Paige Spiranac still remembers that conversation. Coming from a family of athletes, what she was about to tell her parents would shock them to the core. “If you put the work in and you dedicate your life to something, you WILL be successful’,” they had kept telling the golfer since she was young. However, exactly after a year of dabbling in professional golf, Spiranac’s worst fears seemed to have come true.

In the end, the very thing she loved “broke” her. Endless online harassment, cyberbullying, death threats, and most importantly, a failure to see her hard work getting reflected in her results, pushed her to her breaking point. “I was driving myself crazy because I felt like I should be achieving at a much higher level. … I had everything to be a world class golfer, but I just couldn’t put it together and I didn’t know why. It was driving me actually insane. I just got to the point where I just stopped caring. I wanted to have more of a social life. I wanted to have fun. I was tired of dedicating my life to something and just not seeing the result. So when I was playing at SDSU, I just lost my desire for it.” The result?

Extreme mental exhaustion, and a condition where she was seemingly “cracked” and “broken”. The last straw came during a press conference in 2016 after Spiranac missed the cut at the Omega Dubai Ladies Masters—through tears she confessed about the “extremely cruel” comments she was being subjected to. “They attack not only me, but my parents, my family, my friends and they say I’m a disgrace to golf, and no one sees that. And I still get those comments and I still deal with it every day…I was harassed, my family was harassed. I was receiving death threats, people were invading my privacy, I was being blackmailed. This was going on whilst I was trying to play.” The harassment still didn’t stop, evident by a harsh tweet a few days later.

“Don’t be mean to her. She will cry all over the tv about how people only talk about her b–bs, while getting a playing exemption,” the user wrote in a since-deleted tweet. Spiranac’s response, though, was as graceful as it could get. “Maybe I cried because two minutes before I stepped on stage for the press conference, I was being blackmailed over stolen private property and people were threatening my life.” Soon after, a heartbreaking announcement hit the golf community like a wrecking ball…

At 23, when most golfers are usually knee-deep into the grind and trying to make it big, Spiranac decided to take a step back from professional golf. While the now 31-year-old has found solace in other things since then, making it big in the world, albeit in a different way, some things still haunt her, which she revealed in a conversation this week.

On February 18, the retired star made an appearance on the 5 Clubs show on Golf channel, where the host, Gary Williams, asked, “A lot of people may know your background, but let me share a little bit…You come from a family of high achievers…your dad played on a national championship college football team at the University of Pittsburgh with Tony Dorset [in] 1976. Your mom was a ballerina, your sister was a track athlete at the collegiate level. Obviously, you were a college golfer. Do you remember at a young age having a competitive bend? [Were] you naturally…competitive? Or was it the environment that you felt like you needed to be, just to kind of survive the household that you were growing up in?”

To this, the golfer-turned-social media star heartbreakingly confessed, “I’ve always been really naturally athletic. And I come from a big sports family…So it was just a part of our everyday lives, but I didn’t really have the competitiveness of my parents or even my sister. But sports came relatively easy to me even when I was in preschool. I was hanging on the jungle gym and the monkey bars, and so that’s why I got put into gymnastics, because I was just throwing my body around everywhere. I’ve always had the physical ability to compete at a high level, but the competitiveness and the mental fortitude to be able to compete at that level, I never had. So that was something that I always struggled with because I could do it, but my mind…it wouldn’t allow me to compete at that highest level, which was always something that was a little bit difficult for me.”

Williams then asked, “Did it take time before you made, what was your pivot to the next chapter of your life? Did you struggle with that at all?”

“I really struggled throughout college just with my relationship with the game of golf and competition. So, I took about two weeks off and…I was talking to my parents and they just said, ‘Let’s just give it one year. Let’s try to play professionally for one year’. Problem was is that I didn’t have the financial backing to be able to play professionally, and so I was running junior golf clinics and caddying.”

“And after I played the Colorado State Open, I looked at my phone. I was getting a ton of notifications from my friends and they were like, ‘Hey! you’re going viral right now’. And this was at a time when this wasn’t normal. Now you have people going viral every single day. But back in 2015, this was unheard of and so I went from having 500 followers to a 100,000 followers overnight and my life completely changed.”

“I had all these new opportunities and because I was struggling financially, I was like, ‘Wait, I can leverage this to finance my golf career’. And so, that’s how my media career started, and also my professional golf career. They started at the exact same time, which was a lot to handle because there was no playbook of how to handle viral fame. And, especially, when you’re 21 years old, I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t know what I wanted. I didn’t know what I was doing with life.”

“And now you have all these eyes on you while I’m also trying to navigate playing professional golf for the first time, which I also have a very complicated relationship with. So, I did not handle it well, to say the least…constant breakdowns, it was just a lot to deal with, and there was no one who had done this before me to seek advice [from]…So, after a year playing professionally, I just I couldn’t handle it. I was doing both of them. I wasn’t doing either of them particularly all that well.” And then came the most heartbreaking part…

“A couple weeks of not playing golf professionally, I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to do media full-time now’. I’m much better suited for this. I’m significantly happier, and I think that this is the path that I should go down. I’m so happy that I’m able to do what I love every single day. But, there is some heartache of putting your head on the pillow at night and going, ‘I want to play professionally’. But I failed at that, and that’s just something that I have to come to terms with, and something that I deal with every single day,” she further said.

Notably, this is not the first time that former golf has shared the not-so-charming parts of her life. Back in 2023, she had revealed, “It keeps me up at night to be honest, because I feel like a failure and it’s really difficult for me to wrap my head around the fact that I never made it—not as a gymnast, not as a tennis player, not as a golfer. It’s been hard. It’s really hard because I felt like I could do it and there was just something that was missing,” before adding:

“But instead of sitting down and feeling sorry for myself, I picked myself back up and threw myself into my media work. My background of just grinding, hard work has really helped me in my media career, because I work so incredibly hard — and the difference is here, the harder I work, the more successful I’ve become and I think that’s why it’s been a more fulfilling journey for me than professional golf… the outcome is positive.” Like they say, all’s well that ends well, and looks like Spiranac is amply reaping the benefits now…

With 4 million followers on Instagram and 438K subscribers on YouTube, the content creator now has ambitious deals with Parsons Xtreme Golf (to represent its golf clubs on social media and in television ads), 18Birdies as their brand ambassador, Mizzen+Main, Philip Stein Watches, global sportsbook operator PointsBet as a brand ambassador, on-air personality, and an equity stakeholder, among others. Apart from that, Paige also featured in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition, and Golf Digest. What’s more? In 2022, she became the first athlete to be named as the ‘Sexiest Woman Alive’ in Maxim‘s 2022 Hot 100 list.

Spiranac also has a subscription-based website called OnlyPaige, that reportedly has “plenty of golf content, bikinis, lifestyle, fitness, and some fun food challenges” as per the official website.

While that point is worth noting, we must not forget that Paige Spiranac is still a big name in the golfing world. Born to a national champ footballer from Pitt’s ’76 squad and a professional ballerina, athleticism is in her genes. So, how is she teeing up the wisdom?

Paige Spiranac inspiring the golfing world

Though largely considered a social media influencer, Spiranac is consistently involved with the sport, and the sporting world at large. Her real talk and game-changing advice are pulling a whole new crowd into golf. Take, for example, a recent video she posted on her YouTube channel. In it, she suggested, “I want you to have more of a sweeping motion… I want you to have full stability in your core, instead of having to come down.” Since many struggle with it, the takeaway is “stability in your core is crucial for success.”

Spiranac also keeps up to date when it comes to other disciplines. Like, the recent appearance of Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl. As the pop star arrived at Allegiant Stadium to support her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, the reaction from Eagles fans was cold, and she was even booed. A frustrated Spiranac, then, took Taylor’s side.

She pointed out that Taylor has played a massive role in boosting the NFL’s brand value and called the response lame. “It was reported that the NFL’s brand value has increased almost $1 billion since Taylor Swift started dating Kelce. The NFL is using her popularity to boost their brand. So booing Taylor Swift is lame.” Considering Spiranac’s popularity, this stance drew support from several fans. She is surely a positive voice in sports. On that note, it’s only good wishes for the golfer!