apart. “The first player from Norway to make it to the PGA Tour, Henrik Bjornstad, was a member here when Viktor was a junior. I coached Henrik, too, and he didn’t work as hard as Viktor did,” says McGowan, who taught Hovland from ages 11 to 17. “In the summer, it stays light until 10.30, and even then, Viktor’s parents spent a lot of time waiting in the parking lot for him to finish.” The flipside of those endless summer nights is about six hours of daylight in the winter. That translated into hundreds of hours of Web surfing and beating balls at the Fornebu Indoor Golf Cen- tre – and Hovland interrogating McGowan about everything from the latest swing trends on tour to his TrackMan numbers. “I didn’t have one my- self at the time,” McGowan says, “but Viktor had a TrackMan at school he could use, so he would work on the numbers to see if what we talked about worked.” The Stack-and-Tilt method was strong on tour at that time, but Hovland bypassed it without a second glance, preferring to work on adding some Dustin Johnson lead-wrist flavour to his swing to produce more power. “He just kept improving, and there were no flat spots on the way,” McGowan says. “Viktor’s only weakness was putting from around 10 feet, which was the birdie length he mostly had. If he had made more of that length, he would have gone extremely low much more often.” Hovland’s growth coincided with a massive proliferation of digital-golf coaching personalities across every platform from Instagram to Twitter to YouTube to Facebook. George Gankas parlayed his social-media reach – including a quarter-mil- lion followers on Instagram – into real-world work with tour players like Wolff and a spot on Golf Di- gest’s 50 Best Teachers list. The UK-based teach- ing pair of Andy Proudman and Piers Ward have more than 900 000 subscribers for their “Me and My Golf” YouTube channel and offer everything from monthly content-streaming membership to pre-packaged “Break 90” video series. They are just some of the brands in that game. Do a search for how to fix your slice, and YouTube will offer up more than 1.1 million videos. Hovland was comfortable with that world from the start, and he learned quickly how not to drink from the information firehose. “I started young getting into the golf swing, so I feel I have a pretty good understanding of what’s going on and how it relates to what I’m doing when I hit a ball,” Hovland says. “There’s the valuable stuff, and the stuff you hear and throw out, and then there’s the gray area in between, where you don’t really know. You try it out and see how it goes and leave yourself some breadcrumbs so that you can get back to where you were.” In its best form, that meant taking lots of trips to the golf-information buffet – where grip- adjustment tips from tour legends are mixed with recorded lectures from sports scientists about the importance of understanding moment of inertia. But by the time Hovland was in his second year
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 55
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2025
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator