Paige Spiranac has made a career out of shaking up what has long been one of the most conservative, straight-laced sports around.
Posing in a series of revealing outfits — no knee-length Bermuda shorts or buttoned-up polos here — she has attracted more than 2.6 million Instagram followers, many of whom would probably be hard-pressed to name another female golfer. She posed for the 2018 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue and garners headlines for titillating revelations from her podcast, “Playing A Round” — like how she doesn’t wear underwear on the green, or the time an ex circulated a nude photo of her online. All this despite the fact that she has never actually been a pro on the LPGA tour.
Unsurprisingly, the attention has made the 31-year-old a polarizing figure. After she landed the cover of Golf Digest in 2016, ESPN personality Sarah Spain said, “I don’t give many props to Golf Digest but I’ll give them props on finding a way to make it seem like it made sense to have this total nobody on their cover.”
Spiranac, who regularly speaks out about cyberbullying, has also gotten death threats from Instagram users and heard criticism from female pro golfers.
“I think I’m an easy target to hate. In the beginning I took [the criticism] hard, but it’s not important,” she said. “Some hate is good because it means you are doing something different and it causes a reaction. You can’t create change if everyone agrees with you.”
Growing up in Colorado with a ballerina mother and entrepreneur father, Spiranac had dreams of being an Olympic gymnast but was sidelined at age 12 by kneecap injuries. She’s also been bullied at the gym, she’s said, and so she moved to golf in part because players are more isolated. In 2009, she was the top-ranked junior golfer in Colorado, according to Golfweek magazine.
In fact, she got so into it, Spiranac began home schooling so she could have a more flexible practice schedule. It paid off when she earned a golf scholarship at the University of Arizona, later transferring to San Diego State. She was a standout there, earning all-conference honors two years in a row and helping her team to its first conference championship.
After the bro-centric college website TotalFratMove.com started writing about Spiranac in 2015, she gained sponsors, endorsements and social media followers.
Although Spiranac failed to qualify for the LPGA tour in 2016, it didn’t stop her from being vocal about the event. The next year, she penned a rebuke of the tour’s stringent dress code that had introduced a ban on plunging necklines, leggings and short skirts.
The column, published in Fortune, went viral, further proving how much more attention she commands than the actual pros.
“I totally understand why the girls on the LPGA don’t like me. There are so many women athletes who need to get more recognition,” said Spiranac. “I would like to use my platform to amplify them. If we worked together, it would be better to bring a bigger spotlight to the sport.”
And it’s definitely they who need her help gaining name recognition, and not the other way around. With endorsement deals from golf apps, sporting-goods brands and even the Myrtle Beach, SC, tourism board, Spiranac has given up on making a career out of the sport itself: “I don’t play professionally anymore. I am in golf media.”
She launched her weekly podcast in February, in a deal with industry giant iHeart Media. The series focuses on sports, but with a side of sex — like the episode where she talked about her biggest turn-ons (sense of humor, nice arms), or the one where she broke down her dating travails with various athletes, declaring that she would rather date hockey or football players than golfers, given that they “prefer to perform in silence.”
It’s a moot point now, though, as she wed Steven Tinoco in 2018. The athletic trainer is very encouraging of his wife’s aspirations.
“I met him at the start of my career, so we have done this entire thing together. He is so understanding and knows this is a business for me,” Spiranac said. “He will say, ‘Hey show a little more cleavage.’ ”
She added that their home life is quiet and that, in private, she’s a comic-book nerd with a thing for Batman — because he “wants to help people and do good.”
And whether you think she’s doing good or not, Spiranac knows she’s changed the way some people see golf, especially as there are now countless female golf influencers following in her footsteps: flaunting trick shots, powerful swings and, sometimes, their breasts on social media.
“I have been a bit conflicted on it, to be honest. When I started my pro career, I didn’t have any financial backing so I needed to leverage my social media. I started out with good intentions,” she said. “Then the Insta-golf girl morphed into something I wasn’t really proud of, where girls who aren’t into golf started posing to get followers.”
Now, she realizes, there’s a place for everyone: “These girls are out there making golf cool. We are getting more women into golf. I’m proud of where it’s gone.”