Straightforward and candid. This is how Viktor Hovland speaks when asked about the upheavals golf has been experiencing in recent years, which have multiplied in recent weeks with Jon Rahm‘s signing by LIV Golf. The Norwegian does not criticise the Spanish golfer in the slightest, but rather points the finger at the poor management of the PGA Tour, as he revealed on the Discovery FORE! podcast.
The bombshell of Rahm’s move and the “domino effect” that his joining the Saudi league will supposedly bring, in the words of Greg Norman, have put the world number four’s name on the table as a possible addition to LIV. The 26-year-old golfer has no intention of moving. Will we not see him on the dissident circuit soon? “No, I doubt it,” the Nordic champion of the Tour Championship, the BMW and the Memorial in 2023, bluntly concludes.
“I don’t know how much more money LIV intends to keep throwing around. Now it seems they are a bit satisfied: they have enough players for things to happen a bit on their own,” continues Hovland, who is not at all attracted to the format: “I’m not very fond of playing without a cut. You need the pairing with 150 players and a cut. If you don’t play well enough, you’re out,” he assures. Moreover, he is convinced that his evolution would not have been the same had he left: “If I had gone to LIV, I don’t think I would have become a better golfer. And this is, in a way, the end of the debate. But I can’t blame people who make that decision and go there. So we’ll have to try to come to an agreement in the end. We’ll see,” he stresses.
Delving into this issue, Viktor does admit that “you have to think about the alternatives that exist. What is better for me? Maybe I can be part of the change in professional golf? Now things have to happen. You can’t have a division going in that direction, it will only destroy golf,” points out the Norwegian, but makes it clear that “talking about Jon Rahm being a bad person and that LIV is scary indicates that you are thinking too much about the small things. You’re not seeing the big picture. So I hope things happen, but I don’t know. I just hope that in the future everything will return to some normality. It’s important that the fans don’t get lost in all this. Without fans, there won’t be as many tournaments we can play, and it won’t be as fun to play them. We have to find a product that people want to continue to follow,” he continues.
And the Nordic does not hesitate to lash out at the PGA Tour for its poor management of the crisis since it announced in early January that it would reach an agreement with the Saudi Public Investment Fund without the players’ knowledge, something that upset them, and insists that he understands Rahm’s decision: “It would be too foolish to criticise players for leaving. After all, only one side is heard in the media, and there are quite a few different things happening at the same time. I totally understand why he left. That’s a lot, a lot of money. And especially when the PGA Tour management has done such a poor job. To be clear: I’m not complaining about the position I’m in and I’m very grateful for everything. But the management has not done a good job. They almost see the players as labour and not as members of the Circuit. After all, we are the PGA Tour. Without the players there is nothing. When you then see what happens behind closed doors, how the management really makes decisions that are not the best for the players, but for themselves and what they think is best… After all, they are not professional golfers. They are businessmen who say ‘no, it should look like this and that’. There is a lot of arrogance behind all this,” Hovland lashes out at Jay Monahan, commissioner of the PGA Tour, and his team.
Certainly, just as Rory McIlroy called for a change in the rules so that Rahm can be on the Ryder team at Bethpage in 2025, Hovland does not bury the Spanish champion, but goes further and lashes out at the executives who have conducted negotiations with LIV without involving them at all.
