Golf is a game designed to make you lose. So, any time you start succeeding, you always ask yourself: Am I over the slump? For 15 months now, that’s exactly what Viktor Hovland has been thinking. His persistent swing issues crept into self-doubt. And after claiming his eighth PGA Tour title at the 2026 Travelers Championship on Monday, he opened up about how hard it was to navigate through the 15-month winless drought.

“That’s one of the things that’s been very difficult, especially when you’ve been going through some struggles as I have,” he told the reporters after his win on Monday. “Some of the shots that I’ve been seeing are just like, whoa, how is that even possible? I’ve never seen some of these shots before. Then I’ve had moments where, okay, I think I’m onto something. It feels good, and then that one big miss comes back again.

“So if you’re playing good golf, it’s still kind of in the back of your mind a little bit. I don’t know if there’s this one point where you go, ‘Oh, I get it now.’ It’s just kind of those big misses stop happening, and you expect to see the ball going straight, like kind of what happened this week. And it did.”

Hovland’s first victory of the 2026 season didn’t come easily. On Sunday, Scheffler made an 8-foot par to force a playoff on the leader of the day. The PGA Tour had already announced that the two would be matching up on the 18th hole, which would be replayed until a winner was declared. And so, with about 3000 spectators in the gallery, the show began.

On the par-4 18th, both found the middle of the fairway. The world No. 1 hit his approach to four feet, while Hovland hit it to six feet. His downhill 7-foot birdie putt barely caught the inside of the cup on a sharp left-to-right break. On the other hand, Scheffler played his 4-foot birdie putt with a little too much impact, and it rolled over the left edge. With the latter eliminated in the sudden-death playoff, Hovland got the win for the Norwegian fans in the gallery, who visited the US for Norway’s upcoming game in Dallas, Texas — Scheffler’s hometown. They broke in a chant, “Vik-tor Hov-land.”

After all, Hovland’s win came after a long stretch of struggles.

His lone win in 2025 came at the Valspar Championship. Soon after, however, he missed three consecutive cuts at the Genesis Invitational, the Arnold Palmer Invitational, and the Players Championship. He still finished T-3 at the U.S. Open and T-21 at the Masters. But Hovland’s struggle dates back to late 2023.

Fresh off winning the FedEx Cup, he made a deliberate decision to add a draw shape to his ball flight. The move backfired. The 2024 season became the worst of his career. He recorded no wins, went through multiple coaching changes, and at one point even withdrew from a signature event because he no longer trusted the quality of his ball-striking.

Even in 2025, his driver remained a consistent issue. Speaking to the media after the round, Hovland admitted his driving “pissed me off.”

2026 tested his patience even further. At last week’s U.S. Open, an out-of-bounds tee shot on the 12th hole caused him to miss the cut by a single stroke. Through it all, Hovland has chosen patience.

“I’ve been like progressing the whole way, but still having a little bit of doubt in there. But this week I just kind of went to work and felt comfortable.”

He candidly traced his progress from the RBC Canadian Open into the Travelers Championship, describing each week as another step forward, even if everything still wasn’t quite clean.

Hovland fired his career-low 61 on Friday to take the lead into the weekend. As a player who has spent nearly two years unable to trust where his golf ball was going, it is a fitting ending.