Golf influencer Paige Spiranac spent nine holes in the Florida heat interviewing herself, answering questions about her dating history, her temper, the controversy she has refused to address publicly, and the anonymous follower she credits with lifting her out of a dark stretch.
The video is a solo installment of a recurring series in which Spiranac plays alongside other women golfers and asks them personal questions between shots. This time there was no guest.
“I have good news and bad news. I don’t have a beautiful, talented, amazing golf girl to join me today. So you are stuck with me, but I am putting myself in the hot seat, because I didn’t think it was fair that I was making these girls ask these really tough questions, having to be vulnerable, and then I didn’t do it myself,” she said.
Asked whether she had ever dated anyone famous, Spiranac said she had not, and that her dating history is shorter than people assume.
“No, actually haven’t dated anyone famous before. I actually haven’t dated that many people in general. I was homeschooled from fourth grade all the way until college, with a very sheltered life,” she said. “When I tell people I was homeschooled, they go, ‘Ah, that makes sense.'”
She named several golfers from her junior and college years.
“In junior golf, I had like the biggest crush on Justin Thomas. And I also grew up playing junior golf with Wyndham Clark. And I went to college with Xander Schauffele and his caddie, Austin. Also had a crush on Xander,” she said.
Her preference, she said, has little to do with fame.
“If you can see a trend with me, I don’t really have a type, but my type is someone who can hit a golf ball really well. If a guy can hit a really pure iron shot, I don’t know, like there’s just something to it. You can hear that sound when someone hits a really pure shot. It just works for me.”
Spiranac also addressed, without detailing, the fallout from the Internet Invitational, an episode she has pointedly declined to discuss.
“I know everyone is always wondering what happened at the Internet Invitational. Why didn’t I talk about it? There was so much going on, and there’s so much context that had been missing,” she said. “I have this itch to be understood, and I feel so deeply misunderstood sometimes. And I always want to talk about everything and get my side out there. And what I’ve realized, and what people who are much smarter than me have told me, is that it does not matter.”
She said her team advised silence.
“I’ve had my whole team telling me to not talk about it. Don’t continue to keep talking about it just because it’s going to make you feel better, because chances are it’s probably not going to make you feel better. And so I’ve just decided to really not talk about it all that much. And it goes against everything that is me as a person and my core personality.”
The openness that built her audience has also cost her, she said.
“No matter how much PR training they try to give me, or tell me that I need, I always seem to get myself in pickles, because I just bare my soul constantly and I’m always vulnerable and always putting myself out there, which I think has led to this amazing community and the position that I’m in, and I’m so grateful for that. But I feel like very vulnerable pieces of myself have then been put out to the world to be judged and criticized. And that’s a really difficult spot to be in.”
She described a deliberate change in how she responds to criticism.
“I think I’m very reactive, and when things happen I get highly emotional, because, you know, your girl loves to cry, and I will react and say things that I regret the next morning. And so this year, and kind of since that whole situation happened, I really have been trying to take a beat, take a breath, think about it, think about my reason why I want to say something, and from there then I go into what that response would be.”
She added: “It’s eating me inside, because every part of me wants to explain and overexplain every single little detail of everything that happened, because I don’t feel that in a lot of ways that was the most true representation of me. It was a version, obviously, of me. I was very serious.”
Her camera cut out in the middle of a sentence, a coincidence she found pointed.
“It’s so funny, because I was sitting there talking about how I shouldn’t overexplain myself as I was overexplaining myself, and the GoPro had my back and it said, ‘No, no, no, enough of you. Shut up.’ And it turned off, and that was the best thing that happened. So sometimes I just need someone to cut the cameras on me.”
The angriest she has been on a golf course, Spiranac said, came during a college practice session.
“I just could not figure my swing out, and I was so beyond frustrated. And I took my club, and I hit a tree next to me as hard as I possibly could, and I snapped my iron in half,” she said. “In the words of Big John Golf: not proud of it, man enough to say it. I’ve broke some clubs, thrown some clubs. I haven’t done it in a very, very, very long time. Thank you, therapy.”
Asked her favorite thing about herself, she pointed to resilience and comedy.
“I think that I’m incredibly resilient. I think that I am kind. And one of my favorite qualities about myself is my sense of humor,” she said. “I think the reason I’ve been able to last so long within this industry, despite all of the hits that I’ve taken along the way, has been my ability to laugh it off. And maybe that’s a bad coping mechanism, but my family loves to laugh and loves to make fun of me and keep me humble.”
She acknowledged the approach can be misread.
“I think sometimes I do that and maybe people think I’m not taking anything seriously, or myself seriously, or situations seriously, but it really is my way of getting through life.”
Asked what would surprise people about her, she said: “I am super goofy. Like super silly, super goofy. I also have a very serious side. So I’m very multidimensional. We’re all complex individuals who have our own struggles and quirks and things that make us us.”
She added: “At the end of the day, I just need to be myself, and the people who like me will like me, and the people who don’t like me will not like me. And sometimes that’s a really harsh reality to accept, but I’m working on it, and we’re making progress.”
Spiranac devoted much of the seventh hole to an anonymous follower who commented the same two words on every post she made during the worst of the backlash.
“When I was going through all this Internet Invitational stuff, I noticed that there was this guy who had been DMing me for a while. On every single post he would say, ‘Great cans.’ And for some reason it just made my whole day. I had been getting a lot of negative DMs, and I was scared to check my DMs,” she said.
She posted about it publicly, and the man vanished, then returned.
“I kept checking for the great cans guy, and he disappeared, and everyone else was coming in with the great cans, the great cans, the great cans. I was at events, and people would come up to me in person, and I loved it,” she said. “And then I see ‘great cans,’ and I thought it was just one of the others. I click on it, and it was the guy. And he didn’t miss a beat.”
She said she finally replied: “You’re the guy. You’re the man.” According to Spiranac, he did not initially understand the reference. “He was like, ‘Yo, you have great cans. I just wanted to send a little love your way.'”
The two agreed not to publicize his name after the story was picked up by news outlets, she said.
“I’m giving him acknowledgment, because he actually has changed my life in such a positive way. Because now all of my comments are great cans, and it just warms my heart and makes me so happy. And this guy started such a movement.”
Among the lighter disclosures, Spiranac said she has four holes in one and a career low round of 63 at The Farms in Rancho Santa Fe, California. Her favorite color is pink. Her favorite animal is a dog, or an elephant.
On drinking, she said: “I don’t drink that much. So I love, like, a piña colada. Like, I like when you actually can’t taste the alcohol, and I just want to taste a very sweet, fruity drink. If I’m going to do a shot, I will only do a shot of tequila.”
On Bigfoot, after a green she compared to a set of footprints: “I was a Bigfoot truther. Still am, for the longest time. And when I was homeschooled, I wrote an entire paper on Bigfoot. This was like 15 pages about Bigfoot.”
She named Kevin Hart, Jessica Alba and LeBron James as dream collaborations, and made a direct pitch to two WNBA players.
“I think that would actually be a super epic collaboration is obviously Caitlin Clark for sure, but to do something with Sophie Cunningham, I would kill to do that. I don’t know what I need to do to get her on the channel, but I think that would be so much fun. I think she’d do it, too.”
She also described a habit of adopting a verbal or physical tic for the length of a single video. “There was a phase where I was doing Instagram stories, and I kept doing finger guns. Every single time I would just hit them with the finger guns, and I did that for months.”
On the course, Spiranac played the forward tees with a deliberately conservative strategy, favoring shortened tee shots she called the bunt drive.
“My strategy is a little bit different, because I know I’m trying to go as low as I possibly can, but normally I have a teammate, and if I hit a bad shot it doesn’t matter. So I can be pretty aggressive, but I have to be a little bit more conservative today,” she said. “Low and slow and controlled. Never fails me.”
She opened with a bogey, made par at the second and third, then birdied the fourth, sixth and seventh to reach 2 under. She said the par 3s remain her least favorite hole. “If there’s one thing about me, I hate a par 3.”
The conditions wore on her.
“Very hot, very humid. I am sticky. I am sweating. My shins are sweating. My earlobes are sweating. Every part of my body is wet right now,” she said early on. By the ninth: “I feel like I’m in the movie ‘Cast Away’ right now. Feel like I’ve been on this golf course for 100 days, 100 nights. No water, all heat, all humidity. Lost the plot. My Wilson is my golf ball. Now we’re having conversations. My only friend in life. Is anyone going to rescue me from this golf course in Florida?”
She added, laughing at herself: “Losing all aura. My brand to be sexy, and then in this video lost all of it.”
A missed chip on the final hole cost her a shot at 3 under.
“There’s just certain things in golf that just drive me insane. And one of them is a shot like that, where it’s such an easy chip shot and then I just don’t play it,” she said. “I would have read that 10 out of 10 times and not have seen that go right.”
She signed off after a closing bogey: “But you know what, we finished at 2 under par. Nice little solo episode. I hope that you enjoyed. You were on this journey with me. It was quite nice. Maybe we’ll have to run this back.”
