Viktor victorious again at long last
Valspar winner prevails in spite of his struggles; Schauffele slowly trending up
Viktor Hovland rallies to beat Justin Thomas in Valspar (Douglas P. DeFelice/Getty Images)
It’s been a wild 18 months for Viktor Hovland, who went from near the top of the golf world to an exasperating period of doubt, indecision and introspection.
As daunting as it is to comprehend the struggles Hovland has endured since winning the PGA Tour’s FedEx Cup in 2023, it is just as difficult to keep track of all the changes he’s made leading up to the past week.
For those keeping track, it’s five moves — twice involving the same teacher who was abandoned and brought back — in just more than a year, an indication of the struggles that have seen the Norwegian golfer drop from fourth in the Official World Golf Ranking to 19th heading into the Valspar Championship. He showed up at Valspar coming off four missed cuts in his last five starts.
So, of course, there was Hovland sitting with the trophy on Sunday at the Copperhead course at the Innisbrook Resort.
Trailing Justin Thomas by three shots with three holes to play, Hovland birdied the toughest hole on the course — hitting his approach to 6 feet at the 16th, the closest of any competitor — then added another birdie at the 17th to surge ahead and win for the first time since the 2023 Tour Championship.
Even in victory, the ever-friendly and engaging Hovland was doubting his own abilities.
“It’s still not great,” said Hovland, whose final-round 67 brought him his seventh PGA Tour victory. “I’m still hitting the same shots that I have been the whole year, really. But it’s just I was able to time it extremely well this week. It felt like every single good shot that I hit I just saved it really well. Because the club is just not in a great place for me coming down. It’s just not what it used to be. So I can’t really rely on my old feels anymore because the club is in a different spot and I have to change my release pattern to make that work.
“Now, incredibly, I did make it work and was able to win and I think that is something that I’m extremely proud of that I can show up at a PGA Tour event at one of the hardest golf courses we play all year and still win with not my best stuff. So I think that’s really cool, that’s something that I’m extremely proud of, but at the same time it makes this game a lot more stressful than I think it should be.”
Hovland earlier this week went back to former PGA Tour pro Grant Waite for his latest coaching maneuver, the fifth change he’s made since the beginning of 2024 when he parted ways with Joe Mayo, who helped him to the top of the PGA Tour a year earlier.
After starring in the Ryder Cup for Europe following his breakout 2023 tour season, Hovland made that change at the beginning of last year. He then brought Mayo back prior to the PGA Championship, where he finished third in his first top-10 of the year and one of only two.
Waite got a try in there before Hovland went back to Mayo and then made another change before going back to Waite.
“He’s really smart, and I think I have a little bit of a different perspective now going through a lot of struggles the last year since we worked together, and he has a lot of knowledge and there’s a lot of information and I don’t think I was quite ready for it a year ago,” Hovland said. “I just wanted it to be super simple and I’ll just find a feel and we’ll make it work.
“Then we actually needed to put some more work and diligent kind of technical work into it to figure this out. And I think Grant is one of the few guys that can solve it.”
Hovland shot 80 in the first round of the Players Championship, missing a third consecutive cut. He was unsure about playing in the Valspar until Tuesday night and even Wednesday felt like he played poorly in the pro-am.
A few days later, he is a winner again.
“The last year and a half has been … I know my golf game is not very good,” he said. “I know I have some issues, and just because you have one bad round of golf or one bad tournament you would like to think that, oh, okay, next week is another week, you’ll figure it out.
“But when the problems remain and linger it doesn’t really give you — you don’t become more hopeful, it’s like you keep drowning and you’re running out of air. It’s tough to get excited to go and play because you just don’t feel like you have the confidence to succeed.”
Xander Schauffele made his 59th consecutive cut at the Valspar (Brennan Asplen/Getty Images)
Slow road back for Xander
Xander Schauffle shot his lowest round of the year on Sunday — a 66 at Innisbrook’s Copperhead course — to tie for 12th in his third event since returning from a rib injury that knocked him out for two months.
It was a nice rebound from another trying week and Schauffele is still searching to get back to the form that saw him win two major championships last year with the Masters looming in two weeks.
Coming off a final-round 81 at the Players Championship, Schauffele rebounded with a nice tournament at the Valspar, a Saturday evening practice session leading to some better results.
But it still came with some of the frustrations he’s faced since returning two weeks ago at the Arnold Palmer Invitational.
“It’s harder than I thought,” Schauffele said of trying to regain his form. “I didn’t think it was going to be this tricky. Maybe I’m being a little impatient, it’s been (three) weeks of tournament golf for me, coming off of pretty much zero golf.
“I played Sentry and then before that was the Zozo (Championship in Japan in October), so the layoff felt more than just that six weeks, it feels like I haven’t golfed in quite some time. I have expectations and I think my team has expectations and just try to be professional through and through. But that includes shooting better scores.”
Schauffele has struggled with the driver, a club he used to his advantage for the majority of 2024. At the Players, he descried his golf as “really bad” and “it’s pretty gross, to be honest.”
And that was before his 77-81 weekend.
Still, he made the cut at Valspar — his 59th consecutive dating to the 2022 Masters, the longest streak on the PGA Tour and the longest since Steve Stricker got to 49 in a row in 2012. That is the sixth-longest streak in PGA Tour history, the record of 142 held by Tiger Woods. Dow Finsterwald is fifth on the list with 72 in a row.
Nonetheless, Schauffele is understandably a bit antsy. The Masters is only two weeks away now. He won the last major championship played in the Open at Royal Troon. Had he not been injured, it’s quite likely he’d be trending toward a big week at Augusta National trying to win his third of teh last four majors
But in his three starts since returning, he’s finished tied for 30th, T40, 72nd and now T12. He is unsure if he will add the Valero Texas Open the week prior to the Masters.
“This is my first sort of injury I’ve ever dealt with,” he said. “Everyone that I’ve talked to that was hurt sort of says ease your way back in, you can hurt yourself again. Those kind of things. So everyone’s telling me to be patient.
“I think in assessment you can be as hard as you want. When I’m playing out there my expectations aren’t through the roof, I don’t think. I’m pretty happy with a drive that’s in the fairway right now, and I’m pretty happy when I hit a good cut or good draw. But when you’re assessing yourself I think it’s important, if you want to elevate your game, to be harsh.
“It’s easy to be biased and think you’re doing okay. So, yeah, that’s kind of where that maybe what seems to be a harsh assessment came from.”