Paige Spiranac invited three hosts of Barstool Sports’ “Fore Play” podcast onto her YouTube channel for a friendly round of golf, then put them in the hot seat with questions about cheating accusations, a viral Tiger Woods controversy, and the golf careers that never were.
Spiranac played with Trent Ryan, Frankie Borrelli and Sam “Riggs” Bozoian in a two-on-two scramble, switching partners every three holes. Any player who missed a fairway had to answer a question from the group, and over the last three holes anyone could ask anyone anything.
“We have some of my most favorite guys ever in the golf space,” Spiranac said to open the video. “I think I’ve known you guys for almost a decade.”
The first two rotations ended with every player earning a half point, leaving the final three holes as the tiebreaker. Spiranac and Borrelli took the match after Borrelli holed a crucial shot late in the round, and Spiranac then sank a putt on a bonus par 3 the group added as a press.
“Frankie and I ended up winning. We are a dream team,” Spiranac said. “That was therapy, I think, for all of us and super enjoyable.”
Ryan was the first to miss a fairway. “OK, gun to head,” Spiranac said. “Do you actually like golf?”
“That’s easy. Oh, yeah, especially when I’m getting better at it,” Ryan said.
He said that was not always the case. “The first time we went out and shot a video, a real video, I shot 144 at Bethpage Black. Nobody’s having fun doing that,” Ryan said. “I knew I was like a bit of a drag in terms of the game because I was so bad. I couldn’t even get it off the tee.”
His fellow hosts noted that Ryan had been saying “This is so fun” after shots since getting a tip from PGA Tour winner Kevin Kisner about two months earlier. “I was just kind of stuck in a rut there for a while,” Ryan said, “and you’re just like, ‘I’m going to go to these golf courses that are super nice. I’m going to shoot 105, and I’m going to go home.'”
“The weirdest thing about it is that your bad golf is what made the channel popular,” one of the hosts said.
“Correct,” Ryan said.
Borrelli was next. Spiranac asked him about the final of last year’s Internet Invitational, the $1 million YouTube event run by Barstool and Bob Does Sports, where Borrelli, Spiranac and Good Good’s Malosi “Mo” Togisala ended up on the same team.
“How p***ed were you after 45 minutes of debating you ended up on a team with me and Mo for the final?” Spiranac asked.
Borrelli said his frustration was aimed at comedian Francis Ellis, who landed on a team with Good Good’s Brad Dalke. Ellis, Dalke and Cody “Beef” Franke went on to beat the Spiranac team on the final hole.
“Everyone wanted to be on Brad’s team,” Borrelli said. “It wasn’t anything towards you or Mo. I was on Francis’s tail. I knew what he was doing. He’s witty like that where he kept saying like, you guys have the best team. And I’m like, you’re with Brad Dalke.”
“I still think we had a great team,” he said. “We went down to the last shot.”
“I’m just saying it would have been nice if someone caught him saying we have the best team on camera instead of me,” Spiranac said.
Spiranac said Dalke was on another level that week. “I’ve never seen some people hit shots the way Brad was hitting shots that week. It was insane,” she said.
Spiranac then asked one of the hosts about an old challenge video in which she smacked his backside.
“How mad at me were you when I smacked your a**? ‘Cause we didn’t talk for a bit after that,” she said.
After a playful reenactment on the course, he winced. “You’re aggressive. That hurt like a mother,” he said. “That was almost malicious. I have to send that in to the police.”
“I’m sorry,” Spiranac said.
He said he was never upset. “When we’re doing a challenge like that, and it’s like, all right, time to pull down my pants and get a ball hit out of my a**, I’m signing up for a potential disaster,” he said. “I actually was probably just mad at myself. Like, what are you doing? Why are you still doing things like that?”
The bruise lasted two months, he said. “To answer the question, I was never really mad.”
Spiranac then gave Borrelli, her teammate in that final, a turn to ask her anything.
“This might be a hot tamale spicy question,” Borrelli said. “Did you knowingly cheat at the Internet Invitational?”
“No. No,” Spiranac said. “I did it in front of you, Mo, multiple people, multiple cameras. I went to identify my ball. I didn’t think I did anything wrong. And I was shocked when like the whole thing happened, but no, I didn’t intentionally cheat.”
During the final, footage showed Spiranac pressing down long grass near Togisala’s ball in the rough, and fellow YouTuber Peter Finch raised the issue. No penalty was assessed because her team lost the hole anyway. Spiranac later said on Instagram that she received tens of thousands of death threats after the episode aired.
Borrelli admitted he had misjudged how the public would react. “You were right, by the way, on that. I was telling you like no one’s going to care,” he said. “I was like, no one’s going to give a [expletive].”
Spiranac said the moment hit her hard. “I’ve gone through a lot of pain in my career, and I don’t feel like I’ve done anything to like really deserve the amount of hate that I’ve gotten,” she said. “This was the first time that I’ve given people something to talk about, and I knew it was going to be an absolute disaster, and it was much worse than I could have ever imagined. All of it just boiled up, and I was exhausted.”
The hosts said she responded by playing some of her best golf of the day. “You had like a tear rolling down your eye, and you were striping fairways,” one said.
“That’s actually the most impressive thing that happened at the invitational,” another added.
Later, Spiranac and Borrelli struggled to come up with a question for Ryan.
“We were thinking of things to ask you, but like you’re so mysterious,” Spiranac said.
“I don’t feel mysterious,” Ryan said.
“I feel like when you think of me, Frankie, Riggs, there are like distinct controversies that you can pull from,” Spiranac said. “I can’t think of one with you other than you were a big baby.”
“I was, yeah. Massive baby,” Ryan said. “That happened right out of the gate.”
Told that he only ever goes viral in a positive way, Ryan said, “That’s obviously a good thing. I don’t like try to manufacture it that way. It just sort of happens.”
The conversation then turned to Bozoian, who faced backlash after he told the Fore Play team not to post about Woods’ DUI arrest and a clip of him defending the call spread online.
“So the Tiger tweet obviously went mega viral,” he was told. “Do you regret it?”
“I’d say the only part of it I regret is, if any original video would have gone out, I wish it would have been like my overall logic that I explained later. ‘Cause I don’t think it was conveyed properly by that video,” Bozoian said. “So, yeah, I regret that part for sure. However, I still stand by the decision.”
He said he stood by “the decision to refrain from like jumping in on Tiger Woods DUI post from our main accounts,” but acknowledged that “the messaging came off horrifically.”
“Anything negative that comes towards like a brand that many more people than I have built, I feel horrible for, but I can always stand by my own stuff,” he said. “I can handle it, but I don’t like when other people, the guys that work behind the scenes, are like thrown into something that I did. I regret that a lot.”
When another player joked that his fellow hosts “both walked away from you after that,” Bozoian shot back, “I walked closer.”
One of his fellow hosts said the frustration came from how the decision unraveled after the group agreed to stay quiet. “We had this conversation in the group chat about not posting it,” he said. “But then like an hour later, because it got leaked to Dave and it was like a whole thing, now video goes out. … Now we’re talking about it. Now we’re doing the thing we didn’t want to do.”
“That one felt like we just sort of made a decision and then it got away from us really fast,” he added. “I only like the decisions that we make when we make them together, because then if there is backlash, it’s like we all made that decision together. We can just ride it out together.”
Spiranac said she admired how they handled it on their podcast afterward. “I like that you both have such distinct opinions on everything that happened,” she said. “I liked the fact that you can have an open and honest discussion and still have each other’s backs.”
“We’re one of, if not the only, group that really built our way like giving opinions every day on everything,” one host said. “When you do that, we’re going to get in some hot water sometimes.”
The next question put Ryan on the spot: Who is his least favorite person at Barstool?
“Tommy Smokes,” Ryan said, naming the Barstool personality. “I’ll be honest, he came into my mind immediately. I just milked it a little bit.”
Ryan said the jab was affectionate. “There definitely was huge debates and arguments and like almost like a college dorm room style fighting when we were back in the old office, when it was just like 25 of us,” he said. “But now it’s like every time we see each other it’s almost like a reunion.”
“Tommy like gets under our skin ’cause he’s one of our best friends, but like he goes out there and makes TikToks and tries to make his hair all cool and you’re just like, ‘F*** you, Tommy,'” he said.
“Tommy was at my wedding, so it’s like he’s still one of us,” another host said.
Borrelli, who spent years as Barstool founder Dave Portnoy’s cameraman for his pizza reviews, was asked what he learned most from his former boss.
“To always think about what could go wrong at any given moment and make sure that it all goes right,” Borrelli said. He described planning traffic, routes, and timing for every review. “Is it going to be hot? Is it going to be cold? Are they going to get a bad review? It’s going to ruin their business.”
Asked whether the job gave him anxiety, Borrelli joked, “I didn’t sleep for 10 years.”
He said the lessons carry over to fatherhood. “Now I have a baby. It’s like, how are we planning to like get him through the day?” Borrelli said. “I think it just like instilled a really good core belief in like work ethic for me, and like I never stopped because of him.”
Of Portnoy, one host said, “He can’t stop. He’s writing books.” Another added, “He just is so perfectly built to do what he has done.”
On the final holes, Spiranac turned to Bozoian, who spent 99 days at Pinehurst in 2020.
“What do you think is the more famous cry? My cry during the final day or your cry at Pinehurst?” she asked.
“I mean, mine has a lot of staying power. Yours was just seen by so many people and for so long,” Bozoian said. “Probably mine.”
“I don’t think that the thing that people remember for you is the cry,” he told Spiranac. “I think it was more just the moment.”
“That video that he put out, the crying video, was six years ago,” one host said, marveling at how fast time passes.
“I think everyone died in 2020 and this is just the afterlife,” Borrelli said.
Asked how nervous he was to meet Woods for the first time, one host answered, “Ridiculous. Shaking.”
Spiranac faced the day’s final pointed questions.
“Do you think you didn’t make it playing pro golf because you weren’t talented enough or you weren’t mentally tough enough?” one host asked.
“A little bit of both, more mental though,” Spiranac said. “I don’t think I could ever be like top 25 in the world. I think I could have made it on tour at some point. But mentally, it’s so bad. I’m such a hot mess.”
Spiranac played college golf at Arizona and San Diego State and tried LPGA qualifying in 2016 without earning a card.
Another host carefully asked whether her success on Instagram had pulled focus from competing. “I don’t want this to come off the wrong way,” he said. “Do you think that you being so attractive and having that to be able to like pursue that on the Instagram and turn that into a brand, that affected your drive to try and become better at golf?”
“I was trying to do both at the same time, and I would have never made it doing both, but I needed to do modeling and media work to finance my golf career,” Spiranac said. “So I couldn’t have even pursued it without any of the financial support.”
“Everyone says that I stopped trying to play professionally because I had so many other opportunities, but this was dead,” she said. “I wasn’t good enough to make that a full-time job, really. I wasn’t making enough money to be able to do it.”
She said her dream had been a career like that of LPGA star Nelly Korda. “I want to have a career like Nelly. I want people to look at me the way that someone would look at Nelly,” Spiranac said.
“They look at you differently,” a host cracked.
“That dream died, and I either had to be sad about it and depressed, or I could get another job, and this was just a path that was open for me, and I took advantage of it,” she said.
Before the round ended, the group pressed Ryan on why he has never worn shorts on camera. Ryan pointed to his legs, calling himself “a skinny framed, like, pathetic loser.”
Asked whether he ever would, he said, “No, no, no. That would be insane.” He then allowed that he had promised to wear shorts “this year, but I have to get in the gym.”
Asked whether he would wear them if he won the Internet Invitational, Ryan raised the stakes. “If we win the Internet Invitational, I’ll get naked,” he said. “You’re talking like millions. I won’t care.”
Near the end, one of the hosts said he did not know Spiranac had appeared in Maxim. “I got Maxim’s Sexiest Woman Alive,” Spiranac said. She received the title in 2022.
“Paige, thank you for having us. You’re the best,” one host said.
Spiranac closed the video by thanking her guests. “Thank you guys for hopping on my channel. I really appreciate it, and for all the years of friendship. It means so much to me,” she said. “You guys are some of the best in the business.”
