For the first 69 holes of the PGA Championship, everything was coming up Viktor Hovland. Sitting eight shots under par, the 25 year-old Norwegian budding star entered the 16th hole on Sunday just one stroke behind the leader (and eventual champion), Brooks Koepka. Coming off top ten finishes at The Open Championships and The Masters, Hovland was in prime position to take home his first major championship with a strong finish at Oak Hill in Rochester. Instead, Viktor Hovland flopped on 16, limping to a double bogey after walloping the ball straight into the side of a bunker.
With the ball lodged so deep in the lip of the bunker that it was inaccessible, Hovland had to take a stroke penalty to remove it and then followed that up with a weak, defensive shot simply to get back on the fairway. In total, he needed six strokes on the par 4 while Brooks Koepka birdied. As a result, Koepka's narrow one shot lead ballooned to a massive four shot gap as Hovland fell back into third place. Ultimately, Hovland rebounded somewhat to tie for second with Scottie Sheffler, but his duffed bunker shot on 16 essentially clinched PGA Championship for Koepka.
Although Viktor Hovland's blunder seemed like a one in a million fluke (seriously, when was the last time you saw a ball disappear into a wall of sand and grass?), it was actually the second time that this happened this weekend; Corey Conners duffed a shot in that exact same bunker in the exact same fashion during his third round on Saturday, relinquishing the lead for good with a double bogey of his own.
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