Emma Carpenter calls golf for a living. On the latest episode of Paige Spiranac’s YouTube series “Hot Birds,” the rising broadcaster showed she can play it, too.
Spiranac and Carpenter played nine holes from the forward tees at Monarch Beach Golf Links in Orange County, California, in a two person scramble. Between shots, the pair traded stories about live television, college golf and life on the road. They set a goal of 6 under par and finished at 4 under with four birdies.
“I am so excited about today’s guest, up and coming talent in the golf space that you’re going to fall in love with,” Spiranac said. “The beautiful, the talented Emma Carpenter, come on in.”
“Oh my goodness, that was so nice,” Carpenter said.
Spiranac said she was excited to play with Carpenter “one, because you’re amazing, and two, because you’re a great golfer.”
“You’re the great golfer,” Carpenter said. “I’m just going to be trying to keep up.”
Carpenter set the target. “Scramble. Nine holes. I mean, we got to get like at least 6 under, right?” she said.
“Six is going to be the goal,” Spiranac said. “We’re at Monarch Beach today, which is a fantastic golf course, but it’s a little hard. It’s a little challenging, and there’s a little bit of a breeze out here. So, I think six is going to be a great number.”
Carpenter, teeing off first as the guest, crushed her opening drive. “Emma smokes it,” Spiranac said, deciding she would hit first the rest of the day “because I do not hit it that far.”
Carpenter played college golf at the University of Minnesota and said she knew heading into college that she wanted a career in golf broadcasting. Singing came first, though.
“I was a classically trained singer, so I was very into singing, and I actually originally wanted to do vocal performance in college,” Carpenter said. “But they said that I couldn’t do that and be a college athlete. So then it was broadcasting we went.”
As a freshman, she went all in on golf. “My freshman year, I was like, I really want to see how good I can get at golf,” she said. “That was not the right approach, because sometimes when you care too much it can have the opposite effect, and the highs were high and the lows were low.”
She said she thought about chasing pro golf around her sophomore and junior years, when she was playing well. Her game actually improved, she said, once she started doing media work and broadcasting other sports.
“Then I ironically started playing better because I had a better sense of who I was,” Carpenter said. “I was like, I care about other things, and maybe I’m not meant to be a pro golfer, and that’s OK.”
“Well, you found your path, and I think that’s so important,” Spiranac said. “But you’re able to combine two of your great loves.”
“I love to play golf, and I found something that I can still pursue, and golf is a part of my life. It’s not my whole life anymore,” Carpenter said. “I didn’t have to give up the golf. So, it’s been amazing.”
How often she plays depends on the season. “Sometimes I’m like, ‘Oh, wow, I’m playing so much lately,’ and then sometimes I’m like, ‘We got to dust some dust off my clubs,'” she said.
Spiranac warned her guest early about a running theme on the show.
“There’s one interesting thing you need to know about me and Hot Birds,” Spiranac said. “I will shank it at least twice during this round. So be prepared for the shank.”
“Almost every single episode I have now hit a shank,” she added. “Off camera, never hit a shank. On camera, I will hit at least one shank.”
Carpenter offered to join her. “I feel like in solidarity I also need to and will likely hit a shank, too,” she said. “It’s like a rite of passage. You’re not a good golfer unless you shank one now and then.”
“I appreciate that,” Spiranac said. “Let’s not do it at the same time.”
On the first green, Carpenter needed a tee and a ball marker. “To be fair, they don’t normally have pockets in women’s golf clothing,” Spiranac said.
“So true,” Carpenter said.
Asked about her putting, Carpenter answered in one word: “Horrible.”
Spiranac called Carpenter one of her favorite follows on social media because of the funny mishaps she shares, including a running gag about coffee and white clothes.
“Seriously, like coffee fears you,” Spiranac said. “Because it knows it’s not going to make it in your system. It’s going to end up on your white pants.”
“Hates to see me coming,” Carpenter said.
Spiranac said she relates. “I’ll share something, and since I’m filming it like selfie style, I think it’s just going out to like my friends,” she said. “And then I put it out and I’m like, oh shoot.”
Carpenter said she had a similar realization after checking who watched one of her Instagram stories. “I was like, ‘Oh jeez, this person saw it. This person saw it. This person saw it,'” she said. “Should I be really putting a little bit more thought into what’s going out there, because this is just out there for the world to hear.”
“I feel like the more you’ve been sharing, the more relatable you have become,” Spiranac said. “You don’t have to only be one thing. You can be multidimensional and still do your job extremely well.”
“You are the prime example of that, and it’s why you’ve had so much success,” Carpenter said. “People love seeing that side of you and your whole personality.”
“The nice thing about my brand that I think I’ve built is I don’t ever really have to be serious,” Spiranac said.
Spiranac also asked whether she should start using AimPoint, a green reading method that relies on feeling slope through the feet. “I actually tried to learn AimPoint at one point,” Carpenter said, “but I felt like I could always see it with my eyes better than I could feel it.”
Asked which pros she most enjoys covering, Carpenter rattled off a few names.
“Jordan Spieth is always a lot of fun to follow,” she said. “You never have to guess what he’s thinking.”
“Tommy Fleetwood is definitely one of my favorite guys on tour. I love his game, and he’s such a great person. Same with Gary Woodland,” Carpenter said. “Of course, I’m rooting for everybody. I’m always rooting for everybody. But those guys are fun to watch and fun to listen to and especially fun to root for.”
“Gary Woodland, his story, every time he plays well, I get a little teary eyed,” Spiranac said.
“I told him I think that Houston was one of the best sports stories of the whole year,” Carpenter said.
Spiranac said she was shocked to see Woodland ranked No. 1 on tour in speed, though she wasn’t sure whether it was swing speed or ball speed. “I should know that, and I had no idea,” she said.
The conversation turned to Minnesota golf, and to the online backlash Carpenter faced after an appearance on the “Subpar” podcast.
“Wait, you kind of got canceled over this today,” Spiranac said.
“This is by far the most hate I’ve ever received on the internet,” Carpenter said.
“Welcome to the club. How’s it feel?” Spiranac asked.
“It did not feel good,” Carpenter said.
Carpenter said she was asked which city has better golf and picked Minnesota over Chicago. “I was like, ‘Oh, it’s crazy. Hot take. Low key Minnesota,'” she said.
“Chicago is absolutely without a doubt going to have more. It’s a huge city, and they’ve got great golf, really well known golf,” Carpenter said. “What I was really just trying to get at was that Minnesota is super underrated.”
She described the state’s courses as “championship golf, like top notch golf” and said her opinion came from her own experience playing in the Twin Cities area.
“I mean, how dare you have an original opinion,” Spiranac said.
“No kidding,” Carpenter said. “Chicago without a doubt has more courses, more great courses, but Minnesota has a lot of amazing, fabulous ones, and I’ve gotten to play a lot of the best ones.”
Her top three Minnesota courses: Spring Hill, Olympic Hills and Windsong Farm.
Asked for a favorite golf memory, Carpenter pointed to the young girls who tell her they have taken up the game. “It’s just such a cool time that we’re in right now,” she said.
Spiranac called the past couple of years a run of “pinch me moments” for her guest.
“Literally, like one after one after one. I can’t even keep up,” Carpenter said. “I feel so lucky and just overwhelmed with gratitude every single day. I say yes to everything, and I’m so glad that I do.”
That pace has her sprinting to make flights and sometimes forgetting half her wardrobe. “I’m a pretty type B person,” she said. “If I forgot something, I’ll just DoorDash it.”
The moment it hit her, she said, was working a PGA Tour event for Golf Channel for the first time, and her first football game as a sideline reporter for Big Ten Network.
“I was so nervous. I mean, so nervous,” Carpenter said. “Part of why I didn’t want to play pro golf is because I have debilitating nerves.”
“I relate,” Spiranac said. “As much as I want to, I can’t handle it.”
Spiranac noted that Carpenter picked a career “almost just as stressful.”
“Honestly more, especially when the camera comes to you and it’s go time,” Carpenter said, “and you know you’re live and you can’t mess up.”
Then Spiranac asked about something Carpenter said on camera that still haunts her.
“I’ve been hoping that this doesn’t resurface,” Carpenter said. “So, I don’t know if I want to say it, but I’m going to say it anyway, because my brother will make comments about it all the time.”
She said she sometimes slips her college friends’ slang into a broadcast. “I’m just like, ‘Oh, he got so deli with that chip,’ and they’re like, ‘Carp, there’s no way you said that,'” she said. Another favorite: “He H&R Blocked it.”
The moment she regrets came while calling featured holes early on a Sunday last season, when Chris Gotterup was having a rough round. “It almost goes more podcast style at that point,” she said.
“He missed a green and then he kind of bladed a chip over, and we’re like, ‘Oh, got her up, got her down,'” Carpenter said, describing how she and her analyst riffed on his last name. “We took it probably too far.”
“Chris Gotterup’s a stud, and he’s had one of the best seasons on tour this year,” she said.
After Gotterup won the John Deere Classic, her brother texted her: “Oh, looks like got her up, got her done today.”
“I really hope this video doesn’t resurface, because I feel like that was my least professional moment on air,” Carpenter said.
“That is the most wholesome,” Spiranac said. “That’s not bad at all. Out of the things that I have said, that is like nothing.”
“How do you balance work with your life? Do you even have a life right now?” Spiranac asked.
“Right now? No,” Carpenter said. “I’ll let you know when I figure it out.”
“I don’t regret anything,” she said. “But I would say the philosophy I take a lot is, if I can physically be there, if there is a way for me to get to that city, to the next one, in time for the job, I will do it. And the next thing I know, I’m like, ‘OK, so now I have back to back to back jobs and I’m working like 21 days in a row.'”
“When you freelance, it’s like, why would I say no to working if I’m available?” Carpenter said. “I wouldn’t change a thing, but yeah, I get tired.”
When Spiranac asked how she makes room for dating, Carpenter talked about her coworkers instead.
“I’m so extroverted, and I love that I at least get to work with people all the time,” she said. “I show up for a job and every single time it’s, ‘Hi, I’m Emma,’ and I love it, but it’s definitely kind of exhausting.”
Now that she works with many of the same crews, she said, “it’s a little bit more like we’re hanging with friends than just working with new people every time.”
Spiranac teased her for the polished dodge. “I was like, ‘Hey, do you date or have a boyfriend?’ She’s like, ‘No, but let me talk about the crews I work with. You ain’t getting anything out of me,'” Spiranac said.
The two also bonded over botched celebrations. “I panic in celebration modes, and I never know when someone’s going to go for a high five or a fist bump or when they dap you up,” Carpenter said. “The amount of times I do that is concerning.”
Spiranac recalled going for a high five in a pro am while her partner put up his fist. “I shook it, and we just stood there like this for an uncomfortable amount of time, and I’m like, we’re committed at this point,” she said. “And he didn’t talk to me for the rest of the round.”
They also explained what broadcasters hear in their earpieces on live TV.
“You hear producer, and you also hear the broadcast,” Carpenter said. “You’re hearing play by play and you’re hearing analysts, and then you’re also hearing, ‘OK, cut to one. One, move right. OK, give me a shot of this. OK, now left. Ready three. Take three.'”
“Then when it’s your turn to talk, then all of a sudden it’ll be like, ‘OK, toss it to Paige,'” she said. “‘Three, two, one, Paige, you’re live. You’re live. Go, go, go.'”
“You know what bothers me the most is when they use ‘no’ and ‘go,'” Spiranac said. “Can you think of something other than ‘no’ and ‘go’? Because it’s staticky. You can’t hear anything.”
Carpenter said working with the same producers helps, because “they know kind of the best language that you like to hear.”
“We’re always chasing perfection for sure,” she said. “And whatever you think might have been an uncomfortable pause on air was never as long as you think.”
Spiranac said critics of broadcast teams should try the job. “I just want everyone to do it for a day, and then I think they’re going to have a whole new appreciation for, like, Jim Nantz, for example,” she said. “He’s so poetic and he never messes up and it’s so smooth and it’s so hard to do.”
Spiranac, who works in both broadcasting and content creation, said the two have little in common. “My pillars are broadcast and then content,” she said. “They’re not even close to the same thing.”
Carpenter saved one of her best stories for the back nine.
“I always start a story and I’m like, should I be telling this?” she said.
“If you have to question it, it’s exactly what you should be saying,” Spiranac said. “That’s my life motto.”
During a college spring break trip, Carpenter said, her team was playing a practice round at the Big Ten Match Play when they found a pair of underwear just off a green.
“Everybody’s like, ‘Ew, where did this pair of underwear come from?'” Carpenter said. She told her teammates, “That is so funny. I have that exact same pair.”
She flipped the underwear up with her putter head and tossed it into the woods. Three holes later, she realized the pair was hers. It had been lodged in the leg of the rain pants she wore the day before.
“I really wish I would have grabbed that pair,” she said.
Spiranac countered with a story from her own college days. “This is irresponsible,” she said. “We went out the night before and we shouldn’t have done it.”
It was the team’s first event of the fall season. “I packed the morning of. I forgot my golf shoes. I forgot my hats. I forgot everything,” Spiranac said. She showed up to the practice round in tennis shoes, with no hat and her hair half falling out.
“My coach was like, ‘What is going on?’ I was like, ‘Whoopsie,'” she said. “I finished like sixth in the event and she forgave me and all was fine.”
“If you play well, it solves all your problems,” Spiranac said.
Carpenter once forgot her team polo for an event in Florida in September and had to wear a fleece pullover instead. “It was like 95 degrees and I was pounding water,” she said.
Spiranac closed with a round of quick questions.
Carpenter’s lowest score is a 6 under par 66. Her dream foursome: Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus, her dad and herself. “I’m pretty sure none of the people I’m about to say are dead,” she said when Spiranac said the list could include anyone, dead or alive.
Her favorite club is the driver. “Even though we got some sad memories, we got some of my favorite memories,” she said. Her favorite course is Royal Dornoch in Scotland, and the one she most wants to play is Cypress Point.
Her proudest golf accomplishment had little to do with her scores. In college, she juggled the team schedule with the “Five Clubs” podcast, social media and play by play calls for Minnesota volleyball and women’s basketball.
“I felt like the whole time I was really still true to who I was,” Carpenter said. “Honestly, my biggest accomplishment was working really hard in college to be able to help lead to what I’m doing now, and finding a lot of joy in all of it.”
The pair also ran through their outfits for the show’s “fit check.” Spiranac wore G/Fore shoes, a Beach Riot skirt, a bodysuit from The Upside, Warby Parker sunglasses and jewelry from London Jewelers. Carpenter wore FootJoy shoes, a Grayson skirt and her Titleist hat.
On the course, the team was even through two holes before back to back birdies. Before the par 3 fourth, Carpenter admitted, “So, I’ve never had a hole in one.” She didn’t get one there, but the team made a natural birdie to reach 2 under.
“Par 3s are a killer,” Spiranac said. “So to get that birdie on a par 3 is huge.”
On the next hole, Spiranac had a short uphill chip for eagle. “Hopefully, we can chip it in and maybe make an eagle, because we’re on a little bit of a hot streak right now,” she said. “Hot birds, hot streaks.”
The chip slid left, and they settled for birdie. Several pars followed, including one Spiranac counted after a casual tap in. “Honestly, it’s my channel,” she said. “I make the rules.”
They finished 4 under, two shots shy of their goal.
“The sad part is that I felt like we should have been 7,” Spiranac said. “We have to run it back.”
The pair agreed the round was just a warmup.
“Thank you so much for having me,” Carpenter said.
“We had so much fun,” Spiranac said. “You’re the best.”
