Before we started — and before I had to say it out loud, on camera — I needed some clarification from Ludvig Åberg.
How do you pronounce your last name?
“I always tell people “Oh-berg” is the best way to say it,” he says. “I don’t know where the ‘Oh-bear’ came from, or the ‘Oh-burge’ [said to rhyme with ‘purge’]. I don’t know where that comes from.”
So how does he say it?
“It’s different in Swedish and English,” he explains. “That’s where where it gets a little tricky, is people are pronouncing it in Swedish; you can’t do that in America.
“If I go to Sweden, I say Oh-bear,” he says [editor’s note: this spelling doesn’t quite do it justice either — his pronunciation is almost closer to Oh-bair, or Oh-baiy, but with a cool rolled R, sigh, just watch the little video below]. “But the G is kinda silent in Swedish. But then you look at, like, ‘Forsberg’, you don’t say ‘Fors-bear’ [in the U.S.], know what I mean?”
In other words, Åberg understands your confusion.
“If I were to read the alphabet in Swedish, it’s totally different than English,” he says with a shrug. “It’s just different.”
So we got that out of the way.
All that was left was introducing the Swedish star and then standing beside him as he launched a half-hour of clinical golf shots into a North Florida headwind, one missile after another sent into onto the bottle-green Tour pros-only side range at TPC Sawgrass — for the latest episode of Warming Up.
Here are 10 things I learned from Åberg. (Eleven, if you count the pronunciation.)
Or here’s the video, if you want it straight from the source himself:
Like many pros I’ve talked to, Åberg starts by hitting his 60-degree wedge. This wasn’t the only 60-degree in his bag on the day we filmed; while he denies the veracity of a report that he always travels with 22 clubs, suggesting it lacked context, he admits that “I travel with quite a few different options”.
He starts by hitting some half-wedges, getting a feel for “how the club interacts with the ground.” He hits one shot trying to swing from the inside, hitting a draw, and another from the outside, hitting a cut. He flights one low and lofts the next one high, calibrating, messing around, finding his feels.
But unlike some other pros, Åberg doesn’t skip straight to his irons after a wedge or two.
“I like to touch all the wedges,” he says. “I like to do sand wedge, I like to do gap wedge.” He works his way into full swings now, picking targets, ramping up his warm-up, dialing in his scoring clubs.
Åberg is firing into the wind on this range, which I point out has always intimidated me during warm-ups. This is, it turns out, just one of about two dozen ways we identify which he is my superior.
“Sometimes if you want to practice it’s almost nice to have it into the wind,” he says. “Because if you can come out of that session hitting it nice, you know that things are looking pretty good. If I’m working on something and it’s downwind, you might not get that same feedback. You feel great, but then that first tee shot is into the wind and you’re like, ‘ah, s—.’
Two (of many) things that set Åberg apart are his commitment and his consistency. Case in point: On tournament days he’ll arrive at the course just over two hours before his tee time and meet with his caddie Joe Skovron, “somewhere quiet,” he says.
They’ll review the day’s pin locations and wind direction, one hole at a time. And they’ll make a plan.
“I think it just simplifies things because when we do get to the golf course we just do what we said we were going to do and it takes away all these emotional decisions you make on a golf course,” Aberg says. “Because sometimes you’re like, ‘ah, I just made two bogeys…’ but no, dude, we said we were going to do this, let’s do it.”
This is directly related to No. 3, but once Åberg and Skovron have settled on a plan, they try to stick to it — eliminating frustration, momentum or emotion from the equation.
“It simplifies in my head because I can prepare for it in here,” Aberg says, pointing to his head. “So I know before I get to No. 7 that I am going to hit this tee ball with this club, most likely — unless something wind-wise has changed. And I know if I get to No. 12 at TPC Sawgrass [the drivable par-4] I’m going to hit driver and I’m going to go for it. It makes things easier than standing on the tee box, like, ‘Should I hit 4-iron, should I hit this,’ know what I mean? So that’s where I’m at with those things.”
Does he change strategy in-round based on how he’s hitting it? Not really.
“I try not to,” he says. “Because driving is one of my strengths, I like to use it as much as I can. And just because I miss a few doesn’t really change that.
“Maybe if you’re coming down the last couple holes of a tournament … that’s a different angle to it.”
Åberg is almost sheepish talking about his ball flight because it’s just … very straight.
“On the golf course I like to do a little bit of both,” he says of hitting fades and draws. But even those don’t move much. A fade will fly straight and fall right. A draw will fly straight and fall left. Bubba Watson he ain’t.
“It’s just so straight,” I remark after one fastball down the middle.
“Yeah,” Åberg acknowledges, the way a mathematician might after putting down his chalk. “We’ve never really been working one way or the other, I feel like when I’m playing my best I’m able to do a little bit of what I want to.”
“I do it all in my setup,” he says. “If I’m going to play a draw right of this pin, I’ll aim a little bit right and close the face and my setup. I might move [the ball] back [in my stance].” But he doesn’t try to change anything in his swing or his release pattern — nothing more than a little feeling.
“Obviously moving the ball back in [my stance] it’s going to start a little further right,” he says. “I learned pretty quickly that’s the easiest way for me to feel it, because that way I’m keeping the big motion the same, and I’m just changing a little bit in the input to make that look different. And then obviously the opposite if I want to do it the other way [hit a fade]: move it up a little in my feet, open the stance and it should [fade] a little bit.”
Typically if Åberg misses something it’s because his setup was off, he says. That’s another reason that it’s helpful when your natural shot shape is straight and pure. Golf is tough enough; life is better if you only have to tweak the simple stuff.
The nine-window drill is popular with plenty of legendary ball-strikers, Tiger Woods among them. If you picture a strike-zone grid of sorts, with a high draw going in the top left, a medium draw going mid-left, low draw going bottom left — you get the idea.
“I think it’s the best thing ever,” Åberg says.
“I like to do it with my 7-wood,” he adds, a true sicko’s admission. “Because it really exposes like, hey I need to flight it, I need to hit it high…”
I jump in.
“How do you hit a low 7-wood?”
“Exactly,” he says.
It’s not just for drills — high-launch fairway woods are way in vogue, and Åberg is in on the trend.
In college in windy west Texas Åberg mostly hit 2-irons. But now, from under a Ryder Cup headcover, he pulls a 7-wood.
“[Two-iron] was great off the tee, not as great into par-5s,” he says. “Whereas the 7-wood, when I tried it out [in late 2023], I started playing around with it even more. And some of the best shots I’ve hit this year have actually been with 7-wood because you can hit it so high, stop it softer, and it’s great into par-5s.”
You may remember the 7-wood Åberg hit at Pinehurst in 2024 that stunned Skovron into a meme.
