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 ᴀssigned 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 longsH๏τs 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 “Sєxiest Woman Alive.”
Spiranac’s swelling popularity reflects not simply her (considerable) Sєx 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 SH๏τ 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 ambᴀssador 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 ʙuттon 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 compeтιтion 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.

YOUNG PAIGE Spiranac with her mother, Annette, at age 5; mugging for the camera at age 7; and showing off her cast after fracturing her kneecap at age 11.
“I’m always skirting the line of being overexposed and chronically online,” Spiranac acknowledges. “It’s a тιԍнтrope 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 pH๏τos. “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 idenтιтy,” 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 glᴀsses, 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 pᴀss 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.

‘WHAT I PRODUCE IS NOT THAT PROVOCATIVE. IF MY BODY MAKES SOMEONE UNCOMFORTABLE, THAT’S NOT MY PROBLEM.’
Instead, there were victories. Spiranac became a top college recruit. When she was accepted to the University of Arizona on a golf scholarship, she found herself ill-prepared for the transition. She had been “in this protected bubble,” never had a drink or a boyfriend. She felt like Sandra Dee at the orgy.
Spiranac transferred to San Diego State after her sophomore fall term, where she developed her game. She became team captain and saw multiple tournament successes, culminating with the Aztecs winning their first Mountain West Conference Championship. But behind the scenes, Spiranac’s mental health was at an ebb.
The social anxiety she had weathered as a child had never gone away. A doctor prescribed anti-depressants, which Spiranac reacted badly to. Entering her senior year, she became too anxious to leave her apartment to grocery shop or dine out. Being seen felt like an excruciating impossibility. She developed an eating disorder. “I didn’t want to interact with anyone,” she says. Instead, she self-isolated, subsisting on graham crackers she squirreled away in her room.
During golf practices, her coach warned Spiranac that she was too hard on herself and gave her drills designed to free her mind. Any mistake she made, “affected Paige so deeply,” Annette says. “It affected how she saw herself as a person.”
Around this time, in July of 2015, Dan Regester, a blogger for the men’s online bro community “Total Frat Move,” stumbled on pH๏τos of Spiranac and decided to single her out for her H๏τness on their popular social accounts. “In that moment, my life completely switched,” Spiranac says.

After dubbing Spiranac a “smokeshow golfer,” Regester’s post continued: “When staring at ᴀss and тιтties on a daily basis becomes a burden, what else does a guy really have to live for? . . . So yeah, your boy was having a rough go at it, mentally. That was until this little biscuit walked into my life.” So it went, Regester extolling Spiranac’s physical virtues, entreating her to run away with him.
“Paige was playing a practice round,” Annette recalls, “and she goes, ‘Mom? I’m getting all these messages.’ It wasn’t until she got home that she started looking at her phone, and it was like a ticker.”
Spiranac’s Instagram rose from 500 to 100,000 followers in a matter of hours. After that, Annette says, “She started to get nervous. It was overwhelming. Now, another child might be like, ‘Oh, wow! This is so cool.’ Not Paige. People don’t understand how unbelievably hard this was on her. It was traumatic for our entire family.”
Spiranac found herself bawling on the floor in the fetal position. Annette and Dan felt helpless, consumed with fear about their daughter’s mental health and what the online chatter would do to her self-esteem. Spiranac was only 22, at the beginning of what she hoped would be a long professional golf career, and she was already getting blowback from the community for stealing the spotlight from “LPGA players who ‘deserved’ the recognition.”
“They said it was because I was playing golf in these quote, unquote, ‘provocative outfits,’ ” Spiranac says.
“We both lived in leotards,” explains Annette. “Paige was in gymnastics. Then you switch to golf, and it is taboo to show your physique? That was strange.”
Strange, too, that her daughter’s body had simultaneously become both an object of rampant Internet lust and a shame magnet, a national example of how to be and not to be.
Spiranac insists she was never “trying to ruffle any feathers or offend anyone.” She dressed the way she dressed and was built the way she was built. She could hardly be blamed for a viral post she didn’t make or know anything about—except that’s exactly what happened.
Like a social media snowball, her exposure grew and took on a momentum and meaning of its own. Once unleashed, the haters never stopped hating. Spiranac received direct messages from players calling her a bad role model, scolding her for “ruining the game.”
“Paige still wanted to compete professionally,” says Annette. She accepted an invitation to play a Ladies European Tour tournament in Dubai in December 2015. It would prove to be the beginning of the end.
“From the start, it was a mᴀssive controversy I was there,” Spiranac recalls. “There were pros, legends of the game, discussing if I belonged. People were taking bets about whether I would come in last. I’m this kid who has no experience, no media training. I completely bombed, publicly cried about it. It was a sнιт show.”