We’ve all done it.
You’re on the range with some friends or family warming up and you play “pass the club.” Someone hits a few shots with your driver, you take a few cuts with one of their clubs, no big deal, right?
Well the same thing happens on the PGA Tour, just ask Danny Lee and Viktor Hovland. Lee was doing a speed session near Hovland before the first round of the World Wide Technology Championship at Mayakoba on Thursday and the two started to chat. We’ll let the young Norwegian take it from here.
“He asked me if I could hit some on his quad and I hit some drives as hard as I could and then he went back to hitting his and like I was just kind of a, I was just curious, I wanted to see if he could get his ball speed up with my driver that was a little longer,” explained Hovland. “Yeah, and then the rest is history.”
“The rest” in reality was Hovland’s driver snapping into pieces. Plural.
“Yeah, I don’t know where it snapped or how he snapped it, but I just look up after he hit the shot and it was in pieces,” added Hovland, who had a backup driver head, but didn’t have a backup shaft.
“James Hahn was in front and he was nice enough to lend me one of his backups. It’s a little bit shorter, it’s a different shaft, but honestly, almost helped me this week because it’s a little shorter,” said Hovland. “It probably goes 10 yards shorter, but I just felt like I could really hit it a little lower and a little straighter. So I’m hitting that thing really well.”
How well? Hovland, currently T-20 at 4 under, missed just two fairways but, “those weren’t with the driver. Every time I pulled the driver, it was in the fairway.”
Must be nice.