Defending Tour champ Hovland rides rebound into Rockies

Four holes from the finish during the opening round in Memphis last week, Viktor Hovland drifted one step beyond what was next.

At 2-over-par through 15 holes in the St. Jude FedEx Championship, Hovland said he was calendaring practice time for the weekend under the presumption his form was tracking toward a missed cut.

"It didn't look very good," Hovland said on Wednesday at Castle Pines Golf Club. "I was almost mentally preparing to kind of be done at Memphis and just practice, getting some good work with (swing coach) Joe (Mayo) and keep practicing working on some things."

Something happened on the way to the range. Hovland recovered and tied for second place in Memphis to catapult himself to Colorado as part of the top 50 PGA Tour players vying for the BMW Championship in Castle Rock, Colo.

Hovland knows a little something about winning the BMW. He rallied in the same event in 2023, capping a nearly flawless final two days with a 61 on Sunday at Olympia Fields and finished two shots clear of Scottie Scheffler and Matt Fitzpatrick. Scheffler is currently No 1 and Fitzpatrick is 36th, at risk of missing out on the Tour Championship next week.

The defending FedEx Cup champion, Hovland said he likes his chances again this week, lending some legitimacy to labeling this stretch of tournaments the "playoffs."

"I think that's a little exciting. I think that gives everyone a reason to tune in and see what's going on and seeing guys that are just barely getting into the playoffs, and now you suddenly have a chance to win the whole thing," Hovland said.

'TWEAK THE MACHINE'

Even before Memphis, picturing Hovland in a position to compete at East Lake on Labor Day weekend was close to implausible. Hovland, all the way up to No 16 in the playoff standings, believes he's only part of the 50-player field this week because of his precise compartmentalisation skills.

"It's pretty miserable. When you're obviously playing bad golf – everyone plays bad golf occasionally, but I feel like I've always been very good at understanding why it's happened. And even if I understand why it happens ... how do I fix it? And that's been like a very difficult thing for me kind of throughout this year. ... That can feel a little bit, you feel a little bit helpless at times when you know what's wrong but whatever you do, it doesn't seem to go in the right direction.

"But I think at the end of the day, I've kind of comforted myself in the way that, like, I'm not broken. It's not my mind that's gone bad and I have to, like, 'Oh, 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're back to playing good golf again.'"