Norwegian Kristoffer Reitan pulled of an extraordinary win last week in the Truist Championship by capturing the $20 million signature event in only his 15th PGA Tour start.
With that kind breakthrough, you’d have thought Reitan wouldn’t have changed anything—from his breakfast choice to his underwear rotation—for the PGA Championship.
So how about switching out his winning putter only a few minutes before Saturday’s third round at Aronimink?
Superstitious, Reitan apparently is not, because he went from his newer Ping putter to an older one, and his strong play on the greens led to shooting a five-under-par 65 that vaulted him 47 spots up the leaderboard, into T-12, as the tournament went into the late afternoon.
Reitan was eighth for the earlier portion of the day in strokes gained/putting after ranking 86th and 130th, respectively, over the first two rounds.
As it turns out, Reitan is hardly afraid of making big switches on the whim of “feel.”
In the victory last week at Quail Hollow, he was using a new putter, Ping’s PLD Custom Ally Blue H with a white finish. He’d previously wielded a stick that he’d had for more than two years—the Ping Harwood, which he used for two big wins last year on the DP World Tour that earned him PGA Tour card.
So, going back to that one seemed hardly to take a second thought.
“I changed before last week and putted well with [the PLD], but, I don’t know, just something about the feel of it that, yeah, just didn’t really work [this week],” Reitan explained on Saturday.
“It could have been my fault too easily, but it was an easy choice to give the old putter a new go today, and I’m happy that I did. It’s a little bit different and it feels like I can be a little bit more positive with it because the insert is really, really soft.
“That was actually a good feeling to be able to actually put a proper stroke on it and not being afraid it’s going to run away from you, if you know what I mean.”
So, it may very well have been Aronimink’s fast and potato-chip shaped greens that made the putter useful, and it didn’t hurt that the PGA of America seemingly gave the players a break in the third round with more gettable pin positions.
Any way you look at it, it was an impressive bounce back for Reitan, who admitted that he was challenged this week to regain his focus—in only his fourth-ever major start—after such an emotional triumph in the Truist. He’s also been an iron man, with this appearance being his ninth in the last 10 weeks.
“Playing after a win, and especially on the PGA Tour, is something completely new to me,” he said. “So I’ve been trying my absolute hardest to just reset. It’s a difficult thing to do. … I feel a little bit drained at this point in time. But it’s still a major, so that gives you a little bit of extra energy. Hoping I can kind of try to keep going.”
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