OAKMONT, Pa. — Viktor Hovland followed a long, grueling U.S. Open round on one of the world's most difficult golf courses with a high-intensity range session. While most of his peers were at home on the sofa, Hovland was slamming drives into the darkening sky.
Hovland's game over the past year or so has been a puzzle that's slowly coming together—first fixing his chipping, then the self-described bad habits that had crept into his ball-striking. Working on those meant he momentarily neglected his putting practice. Then this week, the occasional driver misses.
It's the kind of frustrating golf whack-a-mole that every golfer knows too well.
"I'm super proud that I'm that close, but it's also kind of frustrating," Hovland said earlier this week. "Just can't seem to figure it out. It's like a lingering problem all this year, so it's kind of pissing me off."
J.J. Spaun's puzzle took a little longer to fit together.
Spaun had one PGA Tour win in his 13 years as a pro before this U.S. Open victory. He lost his card along the way after losing 50 pounds stemming from a misdiagnosis of type 2 diabetes. He spent years rebuilding his body, his swing, and his confidence, until it finally all came together at Oakmont. The most improbable of golfers at the most unlikely of venues.
Fascinating and frustrating, it's the task of figuring it out that gets us all obsessed with this maddening game. Whether it's the course in front of you or the swing you're using to play it, golf is a problem to solve. The solution never seems to stick around as long as we'd like, and we're never quite sure how long it's going to take to find. But when we do get a taste—whether it's on U.S. Open Sunday or a weekend round with friends—there's nothing sweeter.
1. Don't sway your backswing
There's a technical reason for Hovland's occasional block-right misses, and his team says it comes right here, at the top of his backswing.
As Hovland began adding power to his golf swing, which transformed him into an elite player, his upper body began swaying a little more off the ball. This opened up a larger gap between his upper and lower bodies.
When golfers have their upper body further behind their lower body, it tends to promote a more in-to-out swing. If you're chasing draws, more of this move could help. If you're a fader like Hovland, a move like this could create a mismatch, and blocked shots out to the right.
Hovland's dialing in the mechanical side of things, and practicing a little positive self-talk in the meantime.
"I know I need to work on some stuff and get back to where I used to be in a way mechanically, but in the interim, I can still perform at a really high level, and there's a lot of good stuff," he said after his final round. "I just have to take that with me and be a little bit kinder to myself."
2. Backside flip your downswing
J.J. Spaun's coach, Adam Schriber, told me something interesting over the weekend: That Spaun's background as a skateboarder has been strangely beneficial to his golf swing.
Good golf swings have lots of side-to-side movement, which is created by lots of side-to-side pushing into the ground with your feet and body. It's a particular movement that can hamper a lot of golfers' progress. Humans are mostly designed to work well up-down, and forwards-backwards. Pushing sideways while jumping and turning is one of those things that only really happens in certain sports. Golf is one of those sports.
Skateboarding is another.
Schriber said that in Spaun's case, Spaun's hobby helped his profession.
"We worked loading into his right leg then getting off it," Schriber said. "You need to push then turn into your left leg to do that. He got it right away. He told me: 'It's just like a backside flip' or something. I told him 'I have no idea what that means, but go for it.'"
I, too, have no idea what that means. But according to the Internet a frontside 180 is, essentially, when you push into the front of the skateboard with your front foot then quickly pull back, so the board gets airborne while spinning and turning.
Whatever it is, it's the same thing in golf. Pushing into your front foot, then spinning and turning off it. It was an interesting crossover feel that worked for Spaun. Maybe it will for you, too.
3. How to guess right from the rough
Major championship setups produce a series of unintended consequences. Turn one dial up to reward one area of the game, and something unforeseen happens in another area. One way we saw this was with the heavy rough around the green.
Oakmont grew the rough to reward players who drove their ball into the fairway and onto the greens—and it did. The problem was that it inadvertently rewarded bad chippers. The gnarly rough around the greens meant chipping your ball close was almost impossible. The best players could hope for was gouging their ball somewhere on the green (and about 20 percent of players didn't even accomplish that).
"It's a complete educated guess," Patrick Reed said, explaining the challenge of the rough. "When the grass is that long and growing in so many different directions, you have no real idea how it's going to come out. That's the challenge of a U.S. Open."
Reed said there's a kind of checklist to run through to make your best, possible, educated guess:
- How high in the grass is the ball sitting?
- What direction is the grass around the ball growing?
- The rough is going to twist the clubface closed—but how much?
Andy Lyons
4. Ball back to hit the ball on the screws
As Reed alludes to there, when your ball nestles into rough as long as it was at Oakmont, it's like trying to hit a golf ball off a tee, except you're not exactly sure how high the tee is. That can make things really tricky, because if the ball is sitting higher up in the grass than you think, you're going to hit the ball off the top of the face. It's the quickest way to turn a decent recovery shot into a disastrous one.
How do you avoid that error? It's about matching your ball position with the low point of your swing. Drop the ball further back in your stance when the ball is high in the grass—and even further back when the ball is deep in the grass.
"It'll help you catch the ball a little earlier…when the low point is too far behind the ball from the heavy rough, it's going to be too hard for the club to move through it," says short game coach Parker McLachlin.
The further back the ball is in your stance, generally speaking, the steeper you'll get. Collin Morikawa says it's matching the amount of steepness you need with the lie.
"It's just knowing where the low point is of your swing and knowing how steep you need to get at the ball. It's a hard judgment because you have to get steep in the rough, so you have to get steep to get down to the ball, yet you can't just keep going because there's no ground to let it bounce off of and then come up. Yeah, the lie looks bad, but it's also where is the club coming from; it's coming from behind the ball. So it's like, am I going to be hitting a lot of grass, can I get steep to the ball, can I honestly get through the grass to where you don't have to get it steep?"
5. Keep your hands close to your body
Perhaps my favorite memory of this 2025 U.S. Open will be watching two legends, Jack Nicklaus and Johnny Miller, sitting side-by-side, clicking into golf swing mode.
There was so much gold in this exchange, but this tip was especially brilliant:
"I remember Byron Nelson when I went to see him years ago…he says, I don't believe you can ever have your hands too close to your body when you swing. Johnny was very much the same way, you were well under the ball and hands were way close to your body. When your hands get away from your body then you make bad swings."
When your arms get away from you on your downswing, they're probably coming over the top. If they're getting away from your body on your release, you're probably getting stuck. The idea of keeping your hands close to your body is a simple swing thought that makes sense to dial in your swing path. No matter the generation, the truly great players always seem to figure out the best, simplest ways of doing the really important stuff.
6. Speed and direction work together
When Henry Fownes built Oakmont he didn't move much dirt around; he built the course into the natural, rolling contours of western Pennsylvania. It means the kinds of putts you don't just go up or down hills, or move severely from right to left. They go on a kind of rollercoaster ride: Up while going left, then down while going right.
And that changes the way they break.
Uphill putts don't just break less overall, but they break much less at first, then way more at the very end when they're running out of speed. The opposite with downhill putts: Those putts break more overall, but more consistently the entire time they roll. The final third of the putt has the most effect.
Andy Lyons
In short, it's complicated. As one of golf's most elite putters, Sam Burns, explains:
"You're trying to figure out, 'OK, this putt breaks seven feet right-to-left but the first half is putting back up the slope and then really once it starts turning it's picking up speed. That's the really tough part about these greens. It's not so much the raw speed of these greens; it's the adjusted speed with how much slope there is."
7. Stick with something
There's been an interesting phenomenon recently where a vast majority of recent major winners have had longtime coaching situations. Sam Burns fits the mold, and he spoke about it after his third round:
"My dad has always said you've got to dance with who brought you. For me, my coach and I have been working together since I was 15 or 16, and to me it seems way more complicated to go seek advice from someone else who doesn't know me or know my golf swing. I fully trust him and what he thinks and what he says, and our relationship is much more than just a swing coach. So I think for me golf is complicated enough, it's difficult enough. For me I have always thought just trying to keep it simple and just figure out what works for me."
I like that quote for a few reasons, but mostly because it underlines the importance of committing to something when it comes to your golf swing. Tinkering and blindly reaching for that latest tip is well-meaning, but isn't going to help you much. There are lots of different ideas that can help you play better golf.
At a certain point, you just need to pick one and stick with it.
8. There's no shame in playing ugly
Finally, just a reminder that good golf at a place like Oakmont doesn't need to be pretty golf. We all aspire to hit better golf shots, but mid-round at a difficult golf course may not be the best time and place to worry about that. Just ask Robert MacIntyre, who hit almost 70 percent of Oakmont's fairways (the fifth-most of anyone) and finished 2nd in the tournament.
Often, good golf is ugly and boring. And that's OK. Sometimes, slapping an ugly slice into the fairway does the job just fine.