Viktor Hovland at Royal Troon. | Photo by Jane Barlow/PA Images via Getty Images
Perhaps this new development explains why Viktor Hovland had a “miserable” campaign during the 2024 season.
Viktor Hovland will miss the rest of the DP World Tour season due to an undisclosed injury, according to Ben Parsons of Bunkered.
Hovland withdrew from last week’s BMW PGA Championship at Wentworth and has not played competitively since the Tour Championship in Atlanta in August. The week before, at the BMW Championship at Castle Pines, Hovland described his 2024 season as “miserable.” One year removed from winning the FedEx Cup in 2023, Hovland missed the cut at Augusta National, the U.S. Open, and The Open at Royal Troon. He did finish solo third at Valhalla, but the Norwegian posted only one other top-10 finish on the PGA Tour this past season.
Perhaps this injury helps explain those struggles.
Then again, Hovland fired and rehired his swing coach, Joe Mayo, throughout the 2024 season, so who knows the real reason for his troubles.
“Everyone plays bad golf occasionally, but I feel like I’ve always been very good at understanding why it’s happened,” Hovland said in Colorado.
“Even if I understand why it happens, it’s like, ‘Okay, how do I fix it?’ That’s been a very difficult thing for me throughout this year. But I think at the end of the day, I’ve comforted myself by saying, ‘I’m not broken.’ It’s not my mind that’s gone bad, and I have to, like, ‘What if I can never play golf again?’ It’s like, ‘No, my machine is a little bit off.’ We just need to tweak the machine a little bit, and then we’ll be back to playing good golf again.”
Hopefully, Hovland can fully recover over the next three months and begin the 2025 PGA Tour season feeling refreshed, healthy, and ready to go. But he will have some pressure on him when the new year begins, especially since he will have to work to make next year’s Ryder Cup team at Bethpage Black.
Jack Milko is a golf staff writer for SB Nation’s Playing Through. Be sure to check out @_PlayingThrough for more golf coverage. You can follow him on Twitter @jack_milko as well.
