Viktor Hovland knew he was playing the best golf of his life. Staked to a six-shot lead Sunday in the Tour Championship, he figured a steady diet of fairways and greens and plenty of pars would be the safest route to winning the FedEx Cup.
Xander Schauffele made him change his plans. And then the 25-year-old Norwegian star performed even better. Hovland didn't flinch under a relentless challenge from Schauffele, matching birdies at East Lake from start to finish until he capped off the best two weeks of his career with his biggest trophy — a FedEx Cup title and the $18 million US bonus.
He closed with a 7-under 63, the lowest score by the winner in Tour Championship history, and won the Tour Championship by five shots over Schauffele. "The game plan was to try to play as boring as possible — play it like Tiger back in the day when he would post a 69 or 70 in a major championship and walk away with the victory," Hovland said. WATCH | Hovland claims FedEx Cup title: This was anything but boring golf — Hovland with a 63, Schauffele with a 62.
A six-shot lead was cut to three shots on the back nine until Hovland poured in a 25-foot par putt on the 14th hole that made an already steep hill all but impossible for Schauffele to scale. "What he was doing today was very special," Hovland said. "It made this day more stressful than it should have been." So ended a season when Hovland won for the first time in the United States at the Memorial, had a multiple-win season, and then capped it off with two weeks of such sublime golf that he won the BMW Championship at Olympia Fields and the Tour Championship at 36-under par.