LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY | All Viktor Hovland did last summer was win the BMW Championship, the FedEx Cup and play a dominating role in Europe’s resounding Ryder Cup victory in Rome.
Golf had found its new king, a smiling Norwegian with a curiosity as deep and rich as his talent.
With the help of coach Joe Mayo, who joined the team last year, Hovland transformed his sketchy short game into an asset rather than a liability.
So, what did Hovland do?
He parted ways with Mayo, an admittedly strong-minded guy who acknowledges a little of him can go a long way. Coincidentally or not, Hovland’s performance plummeted.
It was as if Mayo took Hovland’s magic dust with him when he left.
Sound familiar?
Collin Morikawa won two major championships in short order and seemed slump-proof thanks in part to his long-time coach, Rick Sessinghaus. But last year, Morikawa traded Sessinghaus for Mark Blackburn, chasing a fresh look while searching for his old feels.
It worked for a time but then went flat, so Morikawa moved away from Blackburn, conceding that what worked in the short term was not a long-term solution.
Hovland and Morikawa ran into each other near the top of the leaderboard at the PGA Championship last week and shared one more commonality: Both had reunited with their former coaches, and both were in position to win on Sunday here at Valhalla Golf Club. Neither won – Hovland still had a chance as he played his 72nd hole, though Morikawa’s putter doomed him early and left him with just 34 feet of putts made over the final 18 holes – but both were demonstrating something old can be new again.
Joe Mayo offers an explanation on how to sequence your downswing.
Let’s start with Hovland, a notorious tinkerer with a fondness for going down rabbit holes whether it’s swing theory or heavy metal, head-banging music.
Before the PGA Championship, he had made seven PGA Tour starts this year, and his best finish was a T19 at the Genesis Invitational. He bottomed out at the Masters, where a second-round 81 sounded the alarms.
The week of the Wells Fargo Championship, Hovland’s search for answers led to a call to Mayo.
“He knows my swing really well. He’s really, really smart, and just has a way of looking at my swing and kind of knowing what it is right away,” Hovland said last week.
“Felt like I got some really good answers, was able to apply some of the feels right away, and I saw improvement right away.”
“I never doubted my abilities. It was just kind of my machinery was not working very well.” – Viktor Hovland
There was plenty of room for improvement. Even after shooting 18-under-par to finish third at the PGA Championship, Hovland ranks 46th in strokes gained total after ranking eighth last year, and he’s 178th in strokes gained around the green after being 86th last year.
Though Hovland’s PGA Championship ended on a sour note – he three-putted from 10 feet on the final green when a birdie would have tied him with Bryson DeChambeau for the clubhouse lead at 20-under before Xander Schauffele won it minutes later on the 72nd hole – a simple conversation led to a breakthrough.
“We had dinner, and I said, you don’t look very concerned, and he had kind of pinpointed a feel that as soon as I kind of kept working on that, it just got better immediately. And I thought this was potentially going to be a little bit of a project and maybe take six, eight weeks before I would see kind of immediate improvement,” Hovland said.
“I never doubted my abilities. It was just kind of my machinery was not working very well. But as soon as I get the machine kind of somewhere on track, I can play. Like there’s nothing wrong with me mentally or — like I never doubted I couldn’t play golf anymore. It’s just like the technique was not good enough to compete.”
For Morikawa, the soft fade he could hit in his sleep had become less reliable. Not bad but not great. After 18 years of working with Sessinghaus, Morikawa explained their parting as a result of not meeting his own expectations.
Earlier this year, Morikawa cut ties with Blackburn and began talking with Sessinghaus again. Morikawa contended at the Masters where he tied for third, was ninth at the RBC Heritage and was T16 at the Wells Fargo Championship, a turnaround coinciding with reconnecting with Sessinghaus just before the Masters.
Sometimes something new is better, sometimes not.
“I don’t regret it at all. Look, at the time – let’s call it last fall – I thought I had to, and to be honest, if I did it again, I probably would do it again because I thought we had exhausted all of our resources and all the things we tried, and nothing was working. So, I couldn’t get the shot that I wanted. So, what do you do? You change. If I kept going down that path, who knows where I’d be,” Morikawa said.
“So, I’m happy that I went out a different way, but you also learn about yourself, and you learn about what kind of golfer you are and what you need. It took that little span of so many months, and here we are today.”