The Real Cost of the Spotlight: What Paige Spiranac’s Candor Reveals About Modern Golf

In 35 years covering professional golf, I’ve watched the sport transform from a gentleman’s game played by relative unknowns into a global media phenomenon. I’ve seen players become brands, rounds become content, and privacy become a luxury item. So when Paige Spiranac opens up about struggling with anxiety tied directly to her online presence, it’s worth paying attention—not as tabloid fodder, but as a window into something most of us in golf media have been quietly noticing for years.

Spiranac’s recent candid Q&A with her Instagram followers isn’t just another celebrity struggling-with-fame story. It’s a red flag about the unsustainable pressure cooker that social media influence has created around golf, particularly for personalities who’ve built their entire platform on constant engagement and carefully curated visibility.

The Anxiety Behind the Algorithm

What struck me most about Spiranac’s confession was her honesty about the mechanics of her own struggle. She explained to followers:

“I feel like I’ve just been so in my head about everything and I’m just trying to work through it. This has been going on for a little bit. I feel like I haven’t been posting as much because I am just overthinking everything and I just feel like my anxiety has taken control.”

Having caddied for Tom Lehman back in the ’90s, I witnessed firsthand how competitive pressure can mess with a player’s mind. But that was different—it was about performance, about winning. What Spiranac describes is something more insidious: the constant need to perform your own life for public consumption. That’s a beast I don’t think any previous generation of golfers had to grapple with.

The numbers bear this out. Spiranac has amassed millions of followers across multiple platforms—she’s legitimately one of the biggest sporting influencers on the planet. That kind of audience doesn’t come without a cost. For six months, observers noticed her online presence diminishing noticeably from what had become the expected baseline. That’s not laziness or lost interest. That’s burnout with a capital B.

The Soul-Sucking Machine

What I found most revealing was Spiranac’s description of what the job demands. In a follow-up post, she acknowledged something I think many in golf media have whispered about for years:

“I think that I put so many walls up because this job can be draining sometimes and quite soul-sucking. I think I put barriers up to protect myself and started to morph and change into a person that I didn’t really recognize and that I didn’t see as well.”

That admission—that she’d become someone she didn’t recognize—that’s profound. In my experience, when personalities in sports reach that point, it’s usually a marker of serious, sustained pressure. We’ve seen it before with traditional media figures, but there’s something uniquely exhausting about the social media grind. Traditional sports coverage happens on a schedule. You file your story, it publishes, it’s done. Social media is a 24/7 expectation with real-time feedback loops that can be brutal.

For someone like Spiranac, who’s built her brand on accessibility and constant connection with followers, stepping back from that becomes almost an act of rebellion. It also becomes a confession of what maintaining that persona costs.

The Silver Lining

Here’s where I’ll push back against pure cynicism, though: Spiranac’s openness about all this is actually a positive development. It’s not common for influencers to admit struggle—the incentive structure usually demands they project invincibility and endless positivity. Her willingness to be vulnerable suggests something healthier might be emerging.

She’s also been explicit about her intentions going forward:

“This year it’s more about showing and less explaining and trying to defend myself and just being who I am.”

That’s a meaningful distinction. She’s not stepping away entirely—which would be a loss for golf, frankly. She’s recalibrating. She’s setting boundaries. And she’s explicitly moving away from the defensive posture that seems to have been consuming her energy.

What This Means for Golf Culture

The broader question here is what Spiranac’s experience tells us about modern golf culture. We’ve created a system where visibility equals value, where engagement metrics determine worth, and where personalities become products. That’s great for reaching new audiences and growing the sport—which has happened. But it’s also extracting a real human cost from the people willing to take that deal.

In my three decades covering the tour, I’ve seen players handle pressure differently. But most of that pressure was about performance on the course. Now there’s an entirely separate performance happening off it, and for influencers like Spiranac, it’s the off-course performance that pays the bills.

The fact that she’s stepping back to focus on herself, that she’s stopped playing as much golf to prioritize her mental health, that she’s being honest about feeling like she’s lost herself—these aren’t signs of failure. They’re signs of necessary self-preservation.

Golf will be fine. The sport’s grown considerably with personalities like Spiranac helping introduce it to new audiences. But maybe the real conversation we should be having isn’t about whether Spiranac will post enough this year. It’s about whether we’ve created a sustainable model for personalities who want to engage with the game and its community without losing themselves in the process.