How Paige Spiranac took a life she never wanted and turned it into golf’s largest social media empire

Crammed into the back corner of a WeWork high-rise in New York’s financial district, the PointsBet sportsbook studio feels as stifling as a sweat lodge. Various producers scurry to and fro, fanning themselves with folded papers and chugging water, but golfer-turned-social-media-juggernaut Paige Spiranac gives no indication that she minds the heat.

Dressed in a form-fitting black tank, black-leather mini and knee-high boots, she takes her assigned place on the couch, delicately positioning her long hair across her shoulders like a mink stole. Minutes later, as the cameras roll, Spiranac offers her picks for the upcoming Masters, bantering effortlessly with the host like she’s on “The Tonight Show.” Her enunciation is unabashedly girly and punctuated with ample laughs, as Spiranac drops deep sports knowledge with a heaping side of cheek, her years of golf experience trojan-horsed inside bouncy Malibu Barbie drag.

The host wraps the segment, reminding the audience that “blondes have more fun,” and filming cuts. Spiranac stays put to fire off a few PointsBet social media posts, answering questions about the Augusta National menu—“I love soup. Soup is so underrated”—pausing only to adjust the swoop of her bangs or tug discreetly at her hemline.

Back in the green room, Spiranac drapes her coat across her lap while the PointsBet senior vice president of content, Liam Roecklein, reviews her performance and thanks her for being the company’s “shining star” since she came on as a stakeholder in 2021. “You’re picking longshots and getting them right,” he admires, sweating slightly through his shirt.

Spiranac graciously accepts the praise, adding that she has some ideas about how to improve the graphics package, which she sketches on a Post-it. Due at her next appointment, Spiranac says her thank yous and goodbyes, then exits stage left, striding swiftly down the hall as a chorus of producers call behind her that she should feel free to stop by the studio any time—any time at all.

BY EVERY MEASURE, PAIGE SPIRANAC, 30, is the definition of shiny, modern TikTok-era success. She boasts more than 11 million followers across her social media channels, 3.7 million solely on Instagram—figures that outperform the totals of every other golfer, with Tiger Woods in second place. She’s in what her boyfriend labels a “legit category of fame.” They go places, and “people know who she is.” When she dines out, chefs send complimentary dishes to the table. When she shops, onlookers sneak pictures of her with their phones. New acquaintances ask her to tag them in posts so they can draft off her celebrity. In 2018, Spiranac was featured in the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue. Last year, she was named Maxim’s “Sexiest Woman Alive.”

Spiranac’s swelling popularity reflects not simply her (considerable) sex appeal but the way she chooses to deploy it. She punctuates her carnality with wit, pairs her enviable cleavage with solid golf technique and combines her astute commentary with ball jokes. “My content,” she explains succinctly, “is meant to be fun.” She’s like Ty Webb in “Caddyshack” if Ty Webb made other Ty Webbs weak in the knees.

“I created this alter ego where I show the most silly, exaggerated version of myself,” Spiranac says, emphasizing that online Paige is not everyday Paige. (For example, her off-line clothes are adult-sized and include no small number of sweatpants.) She’s a provocative show pony, sure, but she’s also self-aware, politically conscious and, most crucially, in on the joke. This is not a new tack: see Mae West, Dolly Parton, Goldie Hawn, Cardi B, the entirety of Reese Witherspoon’s Elle Woods canon. Like them, Spiranac is a candy wrapper around a protein bar, a Twinkie stuffed with vitamins.

The combination has proved fruitful for Spiranac and her many brand partnerships, which include Shot Scope, Club Champion, Swag, X-Golf and LA Golf. She’s crushing it in what in the old days would have been known as “Q Score” but now consists of monitoring every click and view, as well as subsequent actions and reactions.

In the past three months, her videos were viewed 55 million times. Women make up 6 percent of her fans, and the rest are men between 25 and 55, mostly from the golf sphere, but her mainstream audience is steadily climbing. She’s searched more frequently than any current PGA Tour or LPGA Tour pro. “She has enormous reach,” says Bausch, who signed Spiranac in 2020 after noticing that Club Champion didn’t have any women on its NIL roster. “As you can imagine, she wasn’t the person that our executive team thought of first.” Bausch presented Spiranac’s metrics, and the powers that be agreed to a one-year trial. Now she’s their lead ambassador and most lucrative contract.

“When she posts, we see it immediately in Web traffic,” says Pat Duncan, Club Champion’s vice president of marketing. According to Duncan, Spiranac is directly responsible for thousands of clubfittings and more than seven figures in sales. “There’s not a lot of people, particularly in the golf space, that can do that. She’s a unicorn.”

Spiranac admits to “obsessing like an athlete” when it comes to keeping her algorithms popping. She studies when to post, how often and where. She knows the length of videos that perform best and on which platforms. She understands which colors read, which angles seduce, which captions galvanize. She knows that hits equal dollars and engagement converts to a long-term fanbase and that you catch more flies with honey, honey. She discerns down to the last eyelash and straining shirt button how to turn herself into golf ’s Jessica Rabbit: not naughty, just memed that way.

Spiranac, her team at Octagon emphasizes, is a media company, not simply an influencer. Her recommendations drive sales. Her opinions generate headlines. Her clapbacks fuel news cycles. When you are your own highlight reel, there is no downtime. As such, Spiranac posts every day.

Depending on the needs of the brand, she will create Instagram stories, YouTube videos, Twitter posts or TikTok videos. She scripts, edits, lights and films herself, by herself—a process that takes hours. She does her own hair and makeup, shops for her wardrobe, works out five times a week minimum, likening it to an athlete keeping her body competition ready. After she posts, she responds to comments, building rapport, boosting engagement, batting down trolls and deleting the inescapable dick pix. She also has a podcast.

“I’m always skirting the line of being overexposed and chronically online,” Spiranac acknowledges. “It’s a tightrope act.”

This year she launched OnlyPaige, a members-only subscription service riffing on OnlyFans. “We weren’t sure how it was going to do because there’s no nudity, and that’s what people were expecting, or at least hoping for,” Spiranac says of the site, which for $10 a month offers golf tutorials, travel content and exclusive photos. “Once people sign up, they see the value in it, but like, yeah, there’s no nipples.”

Nipples or not, says her reps, OnlyPaige user growth has defied expectations. “The thing about Paige,” observes Bausch, “is she walks into a room, and it’s like time stops. People know her name, whether they’re golfers or not. She’s a trailblazer.” That’s a wild achievement, especially when you consider she never wanted to be.

FROM EARLY ON, DAN AND ANNETTE Spiranac knew their youngest daughter was acutely anxious. “She was always behind me, peering out from around my legs,” remembers Annette. “She never spoke.”

Instead, Spiranac spent hours by herself on the playground, swinging and flipping on the monkey bars. Dan and Annette thought maybe gymnastics would be a fit and enrolled her in a class at age 6. Spiranac excelled and was soon practicing eight hours a day, six days a week. Former high-level athletes themselves (Dan was a free safety at the University of Pittsburgh when the team won a national championship; Annette danced ballet professionally), her parents decided to home school Spiranac so she could train full time. The family moved from Denver to Colorado Springs to be closer to the facility.

“Gymnastics was my full identity,” Spiranac says. “Everyone knew me as ‘Paige the gymnast who was going to the Olympics.’ ”

But even at the gym, Spiranac still struggled to fit in socially. “I was a very weird kid,” she says flatly. “I wore glasses, rubber rain boots everywhere. I had this condition where my hair would fall out. I had bad asthma. When you’re bald and need an inhaler, it’s not easy. Kids would stand 10 feet away from me.” They also threw rocks. Teasing her became something of a hobby for her peers.

Spiranac remembers completing a floor pass and watching as her teammates secretly spit into her drink. When she brought in birthday cake, the other girls tossed it in the garbage in front of her. “Looking back, obviously that’s juvenile and stupid, but when you’re 9 . . . ” her voice trails off.

Spiranac persisted, winning meets and interest from A-list coaches until a fractured kneecap set her back. A second fracture ended her Olympic dream for good. She was shattered. “All I wanted was to be a professional athlete,” Spiranac says, “to find something that I could be good at.” Her older sister, Lexie, was on her way to becoming a heptathlete at Stanford. Annette phoned sport psychologist Jim Loehr, who advised her that the most critical piece of athletic success was to match the child’s personality to the sport. Enter golf. Thirteen-year-old Spiranac fell in love from the first swing. “Most kids already had 50 trophies by her age,” Annette says. To catch up, Annette and Paige decamped to Arizona so that Spiranac could train through every season, which she did, all day, every day, until college. “There were no proms, no football games, none of it,” Spiranac says.