Where PGA Tour messed up on LIV, according to Viktor Hovland

Last week, the PGA Tour officially announced Brian Rolapp as incoming CEO. The beginning of the Rolapp Era means the beginning of the end of the Jay Monahan Era, which also means the next chapter of the PGA Tour-LIV saga — sure to be a defining issue of Rolapp’s tenure — is beginning, too.

The Tour has stabilized in the three-plus years since LIV’s first staged tournament and the frantic summer that followed. Players have largely stopped leaving. Sponsors are largely sticking around. TV ratings are largely ticking back up. The state of the Tour is optimistic. But that doesn’t mean everything’s perfect nor that professional golf is all the way healed; as evidence, this week the Tour’s Rocket Classic in Detroit will face off against LIV’s Dallas event. So even as the temperature has cooled in the league-vs.-league rivalry, the ongoing schism has people wondering what could have been done differently.

It’ll be interesting to see if we get some sort of exit interview where, with the benefit of hindsight, the longtime commish dives into some what-ifs. In the meantime, we have Viktor Hovland.

Hovland has been one of the Tour’s top players these last few years and among its most interesting talkers, too. Mostly he gets asked about the golf swing but also sometimes about the state of the world. Enter an interview with Brendan Porath of the “Shotgun Start” podcast ahead of last week’s Travelers Championship (and ahead of Hovland’s unfortunate WD), where he spoke freely and delivered a couple particularly interesting takes on Monahan’s missteps and the state of the Tour.

Hovland said he hadn’t attended the players meeting ahead of the Travelers where Rolapp was introduced; he’d been at a Titleist shoot. He doesn’t know a ton about their new leader, but he said he’s not surprised that Monahan is out after what he called the “tribulations” of the last few years — and expressed some skepticism at his lengthy exit plan. “I don’t know how normal it is to announce that you’re leaving and still work for another 18 months,” he said. Hovland’s simplest (and, for my money, most insightful) answer came when Porath asked him what he thinks the Tour could be doing better.

“I mean, I think everything could get better,” he said. Then he got more specific. “Especially the messaging the last couple of years, certainly in the face of the LIV tour emerging, I think the PGA Tour didn’t really go with the best strategy, y’know? I think the Tour certainly had leverage in terms of just historical events, tradition. And I think they should have honed in a little bit more on that. Just playing the money game and the finances — that’s a tough one to compete against the Saudis. So I think they really should just hone in on the tradition.”

As a newly designated Signature Event, the Travelers has upped its payouts these last few seasons; Keegan Bradley just won $3.6 million from a $20 million purse. But in Hovland’s mind the event formerly known as the Greater Hartford Open has a catalogue of moments that mean more to its significance than the first-place check.

“It’s a great event, and I think it’s just really cool to come back to places where you know past champions and you’ve seen shots coming down the stretch that you remember from, oh, that year that guy won and pulled off that shot. Like, that’s what makes the PGA Tour. That’s why people tune in to watch,” Hovland said. “You see storylines from the best players in the world, winning again, defending a win, a new emerging player changing their whole life by winning a tournament or a top finish that changes their career trajectory. And I think the Tour really needs to kind of hone in on that messaging, and creating better storylines, in my opinion.”

Still, unlike some of his peers Hovland would prefer someone else handle the politicking and storytelling; he said he hasn’t been particularly invested in the Tour’s governance, given his investment in his own game.

“The last couple years haven’t been the best on the course for me, so I’m just really focused on that,” he said. What does he make of it?

“It’s a little exhausting just to follow some of the stuff that’s happening,” he said. “I can draw a lot of similarities from the PGA Tour to just politics in general. And it’s like, the more I invest myself, just the more frustrated I’m gonna get.

“But the Tour does a lot of really good stuff and I am excited to come to every single event and compete,” he added. “So that’s what I wanna focus on — but I do feel like the management side has been a little bit messy, in my view.”

Hovland’s pro debut came at the Travelers in 2019. He thinks he’s a more complete player in many ways; he hits it longer, he’s in better shape, his short game’s better, he can read greens better, he can work the ball both ways, he’s more comfortable under pressure. Still, he can’t help but feel nostalgic for the simplicity of the past.

“The ignorance that I had back then of just stepping up and hitting a shot and the ball just going straight and kind of taking that for granted — those days were pretty fun,” he said.

A lot of things were simpler then.

You can listen to Hovland’s complete Shotgun Start interview (and learn his favorite fruit) here. You can dive into Hovland’s golf-swing mindset in the Warming Up interview below.

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