land was comfortable reaching out to ask if Smith would be willing to look at some video of his swing. “He was on a fact-finding mission,” says Smith, whose Instagram account has become a popular analytical storehouse for millennial swings on the PGA Tour. “What were the different views of his swing? What could he take away? Viktor has a high IQ related to golf, golf instruction and swing mechanics. He’s always thinking. He’s a highly intellectual individual. He doesn’t show it off by downloading information onto you, but he can tell quickly when something passes the sniff test or not.” Smith described what he thought were the ele- ments of Hovland’s swing that worked together to produce his elite ball-striking and told Hovland he didn’t think he needed to make any big changes. “It was more about helping him understand his tendencies and why they showed up when they did and doing problem-solving,” Smith says. “When a certain shot pattern shows up on the course, how do you clear that up? Viktor’s generation of players, they want to know. You present them with infor- mation, and they decipher it and make the deter- mination about what to do with it. The previous generation believed you dug it out of the dirt, and you knew it when you felt it. The problem is that you could spend the rest of your career trying to find what you had again.” The two did not do much in terms of technical changes, but what they did do is work on doing the same things at a faster rate. “There was a lot for me to gain just by deciding to swing harder,” Hovland says. “I spend a segment of practice time just swinging the club as hard as I can.” Smith says the truth is Hovland might not have much room to improve his elite ball-striking, so increased speed, by default, is where it’s at. “You give Viktor a 7-, 8-, 9-iron, and it’s right on the flag. Now the idea is get a 7-iron in your hand where you used to have a 5-iron. He’s sent me videos where he’s swinging 120 miles per hour.”
Hovland’s driver speed this year, 115.6 miles per hour, put him 100th in that category on the PGA Tour. Ramping it up to 120 would put Hov- land around the top 35, among players like Scottie Scheffler, Adam Scott and Matt Fitzpatrick.
AT HOME IN OKLAHOMA
Experiencing the close-knit Oklahoma State golf fraternity even for a day makes it easy to under- stand why Hovland wasn’t immediately tempted to spend his money to relocate in Orlando, Jupi- ter, Dallas or one of the other popular tour-player hot spots. He spent eight years there, nearly five as a tour pro, enjoying the team facility at Karsten Creek. It is built with the connective tissue of players going back to the earliest days of the programme, in the form of memorabilia, donations and time – the stream of players returning for football games, pro-am fundraisers and for no reason beyond shooting the breeze with players to pass on some institutional knowledge. Hovland bought a house in Stillwater which he shared with PGA Tour pro Austin Eckroat, but early in 2024 he moved homes to Palm Beach Gar- dens in Florida. “Viktor was already the most boring person, so it wasn’t a big change: Work out, eat, go to Karsten, come home and watch a war movie,” says Eckroat, who won twice in his second year on the PGA Tour in 2024. “It was weird to be playing all that golf without having something to prepare for. Viktor never stopped working. I’ve never seen anyone hit so many balls. You go out with him, and it doesn’t feel like anything he’s doing blows you away, but the ball always stays in front of him. He’s just relentless.” Outside golf, Hovland experimented with differ- ent diets, intermittently fasting before settling on a routine that is a mix between professional athlete and recent college student: takeouts interspersed with two giant fruit smoothies and a never-ending bowl of popcorn. Despite his Scandinavian roots, Hovland doesn’t drink like a European. “Once in a blue moon, he’ll go out, and that’s one of the best nights, but after a drink or two he’s a total liability,” says Eckroat, inserting the needle. “But he can go out and be himself and nobody bothers him.” The joy Hovland gets from immersing himself in the process of improvement was one of the first things that drew Bratton to him. “The second time I saw him, he had a different grip, and he had changed his shot shape from a hard hook to a little cut,” Bratton says. “It was obvious he had put a huge amount of time into getting better. Guys like Viktor and Bryson try their thing while continuing to be themselves. They’re sculpting their games more than building them. You must decide who you are and own that. At the elite level, that means being yourself every day.”
USE A WEDGE THE WAY IT’S DESIGNED “Hitting high, soft pitches used to be a challenge because of the flexion of my lead wrist ( small photo, right ). Flexion is good in the full swing, but it makes it harder to get the ball way up – you hit down on it too much. To take advantage of a wedge’s loft with my left hand, meaning turning it away from the target, but weaker with my right hand. This combo puts my left wrist in extension ( right ) and lets the club glide, not dig, along the turf to create good loft.” when pitching, I now grip the club stronger
I CALLED HIM AND SAID, ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING? WHEN DID YOU START THAT?’ HE SAID, ‘THIS MORNING.’ HE DID IT AS A DRILL, AND IT FELT GOOD, SO HE PUT IT IN.
58 GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2025
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