Paige Spiranac: Bullied her entire life, Instagram star changes professional golf world

The crowd was smaller than she expected. But there was still nowhere to sit, so Paige Spiranac leaned on a low table and waited for the noise to fall.

She passed out a stack of anti-bullying flyers, making sure all two dozen girls at a North Phoenix Boys and Girls Club had one. The girls jostled for position on the couch and sent Snapchat videos of her to their friends. They stared up at her, waiting.

“I’m a professional golfer,” Spiranac said, introducing herself. “I’m a social influencer.”

One description had lately rung truer than the other. Spiranac, 24, had collected one professional golf win, 1.2 million Instagram followers and a string of titles that always surrounded her name: Dream girl. Instagram sensation. The world’s hottest golfer.

Rarely did the headlines include what she had spent her life trying to become.

Spiranac was a social media star who avoided attention. She never wanted to be seen. Not without a club or a trophy in her hand. But the internet has a way of forcing itself in, of turning its attention to somebody and disrupting everything. Strangers split her life into two separate worlds and told her to choose.

She refused. The critics grew louder.

Golf didn’t know what to do with her. A new breed of star had crashed into a sport that cherished its traditions. Established pros rejected the intrusion. A million fans praised her online, but Spiranac obsessed over the few who rejected what she represented.

She hadn’t worked her way up through the system like everybody else. Her fame gifted her invitations to prestigious tournaments and leaped her ahead of hundreds of players. She didn’t speak like them. She didn’t dress like them.

But she kept pushing, trying to break through. She played more golf and posted more photos, collecting more Instagram likes in an hour than there were fans at her small-time tournaments. In her rare free time, she talked to children about cyberbullying and the harassment that filled her phone.

“When you have a lot of followers, you get the good and bad,” she told the kids. “So I had a career out of it. But unfortunately, I had people hating on me every single day.”

A tiny hand shot up from the floor. “Is this coming from experience?” a girl asked.

Spiranac hesitated. Every word had to be perfect. How could she summarize a lifetime of harassment? People forced her into the spotlight and then criticized her for staying there. Where did that leave her? What was her role in this America, a country tugging on an endless chain of sexual harassment scandals?

“I’ve been bullied my entire life,” she said plainly.

“Really?” the girl asked.

“Yeah.”

“But you’re really pretty,” another girl said. There was disbelief in her voice. Spiranac started to reply, but the girl didn't look up from her phone. She had already lost interest.

Paige Spiranac had always been a scrambler.

She played few smooth rounds. Crowds stoked her anxiety and threatened to spin her into a panic. Nervous tee shots often flew off-target, forcing her to navigate out of tall grass and thick trees. Her greatest advantage on the course was her ability to recover from even the worst of spots, to stabilize herself and salvage her round.

It came naturally. Golf always had, ever since a fractured kneecap ended her Olympics-bound gymnastics career at 12 years old and turned professional dreams elsewhere.

Her father, Dan, suggested she try golf because it offered hours of isolation. Paige had never fit into the social scene gymnastics demanded. She grew up with asthma attacks and hair that fell out in clumps. Pre-teen girls pounced. They spit in her water bottle at gymnastics and threw away her birthday cake.

Golf, Dan promised, would be different. He booked a lesson near their Colorado home and watched as his youngest daughter stood over a ball for the first time. She swung, and the ball skidded along the grass, never leaving the ground. She swung again. Again. Again.

Ten swings. Ten balls skimming across the turf. The coach turned to Dan. She was smiling.

Paige’s divots — the small scrapes left in the earth by a proper golf swing — looked like they came from an 18-year-old boy, the coach told him. Gymnastics made her flexible. Her swing had power. The rest would fall into place.

So golf it was.

After a few months of practice, she entered her first competitive tournaments. Spiranac played seven tournaments that summer on Colorado’s junior golf circuit. She won five.

“Dad, if I’m going to play on tour, I need to play year-round,” she told Dan that summer, and they found a second home in Scottsdale. Her homeschool schedule, which started to accommodate Paige’s shyness and a competitive gymnastics regimen, allowed for more practice and weekend tournament trips. At a tournament the following summer, a coach from the University of Arizona found Dan in the crowd.

“Get used to this,” the coach said. “She’s going to have a lot of people following her.”

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Spiranac kept winning. She became a top-20 junior player in the world. A top-5 college recruit. The two-time West Region Player of the Year. Twice an All-American. A professional career awaited.

She went to college instead. Spiranac enrolled at UA, always loyal to the first coach who noticed her, but Tucson’s party-school atmosphere felt smothering. She transferred to San Diego State, where she could be alone in the city’s crowds.

Her first two seasons ended with all-conference awards. She started an Instagram account, posting trick-shot videos and senior-year updates for her friends and family, and then led the Aztecs to their first Mountain West Conference championship.

A decade of golf ended with Spiranac’s graduation. She told her parents she was taking a 30-day break from golf, a pause to decide whether she still wanted to play professionally. To turn professional would be to enter into an endless routine of obscurity, hoping to become one of the few who made it. A career in coaching sounded simpler.

Only two weeks passed before she went back. The LPGA Tour beckoned. She just needed a way to pay for it.

At its lowest levels, professional golf costs much more than it pays. A woman can spend as much as $100,000 a year just to compete. Tournaments are far-flung and just a few days apart. Most require an entry fee and give prize money of a few thousand dollars at most. Equipment is expensive, and most mini-tour players have no sponsor to provide it.

So Spiranac waited. She worked to solidify her swing and returned home to play in the Colorado Match Play Championship. She picked up her first individual win in years, and checked her phone as she walked off the course, assuming the stream of texts was to congratulate her. Then she checked Instagram.

Thousands of people had followed her.

As she searched for explanation, a friend texted her a link to an article on Total Frat Move, a website devoted to frat parties and college girls.

Spiranac clicked the link. The bro-targeted site had declared, “The Whole World Is About To Fall In Love With Paige Spiranac,” complete with a dozen photos and a link to her Instagram account.

In a half-serious love letter, TFM’s Dan Regester called her a “little biscuit” with “a body that just won’t quit.” He proposed marriage and two kids and a house in a gated country club.

Thousands of more people found her and followed Spiranac. She told her sister she just wanted a “K,” to see her follower count tick from “9,999” to “10K.” That happened in a few hours. Then it kept climbing.

Twenty-thousand. Fifty. By the next day, she had more than 100,000 followers, filling her phone with notifications from strangers. She didn’t know how to make it stop. She was the center of attention, and just wanted to disappear.

But there was nowhere to go. She curled up on the floor and cried.

The only solution, Spiranac decided, was to delete her accounts. She had done it once before when somebody at SDSU anonymously bombarded her with promises of blackmail. Her new accounts only existed to showcase her senior year. Now that season had ended, and Spiranac saw little value in keeping them.

Across the world, a golf executive saw it. The Omega Dubai Ladies Masters, a lucrative winter tournament, was struggling to draw attention. Tournament director David Spencer wanted something eye-catching, and Spiranac’s follower count was still climbing.

Spencer offered her a spot in her first professional event.

Spiranac turned him down.

A golfer’s first professional tournament is typically a tiny mini-tour event, with no fans and no attention. Some of the greatest players in the world went to Dubai, and Spiranac was 22 years old, a new college graduate and even newer online fixation. She swore she wasn’t ready.

Her parents talked her into it. What better way, they asked her, to jump-start a career? Already they had spoken with agents, who told them Paige’s online engagement was valuable. Money had been the largest obstacle between Spiranac and a pro career, and now she had a way around it. She hadn’t seen online stardom coming, but maybe she could leverage it toward a career on the course.

She agreed to play, and five months later sat in first class for her first trip out of the country. Her sister tagged along, in business class a few rows behind. Neither knew how to navigate the basics of a professional tournament.

They landed a week before the tournament, and immediately Spencer made use of his rising star. While other players played practice rounds and rested, Spiranac played pro-ams with sponsors and smiled through the same question: “Are you a golfer or a model?” Tabloids and golf websites both focused their attention on her. Veteran players howled that she hadn’t earned her way.

“With more selfies than birdies,” the Irish Examiner wrote, “golf shouldn’t need Paige Spiranac.”

The mediator at a pre-tournament press conference had to ask how to pronounce her last name. Spiranac laughed. “Spe-RAN-ick,” she said. Cameras flashed.

“Do you have any goals in mind?” the mediator asked.

“To not throw up on the first tee is number one,” Spiranac answered, forcing a smile. “I’m extremely nervous.”

A room full of male reporters threw questions her way, probing the strange new creature before them. Did she like the course? Who was her favorite comic book character? Did Instagram make her a better golfer?

“I honestly can’t believe I’m here,” she kept saying, and the feeling never faded. A panic attack struck the night before the opening round. She locked herself in the hotel bathroom and cried.

Finally, she found herself on the first tee. The starter announced her name. Fans lined the fairway, and her sister rushed toward the first hole to watch. Photographers readied their cameras.

A caddy Spiranac had met just a few days earlier handed her a driver. She teed up a ball and fought off the urge to throw up. The crowd hushed. She brought the club back and unleashed the smoothest swing she could muster, fighting her body’s every instinct to panic.

The ball skidded away, low and left, sputtering to a stop well behind her competitors’ balls. Spectators traded skeptical stares. The first shot of her first professional tournament was a 60-yard duck hook. A disaster.

But Spiranac, always a scrambler, somehow made par.

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She spent that winter immersed in the callus-forming routine of professional golf, determined to prove she was more than a sideshow who missed the cut in Dubai.

A new coach helped Spiranac fix her takeaway, steadying the opening rhythms of her swing. Every morning she spent on the driving range and practice greens. Every afternoon she was in the gym or on the course.

The frenzy in Dubai spiked her social media following even higher. Sponsors eyed her for endorsement deals. She kept posting and building her brand, using the extra income to fund the upcoming season.

She joined the Cactus Tour, almost certainly becoming the first woman to play Dubai’s Emirates Golf Club and Buckeye’s Sundance Golf Club back-to-back. She made cuts and a handful of cash: $100 in Queen Creek and $950 in North Phoenix, enough to barely break even. Entry fees and equipment costs stacked up. She did more social media promotions. That earned more fans, but also more harassment online.

Golf Digest put Spiranac on the cover of its May issue, dedicated to golf’s innovators, and the sport recoiled. Juli Inkster, whom Spiranac had once called her favorite player, asked why the cover didn’t feature the world’s No. 1 player and said, “I don’t agree with it, but it’s their magazine and they can do what they want.”

“We need to question what type of innovators we want our future generation of female golfers to aspire to,” former pro Anya Alvarez wrote for ESPN.

“I’ll give them props on finding a way to make it seem like it made sense to have this total nobody on the cover,” ESPN columnist Sarah Spain said on national TV. “She takes her clothes off on Instagram. Way to go, Golf Digest.”

But Spiranac had never asked for magazine covers or hundreds of thousands of followers. For years, she turned down requests to pose in bikinis or show herself in a way that would let down her Bible-study parents.

All she wanted was a chance to play, to make people realize golf didn’t have to be played only by old white men in khaki pants. She wanted young girls to see her and fall in love with golf, as she once had, and to see more money and attention for the women’s game.

So she kept playing, and her swing kept improving. A month after the Golf Digest cover, the Cactus Tour moved to Orange Tree Country Club in Scottsdale. With plenty of room to miss and recover, the course fit her game. She chased down the world’s top-ranked amateur player, shooting 68 on the final day to force and win a sudden-death playoff.

Her first professional win came with a tiny cactus-shaped trophy and a check for $2,500. Social media exploded with congratulations and promises of more to come.

Spiranac didn’t celebrate. When she walked off the course, she wondered how anonymous commenters could turn her victory into a defeat. The internet wouldn’t allow her a brief moment of joy, and neither would she.

As they drove home in a silent car, Dan Spiranac knew his daughter’s golf career was over.

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She never announced she had quit.

The 2016 season had been a success. Spiranac finished the Cactus Tour with her first professional win, $8,010 in earnings and an invitation back to Dubai, but the drive had faded. She would never be one of the greats. Even a stable career on the LPGA was so far away, and its established veterans didn’t seem to want her, anyway.

Her agent built everything around tournaments, on building enough status on the course to have influence off it. It was the traditional method of stardom, but Spiranac had long abandoned that path. She switched agents, signing with Octagon’s Jeremy Aisenberg, and together they filled whiteboards and Post-It notes with her plans to turn a one-year golf run into a long-lasting social media career.

Aisenberg showed her the metrics, pointing out how no female athlete in the world saw more engagement from her followers than her. He introduced her to Annika Sorenstam, a legend of women’s golf, who encouraged her to use her following to grow the game.

Sorenstam, who won 72 LPGA tournaments and eight Player of the Year awards, reminded Spiranac that she was best known for a weekend in 2003 when she played against the men.

Spiranac played Dubai a second time. She made the same 15-hour flight across the world, answered the same questions and stood on the same tee box, fighting herself for all 18 holes.

A first-round 77 left her well behind the leaders, likely to miss the cut again, and again Spiranac panicked in her hotel room. The world had one more opportunity to critique her. She refused to eat. Sleep never came. She wanted to skip the second round and fly home, but went back out and forced herself to finish.

The pressure pushed her away. So winter came and went, and when the 2017 season started, Paige Spiranac stayed away.

But the urge to play might rush back in a year, or two, or five, and she doesn’t want to close the door on her way out. Sponsors still invite her to tournaments, hoping to grab the audience she brought to Dubai, and she declines every time.

Instead, she’s focused on social media, custom-making online content for companies and lending her name to their products. Golf-club manufacturer PXG signed her to a sponsorship deal. She parades through company events and in TV commercials slightly more subtle than PXG owner Bob Parsons once used to promote his first company, GoDaddy.

More than 1.2 million people now follow her on Instagram. Her every photo still ends up the subject of sports blogs and internet trolls. Harassment still fills her phone, and she’s started to push back against it, using her following to shape the game.

When the country turned its collective attention to a series of sexual harassment scandals, Spiranac tweeted constantly about supporting and respecting women. She joined Cybersmile, a nonprofit devoted to ending cyberbullying, and started speaking to groups of kids.

Her clothes drew even more attention. Golf Magazine named her one of the game's most stylish people. Sports Illustrated featured her in its 2018 Swimsuit issue, and she told the magazine, "I'm going to show you sexy, and I'm going to do it my way."

When the LPGA introduced a dress code that banned leggings and low-cut shirts, Spiranac wrote op-eds and pushed back online, saying the decision was “prohibiting a much-needed culture change for this great sport.”

“I want people to see that golf is fun and it’s cool,” she said in an interview. “You don’t have to be a professional golfer to enjoy it.”

She still plays every day, forever chasing the perfect swing. Most of her Instagram posts still feature a club in her hands.

Her game feels better than ever. But she’s given up on spending five sweat-soaked hours on the driving range each day, desperate to prove she could make it. Instead, she hits a few balls and heads out, onto a course where nobody is watching.