Midway through the 2024 season, Paul Peterson didn’t feel like himself. The veteran pro, who has visited at least 44 countries in a 13-year professional career, was often “looping” in his mind – a tendency to repetitively fixate on the causes, meaning and consequences of one’s distress, per Pysche magazine.

Since watching Payne Stewart win the U.S. Open on his grandparents’ floor in June 1999, Peterson was resolute that he would succeed as a professional golfer. There was never really a backup plan. He had found reasonable success on various tours across the globe, but he was amidst a rocky Korn Ferry Tour campaign where retaining his status for the next season was in question. Complicating matters: He now had a family to support.

Peterson, never one to strictly obey convention, found catharsis in an unlikely place. At the advice of mental coach Aimee Smith Schuster, he compiled bad thoughts and wrote them on sticky notes. He took them to a park, and he burned them.

“I was doing a lot of looping in my brain; the same stuff would come up and I was going down these rabbit holes, 15 to 20 minutes, and I would come back like, ‘Man, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time.’ There were some things that were not necessarily complete in my head,” said Peterson, who hails from Salem, Oregon.

“So we wrote everything down on sticky notes, burned it in a park, and I was able to free myself of a lot of things that were anchors and kind of holding me down.”

A few weeks later, Peterson won his first Korn Ferry Tour title and earned his first PGA TOUR card. At age 36, he was the oldest of 30 Korn Ferry Tour graduates in 2024.

Peterson enters the FedExCup Fall at No. 125 on the season-long standings, a number that for more than four decades would be enough to retain fully exempt PGA TOUR status for the next season. This year isn’t like the past four decades, however. Only the top 100 after the FedExCup Fall will carry exempt status into 2026, with Nos. 101-150 retaining conditional status of varying degrees. But with field sizes shrinking on TOUR, players outside the top 100 will likely plan to return to the Korn Ferry Tour in 2026 – and after working for 12 years as a pro to reach this point, Peterson doesn’t intend to relinquish his spot at the game’s highest level without a fight.

“Not many people get to say that they’ve played on the PGA TOUR, and I’m not going to take that for granted,” Peterson said after clinching his card. “This is living my dream, and I do not plan to take that for granted at all. I look forward to having a long career out there and being able to support my family.”

There has been some good in Peterson’s rookie TOUR season (a runner-up finish at the ISCO Championship, only to be outdone by the final-round 61 of his fellow rookie William Mouw) and some not-so-good, like 11 missed cuts in 20 starts. But the strengths of his game have endured. Peterson embraces his position as one of the game’s shortest hitters, knowing that his precision game can stack up against some of the world’s best – he won last year’s Simmons Bank Open for the Snedeker Foundation (which kicks off the Korn Ferry Tour Finals this week), and he has also counted wins on the DP World Tour, Japan Golf Tour, Asian Tour, Gateway Tour and Dakotas Tour. Entering the FedExCup Fall, Peterson leads the PGA TOUR in driving accuracy (73.87%), which compensates for his limited distance (he averages a modest 283.8 yards off the tee, No. 161 of 163 qualifying players).

There’s a story behind the statistics. As a high schooler, Peterson broke his leg in a freak accident back home in Oregon – he was walking down a ramp in front of his house, and his foot “went underneath me and twisted around.” He didn’t rehab it properly, he admits years later, and his physical limitations kept him from implementing the types of speed-training techniques that have bolstered the long game of so many TOUR pros in recent years, or from cultivating a swing that lent itself to a power game. “There were different things with my foot where I couldn’t move in a certain way that was going to make me a power player, because I was going to get injured,” Peterson said. “I’m not at the risk of the back injuries that I would be worried about had I pushed through that and done speed training and chased distance without the right biomechanics.

“I have picked up some distance here and there, but I can win with what I have.”

He took that attitude to heart. Rather than wallowing in his physical limitations, Peterson forged ahead with a successful college career at Oregon State under the tutelage of men’s golf coach Brian Watts. After completing his four seasons of eligibility in 2010, he stayed at Oregon State to complete his degree in speech communications before turning pro in 2012. As his dad saw it (and he agreed), one can only thrive in two of three things – academics, sports and socializing – in a window of time. Peterson focused on sports and socializing for four years, as he put it, then shifted that sports attention to academics to complete his degree before moving to his next chapter as a professional golfer.

After college, knowing he wanted to take his game to the next level, Peterson moved to the Phoenix, Arizona, metroplex and connected with a pair of teaching pros – Pat McGuire and Oscar Coetzee – who offered a 90-day program where they’d teach a select handful of young pros and also offer funding in the form of travel expenses and Q-School entry fees. McGuire preached patterns in the swing, while Coetzee focused on syncing a player’s personality profile and golf game. It was the right blend for Peterson, an introspective thinker who appreciates context. The program led Peterson to overseas Q-Schools and to a globetrotting lifestyle for his early years as a pro.

“I honestly don’t know where I’d be without those 90 days,” Peterson said. “I’m very, very fortunate to have been one of those people.”

All the while, Peterson kept a home base in the United States, first in Arizona before moving to St. Simons Island, Georgia, in 2018 – fueled by a desire to practice more in the wind, realizing he hadn’t carried the right mindset for windy conditions at events, and to better acclimate to Bermuda grass. Peterson made the cross-country move with his longtime then-girlfriend Maggie (they met as class partners during his final semester at Oregon State in 2012), to which he eventually proposed in a helicopter ride in The Remarkables, a mountain range in New Zealand, a gift from their close friends Ryan and Annika Fox with whom they became close on the international golf circuits in the mid- to late 2010s.

Maggie accepted.

The United States was always home base, and it was always Peterson’s ultimate goal to make a full-time living in his home country. Maggie Peterson never gave up on her husband’s lofty ambitions of earning a PGA TOUR card – not when travel logistics forced her to caddie for the final six holes of an event in South Africa due to a snowstorm in London that wreaked havoc on the travel plans of several tournament-related personnel (including Peterson’s caddie), and not when he felt like he was losing some of himself during that slump in early 2024.

The Petersons are young parents, and after Maggie mostly traveled with her husband through the globetrotting portion of his early career, she stayed mostly at home with their young son Wyatt throughout 2024. Peterson missed his family, and uneven results on the course didn’t help. He found solace in a few things, including the podcast hosted by former TOUR pro Morgan Hoffmann, who suffers from muscular dystrophy and competed alongside Peterson on the 2024 Korn Ferry Tour. After missing a cut in Florida early last year, Peterson approached Hoffmann in the locker room and thanked him for his podcast, “I Can Fly,” where Hoffmann and guests have honest conversations about personal struggles. “He said in his first podcast, ‘If we can affect one person positively, it’s worth our time,’” Peterson said. “I said, ‘I’m your one person.’”

The mental work with Smith Schuster helped as well. It wasn’t just writing bad thoughts on sticky notes and burning them. Peterson implemented routines like early-morning barefoot walks in the grass, which helped declutter his mind and allowed his trademark confidence to return. Another key element: a multi-month social media cleanse.

“We cleared out some of the junk that wasn’t serving me anymore,” Peterson said. “That (serve) was one of the words. If it doesn’t serve you, it’s gone. It’s easy for all of us to post pictures of things that are going well in our lives, but those are glimpses. I was in a place of struggle in life … I felt like I wasn’t myself, and I feel like I’m back to feeling like myself again.”

The one constant amidst the ups and downs: his family’s unwavering support. It makes for a loop of positive reassurance, one that ultimately propelled him to a PGA TOUR card, a small piece of hardware that connotes big emotions.

He looks to hang onto that card during the FedExCup Fall.

“It’s not lost on me what this means,” Maggie Peterson said in the immediate aftermath of her husband’s breakthrough Korn Ferry Tour victory in Nashville last fall, which earned him the requisite points to clinch his first TOUR card. “It’s been his dream from the day I met him, and something we’ve sacrificed a lot for. Fourteen weeks apart this summer and that was hard on him, on Wyatt and me.

“It’s always worth it, but this makes it even more worth it.”