Viktor Hovland describes the swing change that’s lead to his dip in form

Viktor Hovland arrives at TPC Southwind needing a good week if he’s to move up the FedEx Cup rankings and play his way into next week’s BMW Championship and next season’s PGA Tour Signature Events.

This time last year, he was about to crest a wave that would see him win back-to-back titles at Olympia Fields and East Lake, taking the top prize of $18 million at the Tour Championship, and then go on to be one of the star performers as Europe crushed the United States at Marco Simone Golf Club in Rome.

This year, however, he’s been a pale shadow of the man most felt was primed to become a major champion and the number-one ranked player in the world, and in his pre-tournament press conference in Memphis, he described the off-season swing changes that have contributed to his drop-off in form.

“I think that’s better maybe for another time because I don’t want to get super technical with this, but basically my pattern got off,” he said when asked if he could break it down. “The things that I did in my swing that made me good, that made me able to predict a certain ball flight, I went home and tried to do a certain move, not necessarily because I had in mind that I wanted to change my pattern. I knew my pattern was really good. But I was upset that I wasn’t cutting the ball as much as I would have liked. My ball flight started to become a little bit of a draw, which is fine. I was still hitting it good. But sometimes visually I would have liked to have seen the cut.

“Then in the off-season I made a conscious effort to try to cut the ball more, and when I did that, I ruined a relationship that happens in my swing that makes it really difficult for me to control the face coming down. So now it’s just kind of me learning from that. I know exactly why it happened. I know exactly what happens because I’ve gotten myself measured, and now it’s just kind of a process of getting back to where I was.

“But at least I know I have all the data and the facts on the table to go about it.”

One of the game’s more colourful characters, partly due to his drop in form and partly due to being less visible by not being a regular feature at the top of leaderboards, the Norwegian has often cut a dispirited figure this season, and he admits that his frustrations have come close to seeing him take time out to try to allow the swing changes to bed in more.

“I mean, it feels like it’s been a lot of peaks and valleys. I mean, it’s just not that fun to play golf when you don’t know where the ball is going,” he said.

“I do pride myself in trying to make the best out of it, but it gets to a point where you kind of lose that belief — you just see a shot, and that’s not good enough. I can try to grind my hardest. I can try to chip in from there. But you do that too often, too many times during the course of a round or a tournament, it’s too much to overcome, and I feel like it’s a waste of time for me to be playing golf if that’s where I’m at. I’d rather be off the golf course and work on it, trying to figure out why I’m doing those things.