Cole Anderson walked up to his bogey putt, tapped it in, and the emotions began to flow.

Relief. Excitement. Jubilation. All of which were a far cry from what he was feeling just last year.

Anderson, a golfer from Camden and a former star at Camden Hills Regional High School, earned a breakthrough victory last weekend by winning the Diners Club Peru Open on the PGA Tour Americas, the tier beneath the Korn Ferry Tour and two steps below the PGA Tour.

Nearly four years after Anderson challenged for a Korn Ferry win in Maine in his first professional tournament, he notched his first professional victory.

“I’m over the moon to get the job done, but then there’s also that sense of relief,” said Anderson. “I’ve been working hard for a very long time to compete at the pro level and ultimately win golf tournaments, so to get my first one here down in Lima was pretty awesome.”

Anderson, 25, shot 21 under and beat Patrick Flavin in a playoff to earn the $40,500 prize. It was Anderson’s fourth tournament this season under the PGA umbrella; he played in two Korn Ferry events, making one cut, and he placed 91st in an Americas event in Argentina in April.

“I’ve always had the big-picture belief,” he said, “but there’s some real, tangible evidence here now that the things I’ve been working on and the effort that I’ve been putting in are moving things in the right direction.”

His results last year threatened to derail that belief. After turning pro in June 2024 following his final year at Florida State, Anderson endured a “good 12-month stretch” in which his game slipped, the birdies stopped coming, and he fought to make cuts, let alone compete for victories.

“(It was) nowhere near the level of golf that I expect from myself,” he said. “There was a while there where my game felt pretty lost.”

Even when things started to go well, there was disappointment. At the Korn Ferry Tour qualifying tournament (also known as Q School) in October, Anderson progressed through the first stage and was playing well in the final round of the second stage when the round was cancelled because of weather. Anderson had five holes to play and was two strokes from the qualifying line.

“That was probably the most difficult pill to swallow, I would say, of my entire golfing career,” he said. “Outside of, maybe, my not winning the high school state championship my senior year.”

In 2026, however, Anderson has started to find success. He went to Q School for the Americas tour and tied for sixth out of 156 players, good enough to guarantee himself 10 starts on the circuit. Three weeks after making the cut in Argentina, he traveled to Peru to tee it up again.

“I was in south Florida, and I made a comment to somebody I was with before I left, just saying ‘I’ve got a weird feeling I’m winning one of these next two,'” he said. “‘I have no idea why, but I think I’m going to.'”

He started with rounds of 67, 67 and 68 and was in seventh place going into the final day. With a 65 in the final round, he climbed up the leaderboard.

“I had a feeling pretty early in that final round that I had the goods,” he said. “The ball was going to kind of go where I told it to.”

After eagling the 14th hole, he saw that he was tied for the lead. The familiar excitement, the reason Anderson plays the game, kicked in.

“It’s a feeling that I crave,” he said. “It’s almost like a drug. You get a hit of it and you feel alive.”

The tournament came down to a playoff, where Anderson won with a bogey to Flavin’s double bogey. Shortly after, two friends, Taylor Funk and Josh Lee, ran onto the green and gave Anderson a congratulatory beer shower. After initially ducking the spray, Anderson leaned his head back and welcomed it, basking in the moment.

“It was more, I guess, the stress and the frustration of the last two years leaving,” he said. “That was when I kind of realized what really happened.”

As a result of the victory, Anderson’s immediate future is more secure. He has the winner’s check to make travel expenses easier. He’s automatically qualified for Americas events this season and the next.

And he’s tied for second in the Americas point standings. If he’s in the top 10 when the season ends in October, he earns automatic qualification for the Korn Ferry Tour.

That, however, is a long way off, and Anderson knows it. He’s in Quito, Ecuador, playing in the next tournament. Even after his breakthrough, the Camden native is focused.

“It makes it a little bit easier to keep my head in that place that I want it to be, which is to just go play good golf,” he said. “We still have a long ways to go. … But this is about as good a start as I could have asked for.”