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.”
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.
