The Endearing Madness of Viktor Hovland

Viktor Hovland, in case you are not aware by now, might be the most curious athlete on the planet. It doesn’t really matter what the subject is, if it piques his interest, Hovland will take it out for a spin.

He likes to read books and listen to podcasts (although sadly not golf podcasts). He’ll go on sightseeing journeys to places like Stonehenge in England or the Native American burial mounds of Ohio when he’s traveling for work, and he will binge-watch movies if he cannot fall asleep.

When it comes to movies, we’re not talking about installments of “The Avengers.” He learned English by watching movies like “Lincoln” and “Amistad.” During COVID, he visited the prison where “The Shawshank Redemption” was filmed during the week of the Memorial. When Golf.com’s Sean Zak interviewed him back in 2021 and asked what he’d been watching recently, Hovland mentioned “The Experiment,” a movie based on the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment, where guards and prisoners can see each other at all times.

“They just go crazy after a while,” Hovland said.

I don’t know what Hovland thinks about classics like “The Godfather” or “Apocalypse Now,” but I thought about him recently when actor Robert Duvall passed away.

Duvall had very little connection to golf. He made one golf movie during his career — “Seven Days in Utopia,” a film that was widely panned — and he had little interest in the game. He told the L.A. Times in 2011 that he played some golf as a younger actor, but he didn’t love it because it took too long. Duvall accepted the role in the film, despite its limited budget, because he liked elements of the script. His character, an eccentric, aging Texas rancher, mentors a talented, young golfer, offering spiritual and life lessons. I’m not joking when I tell you that real-life golfer K.J. Choi is the villain in the film.

It was not “Seven Days in Utopia” that made me think of Hovland, however. It was a clip of Duvall talking about director Stanley Kubrick during an actors' forum hosted by The Hollywood Reporter several years ago. The clip was reshared widely after Duvall passed away at age 95.

At the beginning of the clip, actor Jesse Eisenberg is talking about his performance in “The Social Network” and what it was like to work with director David Fincher. Eisenberg shares that it took him a bit to understand that Fincher — arguably the best director of his generation — often required 50 takes from an actor just to get two usable ones.

“It’s an incredible experience,” Eisenberg said.

Duvall, sitting across the table, looks baffled. At one point during the clip, he turns to Ryan Gosling and gestures like he cannot believe what he’s hearing.

“Can I say one thing?” Duvall eventually interjects. “To me, the great Stanley Kubrick was an actor’s enemy. I can point to movies that he’s done with the worst performances I’ve ever seen by actors in his movies. ‘The Shining.’ ‘Clockwork Orange.’ Terrible performance. Maybe great movies, but terrible performances. How does he know the difference between the first take and the 70th take? What is that about? … I don’t want to be judgemental, maybe it was good for you, but I don’t quite get that.”

When I watched Hovland hit balls this week on the range at Riviera Country Club — with the assistance of yet another training aid — it made me wonder if he might be the golfing equivalent of Kubrick.

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There is unquestionable genius there, but in order to tap into it, he can’t help but flirt with madness. This week, he was wrapping an elastic yellow band around his body, trying to keep his arms wide in his backswing. At Pebble Beach, he was wearing pool floaties on his arms, like a toddler learning how to swim. At the Ryder Cup, he was spotted wearing a GBox, a training aid developed by instructor George Gankas, designed to help with rotation. He told teammate Shane Lowry it led to his “best range session in years.”

The thing about Hovland is, there is always a training aid whispering in his ear. If it’s not a training aid, it’s a new instructor. Or a YouTube clip. He cannot stop tinkering. Sometimes it works, as it did Thursday at Riviera. He shot 2 under in tough conditions and was happy to expound on training aids after his round.

“You might have seen the band drill that I was messing around with,” Hovland said. “It’s still trying to serve the same purpose [as the pool floaties]. But I felt like that actually made it easier for me to find something tangible I could take out onto the course. Trying to just get a little wider in the downswing. Not trying to pull my arms close to me. That’s what the floaties were for, trying to get some space in the downswing. It was just hard to feel that when I took the floaties away. We’re not quite there yet, even though this was a great round of golf. That was a huge step in the right direction.”

Urban legend has it that Kubrick required 148 takes to get one scene right in “The Shining.” Supposedly, he made Tom Cruise walk through a doorway 90 different times for a scene in “Eyes Wide Shut.” For a certain kind of genius, that’s part of the process. I have no idea if Bryson DeChambeau has seen many Kubrick films, but he often feels driven by similar obsessions that flirt with the razor’s edge of madness.

There is probably a bit of Duvall in Scottie Scheffler. Nothing flashy, nothing twitchy, just restrained intensity and consistency that, over time, hardens into gravitas. Every week, Scheffler works on maintaining his grip while Hovland chases a perfection that never seems sustainable.

I am grateful I get to be an observer of both.