR HOVLAND IS THE FIRST ELITE TOUR player to teach himself the game from scratch in the dark in a second language from YouTube. Now a Top-10 ranked player since 2021, he was the first of a wave of new tour players who have used the most democratic of the modern instruction tools – social media – to redefine the relationship between athletes, coaches, and the information they share. It’s the new way to get good. The Norwegian had two PGA Tour wins in his first full year as a professional in 2020, in Puerto Rico and Mexico – he now has seven victories – and the 28-year-old from Oslo won the FedEx Cup in 2023. His victory in the 2022 Dubai Desert Classic elevated him to No 3 in the world, the highest posi- tion he has attained in his career. His swift rise to fame parallels that of Collin Morikawa. They were part of the celebrated 2019 Oklahoma State team which also included Mat- thew Wolff. Morikawa went on to win the PGA Championship in 2020 and Open Championship in 2021. Hovland is still seeking his first major victory: the closest he has come was a T-2 behind Brooks Koepka in the 2023 PGA at Oak Hill. However, he has only won once in the past two years on the PGA Tour, the 2025 Valspar Champion- ship, and his World Ranking this year has fluctuated between 8 and 19 as he struggles with a “two-way miss.” A series of "high right shots" most of the time, with some hot left misses mixed in when he over- corrects. Hovland doesn't have traditional player- coach relationships, which makes the discourse on this messy. Hovland operates as the CEO of his own golf game. He makes the decisions, but he periodi- cally taps a roundtable of consultants he likes and trusts. Hearing from another voice doesn't consti- tute a player-coaching split as we traditionally know it, and he'll often maintain a good relationship with these coaches after moving on.
HE TREATED HIS SWING LIKE A SET OF LEGOS, TINKERING, ADDING AND SUBTRACTING.
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