When Kristoffer Reitan rolled in a short putt on the 18th hole at Quail Hollow on Sunday evening he took on a new identity in the world of golf: PGA TOUR winner.
In the last 18 months he has also become a professional winner, DP World Tour winner, dual member and Masters competitor and at this week’s US PGA Championship he will complete his set of Major Championship appearances.
At 28 years old and sitting 25th in the Official World Golf Ranking as he enters his prime years, the Norwegian’s golfing future looks secure and likely to go in only one direction.
But it has not always been this way and it would be fair to say that his nearly eight years as a professional so far have seen as many lows as highs, with the lows perhaps reaching greater depths than the highs have altitude.
“Golf is a difficult game,” he told the DP World Tour, days before his victory at the Truist Championship. “It’s hard to explain sometimes why it’s going well, why it’s going poorly, sometimes there’s no correlation but sometimes there’s a huge revelation in there to why things are going the way they’re going.
“I definitely learned from that and I try to use that sometimes as a reminder of how tough it can be and try to be a little bit more grateful for the times when it is going well.
“That’s why after a lot of times on the golf course when things aren’t going as you hope, it’s pretty cool to come back in the way that it has done the last couple of years.
“I’ve seen how quickly you can fall down and it’s pretty cool to see how quickly you can rise up so that’s a good reminder as well that it can easily go both ways.”
Reitan’s early days in the game certainly saw more highs than lows after he first touched a club at the age of five playing with his golf “obsessed” dad.
From that moment golf took a “very, very high priority” for the Reitans and Kristoffer made the most of it, representing Norway and Europe around the world and winning the Junior Golf World Cup and Jacques Léglise Trophy along the way.
It was in those days that Reitan struck up a friendship, and healthy rivalry, with Viktor Hovland, who has since gone on to win the FedEx Cup, a Rolex Series title and two Ryder Cups with Europe.
And while Hovland’s professional career undoubtedly found its feet before Reitan's, Reitan this week moved above his countryman in the Official World Golf Ranking.
“We’ve travelled together a lot because out of the four or five guys that practised and played a lot together during that time, we were the closest in terms of age,” Reitan said of Hovland.
“We know each other pretty well and it’s defintiely inspiring to see what he’s been able to do. We’re competitors as well so I want to beat him and he definitely wants to beat me too, even though he’s had the upper hand the last seven years or so.
“It definitely inspires and seeing a guy like that do that well, I’ve practised with him so many times and I see what he is good at and I see what I am good at and it’s a good way to measure up where you are a little bit in terms of getting to that next level. He’s been a good role model in a way but also a yardstick because you know that if you beat him in practice, you can play very well.
“On the male side, we haven’t had a profile like that that has broken through in the way he has so it’s been pretty special to have a fairly close relationship with him.”
While still an amateur and just 18 years old, Reitan finished second, third and fourth in Nordic Golf League events before heading to the United States to play at the University of Texas.
He pledged to give it a year but after feeling his game was “stalling” and “mediocre”, he returned to Europe after a single semester.
“It could be the wrong choice, it could be the right choice,” he said of that decision. “At the end of the day, if I were to do it again I would be a little more patient and have stuck it through a bit more and at least given it that year and I would have liked to have given it the full four years. I think that would have been good for me and good for my development as a player but also just mentally being more prepared.
“At the same time, there’s not a whole lot I can do about that. If I were to do it again, for sure, but things work out the way they work out and at this point I’m in a good spot so it’s hard to tell.”
At first the decision looked to pay dividends as Reitan secured the last card after coming through all three stages of Qualifying School – the only amateur to do so in 2018 - and entered the paid ranks.
A top five in Australia gave him a platform from which to build but he would make just three cuts between May and October 2019, losing his card and dropping to the HotelPlanner Tour.
With only limited status on that Tour in 2022, Reitan shut down his season in April and would not hit a ball in a ranking event for almost eight months.
During that time he suffered not only a crisis of confidence but a crisis of identity, one which would make him almost walk away from the game.
“I learned to fight very, very hard for my scores, even if my game doesn’t feel 100 per cent,” he said.
“There was a little bit of immaturity, maybe. You go out on tour and the first thing you think about always is that these guys are incredible, they’re so good and so solid, everything needs to be perfect and that’s the common mistake to make when you make the step up in the pro ranks.
“Then you try to do everything perfect and you just end up not being a good a player as you were.
“I was getting beaten down pretty badly out on the golf course mentally. Even if it goes badly on the golf course I want to see some sort of progress in any department of the game, I’ll take it. But it came to a point where you can go months, even years from seeing progress and then you show up into a tournament and after a while you just get very beaten down mentally.
“That was the time where I was thinking I should probably get some distance and try to look at it a little more from the outside instead of being in the heat of it all the time. It was a decision I made not very lightly but it was something I thought would benefit me in the long run.
I went through a period of a lot of self-reflection and trying to figure out: if it’s not golf, what is it? I don’t know if I got to a conclusive answer. It was difficult, it was like an identity crisis in the heat of it
“It was an interesting period for sure because I went into it with an open mind a little bit. I thought at that point that I was going to go all the way down to Nordic League again and would have to build my way up if I decided to continue playing which was a devastating choice to make. At the same time, I just found it was the only reasonable solution.
“I always wanted to make it work and during that period I remember just looking back to when I was probably 12 and a huge part of my identity has been golf. It's very, very difficult to go through a period where you start doubting yourself a lot and start thinking: I’ve identified myself as this talented golf player for a while and suddenly that’s just being stripped away piece by piece. That was very difficult.
“I went through a period of a lot of self-reflection and trying to figure out: if it’s not golf, what is it? I don’t know if I got to a conclusive answer.
“It was difficult, it was like an identity crisis in the heat of it.”
From those dark moments came a splinter of light, however: an opportunity to just play the game he had loved most of his life without the pressure of competing.
He returned for the 2023 season and while it was a campaign of grind that saw him finish 88th on the Road to Mallorca, Reitan was at last enjoying his golf again.
“Luckily that period for me ignited a little bit more of an enjoyment for the sport so I decided to just do it more on a hobby basis and have more fun on the golf course with friends and that was a good way to get back into it,” he said.
“I’m glad I got a little bit of the playfulness back in my game because I think that was a huge part of it. For a period of time it was so serious all the time and about doing the right things all the time, there was not a lot of playfulness in there, it was not very childlike in the way you would approach things and try to have fun on the golf course.
“It was just, this shot better be good or else. Which is not a very healthy place to be so that was a good way to trigger that a little bit and once I started playing for fun again, that’s when that got back into my mind a little bit.
“It was a cool thing to reveal in the middle of that difficult period. Even that first year back on the Challenge Tour I had that fresh in my mind and I had a lot of fun playing golf. Even though it was a lot of hard work and a grinding season, that was in the back of my mind and I never had doubts in there so that was a groundbreaking year.”
The end of 2023 brought a new swing coach in the form of Denny Lucas and a new initiative in the NextUp Golf Team as Norwegian professionals Reitan, Hovland, Kristoffer Ventura and Andreas Halvorsen came together to run training camps and build the profile of the game in their homeland.
And while the project is largely to help others, Reitan himself has felt the benefits.
“A lot of it was trying to keep the Norwegian players connected and almost bring it back to the good old days a little bit where we would meet up with the federation and have practice camps and compete and ultimately make each other good,” he said.
“I benefitted from that tremendously. A little sense of belonging in that group and also feeding off the energy of the other players was pretty special and I felt like that was one of the things that laid some good groundwork for the season that was about to come.”
Once again Reitan had a limited category on the HotelPlanner Tour and was 36th on the Road to Mallorca heading into the season-ending Grand Final.
A first professional victory thanks to four rounds in the 60s catapulted him up the Rankings and just two years on from almost quitting the game, he was back on the DP World Tour for the first time since 2019.
In the summer he would win again, coming from nine shots back to win the Soudal Open after a play-off en route to gaining dual membership with the PGA TOUR.
Another victory at the Nedbank Golf Challenge in honour of Gary Player came in December and that win lifted him into the top 50 on the Official World Golf Ranking and earned him a place at the Masters.
“That was a special year and a year I’m going to remember for the rest of my life,” said. “It was good to get that affirmation that you are indeed a pretty good golfer.”
Now living in Florida on the same street as Ventura and Marco Penge and with the Højgaard twins not far away, Reitan admits his American adventure so far has been a “learning curve but also a very, very cool experience”.
It is something he will now have to get used to as a PGA TOUR winner and regular in the world’s top 50, with such success bringing many benefits.
His win at Quail Hollow secured him a second appearance at the Masters next season and as he now gets ready to complete his Major set at Aronimink, he is ready for more “pinch-me moments”
“It’s weird how you play a tournament and you are a competitor in the field but at the same time you’re starstruck by the golf course,” he said of his trip down Magnolia Lane. “That is a situation I haven’t found myself in that much. That was incredible.
“It was a very cool week that I didn’t want to end ever.
“I was walking up 15, my drive was in the middle of the fairway and I was preparing for my second shot looking down on that green and I was thinking, ‘am I watching TV right now? Am I here?’. That was the true moment for me where it settled in a little bit.”
He added: “I feel like I've been pinching myself for pretty much a year-and-a-half. It feels a little bit surreal because these last couple of years have been so rich in experiences that I feel like I’ve been around the top level a lot of years. The development curve has been so steep and it’s happened very, very quickly which is a pinch me moment a lot of times.
“It has been a little bit difficult to deal with at time with the quickness of it, you feel as if things are moving almost a little bit too quick at times but it’s been a very, very welcome circumstance and I hope this adventure continues for a long time.”
Reitan may have taken the tough route but he certainly looks comfortable at the top of the game.
“If it’s not golf, what is it?” has become a redundant question. It’s golf.
