PALM HARBOR, Fla. – Viktor Hovland is a perfectionist. Why wouldn’t he be?

“I just view it as if you put your heart and soul into doing something, you might as well do it right,” Hovland said after winning the Valspar Championship on a thrilling Sunday outside Tampa. “I find it kind of weird that we're professional athletes and the people that are wanting to improve are somewhat looked at as, ‘Oh, he's a perfectionist, he's out on the perimeter searching too much.’ It's like, that's what we do, we are here to get better and we are here to win tournaments.

“So, if you're not going to try to get better, what are you doing?”

Hovland won the Valspar Championship by one stroke Sunday, carding a final-round 67 at Innisbrook Resort’s Copperhead Course to finish at 11-under, one stroke clear of a hard-charging Justin Thomas, who bogeyed two of his final three holes for a closing 66. The Valspar is Hovland’s first PGA TOUR win since back-to-back titles at the BMW Championship and TOUR Championship in the summer of 2023 when he won the FedExCup and firmly established himself in professional golf’s elite tier. He was happy but not satisfied, believing there was a gap between his game and its full potential. He cycled through swing instructors, studied new theories, and saw his results plummet – he notched just two top-10 finishes in 2024, and he entered the Valspar yet to make a cut in an event with a cut in 2025.

Hovland knows some might wonder why he’s chasing that perfect feeling – when asked Sunday if he considered himself a perfectionist, he answered with an air of defiance that implied he heard the rhetoric volleyed across the golf landscape in the past 18 months or so: Was Hovland like a dog chasing its tail, descending into rabbit holes for answers that didn’t exist?

Motor patterns, stalling the body, acquiring and integrating information, connecting feels – listening to Hovland requires your head to remain on a swivel. He speaks of identifying root “issues” in his swing and addressing them gradually – and his litany of coaching changes suggests that he rarely, if ever, reaches complete satisfaction with his game.

The Norwegian believes he’s still a work in progress, but this week countered any notion that his game has fallen into the abyss. Early in the week, he identified a swing feel that reminded him of his early days as a pro, said his longtime caddie Shay Knight. He parlayed that feel to strong ball-striking numbers at the Copperhead Course (19th in Strokes Gained: Off-the-Tee; sixth in Strokes Gained: Approach the Green) – and to his seventh PGA TOUR title.

“He’s really hard on himself, but as soon as he finds some little swing cue, thought, he tends to take it on board, and it happens really fast,” said Knight, who has worked with Hovland since his first year as a pro in 2019. “He had that swing thought, and it just seemed to click; I knew something special was going to happen this week with the swing thought.

“It was something small that he used to do back in the day, but he’s kind of got away from it with the speed training that he’s done in the past, and everything. He had that swing thought and ran with it … He’s a confidence player. When he has that confidence, he can beat anybody, and that’s what he’s done this week.”

Hovland concurred Sunday that he’s seeking a return to old feels.

“Especially when I know there are issues there, it's not like I'm inventing stuff. I have data that can show that what I used to do was objectively better than what I'm doing now,” Hovland said. “So why shouldn't I try to go back to what I used to do?”

Hovland recently reunited with Grant Waite, a former TOUR pro with whom he split in early 2024, and the two had a productive range session last Monday in Orlando that inspired Hovland to remain in the Valspar field after three straight missed cuts, including a first-round 80 at THE PLAYERS Championship last week. Waite accompanied Hovland to the Valspar for further work on Tuesday and Wednesday, and the improvements continued – all the way into the winner’s circle.

Hovland said throughout the Valspar that his game was a work in progress; he said immediately afterward that things weren’t there. It’s hard to reconcile that mindset with a PGA TOUR title, but Hovland offered some insight in an anecdote Sunday evening. He’ll often chat with his mom after a poor round, and she’ll say, “Oh, there were a lot of people that played poorly today,” to cheer him up – but it never consoles him.

“He’s very hard on himself, but he is a perfectionist,” said Knight.

Interestingly, Hovland’s perfectionist tendencies don’t apply outside of golf. In other areas of life, he’s satisfied with an 80% threshold – one’s body possesses a finite amount of energy, and golf is where he wants to reach 100%. In the game, if he doesn’t feel all the way there, he’ll keep unturning all the stones that he can. It might lead to a mini-slump or confusion with his swing and its patterns. But he’s a maniacal competitor with otherworldly talent, and he’ll figure it out. After winning the Valspar, he’s confident Waite is the right guy to help him get there.

“He's definitely put his heart and soul into looking at all the different golf swings that I've sent him,” Hovland said of Waite. “It's challenging because I have a very unique pattern and it's unconventional and I would say most coaches probably would like to make my swing more conventional and hopefully try to fix the problem. But that's not really how my golf swing works. And I really trust Grant, because he can, he sees it and knows what kind of matchups need to be there for it to work. So, yeah, it was obviously a good first week together, so hopefully just build on that.”

Hovland’s talent rose down the stretch Sunday at the Valspar, notably at the par-4 16th hole, the first leg of the vaunted “Snake Pit” closing trio. Trailing Thomas by one stroke, he chose 3-iron off the tee and found the right side of the fairway (after finding the left trees with 3-wood on Thursday and Saturday). He took dead aim with his approach shot and flagged it, striping 7-iron from 187 yards to 6 feet and converting the birdie to assume a share of the lead.

That approach at 16 was a key indicator, per Knight, that Hovland was finding his way back to elite form.

“The 7-iron into 16 today was unbelievable, to go at that flag when I said we want to be a hair left of this flag, because you can’t miss it right, and he went straight at it, and you know that he’s confident when he’s doing stuff like that,” Knight said Sunday. “That’s probably the one shot for the week that he needed to hit at the time to win the golf tournament, and he did.”

Hovland laced a 5-iron to 12 feet for birdie at the par-3 17th, allowing the cushion to make bogey at the par-4 18th after Thomas made bogey in the group ahead. Hovland missed the fairway right off the tee at No. 18, but he played his second shot just short-right of the green, chipped to 11 feet and two-putted for the winning bogey.

Is Hovland back? Depends on the definition. He believes he’s a work in progress – but that level is good enough to win on the PGA TOUR. So, doubt his process at your peril.

“I don't care too much about other things outside of golf,” Hovland said Sunday. “Because I don't have time or energy to put the same amount into other things, so naturally when you only get to do certain things just a few times here and there, you can't have a perfectionist mindset, if that makes sense. So I just try to do 80%, just do good enough and then hopefully over time … you would like to see an improvement, just get a little bit better all the time. But I'm not super hard on myself if I'm not really good at something when I haven't put the effort into it.

“But golf is, it's been my life for a long time, it's what consumes my thoughts and my time, so if I'm not spending that time to do it correctly, then what am I doing?”

Hovland might fall down again – but you’d better believe he’ll make his way back up.