sport news Paige Spiranac: How 'world's sexiest woman' polarized golf trends now

Golf's glamor girl Paige Spiranac has become one of the biggest and most influential names in the sport without ever playing on the women's top professional circuit, the LPGA Tour. 

One of the most polarizing figures in the sport, like her or loathe her, it's undeniable that the American has made her mark, taking social media by storm in her tiny, tight-fit skirts and low-cut tops. 

Rivaling Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy in social media popularity, the 29-year-old posts glamorous photos on the golf course and has racked up 3.7 million Instagram followers, earning herself the title of 'world's sexiest woman'.

Spiranac also uses her growing platform to wade in on golf's hottest topics, from the controversial Saudi-backed LIV Tour to dress codes. 

Spiranac turned to influencing in 2016 when her attempts to break onto the professional circuit failed, so how did she go from LPGA dropout to social media siren? 

COLLEGIATE CAREER

Spiranac comes from sporting stock. Her father, Dan, was a football player who won the 1976 National Championship with the Pittsburgh Panthers, while her mother, Anette, was a professional ballet dancer born in Croatia.

She has said that her father is responsible for getting her into golf after making the difficult decision to quit gymnastics at the age of 12 and a flirtation with tennis.

'From the first golf ball I ever hit, I dedicated everything I had to being a pro golfer,' Spiranac said.

'I was homeschooled. I practiced every single day, morning until night. It was my only goal. I was a highly ranked junior golfer and then at 18 I had to make the decision to go to college or turn pro.'

Along with the help of her family, she made the decision to take the college route to get experience playing on a team after having been homeschooled. 

She went on to play Division 1 college golf at both the University of Arizona and San Diego State, leading the Aztecs to their first-ever Mountain West Conference Championship in her senior year in 2015. 

During the summer before her last semester at San Diego State, Spiranac decided to continue playing golf and pursue a pro career but it came sooner than she planned when her 'whole life flipped upside down.' 

She became famous when the website Total Frat Move wrote a post titled 'The Whole World is About to Fall in Love With Paige Renee, This Smokeshow Golfer From SDSU [San Diego State University].' She gained more than 50,000 followers in a matter of hours, according to ESPN. 

She blew up on social media and didn't return to finish her last semester of college, never receiving her degree, despite being just two credits short. 

'BROKEN' BY THE TOUR 

Her overnight rise to fame garnered her an endorsement deal with equipment giant Callaway Golf and a sponsor's invite to the Ladies European Tour's Omega Dubai Ladies Masters, where she made her professional debut. 

She then burst onto the scene in 2016 and picked up her first tour win on the women's developmental Cactus Tour in Queen Creek, Arizona, at the Las Colinas club.

She ended the season with a few more high-placed finishes and pocketed $8,000 - a far cry from what she banks through social media nowadays. 

But her professional golf career never really took off, making just one attempt to get her card to play on the LPGA Tour in her first Qualifying Tournament in August 2016 but ultimately not making it to the professional circuit. 

In 2022, discussing Marshall football's upset of Notre Dame, she joked, 'Notre Dame is as bad as I was playing professional golf'.

In 2016, she called it quits on her professional career at the age of just 23, instead turning her focus to her social media endeavors, later admitting the struggles of golf 'broke' her. 

'I did one year of playing golf professionally and I was just mentally exhausted. In golf, you fail more than you succeed and I was doing that in the public eye,' she said, via The New York Post. 'Everyone was telling me, "You should quit. You should give up. You're not good."

'All of these things, and I was already dealing with these mental issues of years and years and years of trying so hard and coming up short and I just broke. I honestly cracked. I broke and I just stopped. I said "maybe I'll go back," and I've never gone back to try and play golf professionally again.

'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.

'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.'

SOCIAL MEDIA SENSATION

While her professional golf shortcomings may have kept her up at night, quitting has turned out to be an extremely profitable career move for golf's glamor girl. 

By posting sultry photos in tiny golf outfits or bikinis and doing occasional trick shots, Spiranac has built an extremely successful business model. 

She has garnered the most followers in the golfing world, beating even Woods, who pocketed $15million for finishing top of the PGA Tour's PIP, a venture designed to reward players with the biggest social media following. 

The American beauty is now worth around $3.7m, and rakes in an estimated $12,000 per Instagram post. 

That is more per Instagram post than the likes of Woods and McIlroy, the biggest names in the men's game. 

Two thousand dollars more than Woods to be precise, with the 15-time major winner boasting just 3.1m Instagram followers compared to Spiranac's 3.7m. 

Her growing popularity has even launched her beyond the golfing social media stratosphere. 

She landed a job at Super Bowl LVII in February, serving as a special correspondent for 'Inside Edition.' 

While on duty out in Arizona, she took part in a series of drills and shared a photo on Twitter of her taking down a tackling dummy, quipping, 'How men expect me to act when they send d*** pics in the DMs.'

In 2020, she launched a podcast with industry giant iHeart Media. The series focused on sports with a sprinkle of sex. 

In one episode she talked about her biggest turn-ons and in another she broke down her dating travails with various athletes, declaring that she would rather date hockey or football players than golfers, given that they 'prefer to perform in silence.'

HIGH-PROFILE LOVE LIFE 

Spiranac married personal trainer Steven Tinoco in 2018. The blonde beauty revealed that he had been supportive of her social media endeavors, even encouraging her to 'show a little more cleavage.'