It’s golf’s boldest new enterprise. And it possible would by no means have gotten out of the gate with no mighty shove from the person who upended the game thirty years in the past: Tiger Woods.
Mike McCarley was a sports activities tv govt with spectacular bona fides—he’d overseen advertising and marketing and communications for telecasts of the Olympics and the Kentucky Derby (for TV sports activities pioneer Dick Ebersol)—however his ardour was golf, evidenced by his decade as president of golf and international technique at NBC Sports activities, the place he additionally ran the Golf Channel. In 2021 he based an organization referred to as TMRW (pronounced “Tomorrow”) Sports activities, which he thought might revolutionize golf by combining three enormous forces in in style tradition: skilled athletes, expertise, and tv.
Enter Tiger. McCarley obtained a gathering with the golf legend to pitch his thought for a model new form of sports activities platform made for the 21st Century: TGL, the place two groups comprised of 4 elite PGA gamers would compete in an indoor enviornment, going head-to-head for fifteen holes on an epic, high-tech simulator and stadium inexperienced. Neglect High Golf on steroids; that is extra like High Golf on gene doping. Woods, as is his customized, was considerate, inquisitive, and direct.
“On the finish of the 90 minutes,” McCarley recollects, “he checked out me and mentioned, ‘I fully perceive the expertise. I believe the sport is prepared for this. I know the gamers are prepared for this.’” He then seemed McCarley sq. within the eye. “If I decide to doing this,” he requested, “will you decide to doing it, too?”
For McCarley, it was the equal of a putt dropping in to win a serious. TGL was occurring.
Re-inventing golf for primetime
Even amid the muscular swagger of up to date skilled sports activities, TGL is an audacious thought: a brand new, made-for-television, six-team league the place PGA golfers will compete stay, in prime-time matches televised on ESPN and ESPN+ over 12 weeks till a successful group earns the SoFi Cup and pockets the $9 million in grand prize money. (The full SoFi Cup Purse throughout all groups for the launch season is $21 million.) Cozy cash for a few free rounds along with your buds, however it appears clear the purse shouldn’t be what’s motivating gamers. An opportunity to chart the way forward for the game very a lot is.
The very thought of TGL could strike a sure form of golf purist as sacrilege: here’s a golf match performed indoors, in entrance of 1,500 followers who can be inspired to make noise, with swirling kleig lights and a bombastic, “let’s get able to rumble” vibe. Gamers will face a 40-second shot clock, and every can be mic’d up, so followers within the enviornment and at house can hear some good old style (albeit PG-rated) trash discuss. All gamers will even be capable of hear, and reply to, the ESPN announcers within the sales space.
Gamers hit tee pictures right into a five-story display, with holes created by a few of the nation’s prime course designers and translated digitally. As soon as gamers land a shot inside 50 yards of the pin, a Skymark gentle from the ceiling marks the precise spot of the ball within the GreenZone. From there, gamers hit off artificial turf, navigating bunkers with actual sand till they land on the inexperienced. Set on a grass turntable concerning the dimension of an NBA courtroom, the inexperienced incorporates practically 600 actuators that permit for floor modifications. Each TGL gap has a novel design.
Augusta, this isn’t.
“The largest a part of our viewers, I hope, are individuals who don’t watch golf, however they’re sports activities followers who like to root for a group, and their group beating the opposite group,” says Andrew Macaulay, TMRW Sports activities CTO. The previous Topgolf CTO, he’s accountable for each bell and whistle aiming to show the gents’s recreation right into a hybrid of NBA playoff and Metallica live performance. “It’s all tied in to get that stage of sports activities fan, and I believe they’re going to carry their expertise with different group sports activities that every one work that means.” The ultra-traditionalists, he says, will “tune in simply to hate it. We’ll nonetheless get them watching.”
Who’s enjoying, who’s not
TGL had a number of wind at its again in its launch, a lot of it offered by its partnership with the PGA Tour and, extra particularly, Woods and Rory McIlroy, who signed on as co-founders. The six founding groups, every aligned with a serious U.S. metropolis, are comprised of 24 professionals, together with a few of the recreation’s greatest attracts: Woods and McIlroy, Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa, Rickie Fowler, Xander Schauffle, to call only a few. However TGL didn’t signal two of the largest, world number-one Scottie Scheffler and three-time main winner Jordan Spieth, and its PGA deal meant gamers who defected to rival LIV Golf, together with marquee names like Dustin Johnson, Jon Rahm, and Bryson DeChambeau, weren’t eligible to hitch.
And wasn’t it the flashy LIV Tour that was purported to “reinvent” the game with brash braggadocio? Three years later, it nonetheless hasn’t. As Joel Beall warned in a column for Golf Digest skeptically previewing TGL, “For all of the issues that golf does nicely, cool shouldn’t be certainly one of them.”
Au contraire, argue the gamers. “I’m a fan of golf too, proper?” says McIlroy. “Like I’m a participant, however I grew up being a fan of the sport, and I would like the sport to proceed to do nicely and attempt to carry new individuals into it. For the golfers, you could possibly argue that this has been a good time for us as a result of we’ve by no means performed for more cash. However for the followers, it’s been a reasonably irritating and complicated time. I believe hopefully what TGL will do is give followers one other solution to watch their favourite gamers, but additionally, give them a up shut and private expertise.”
Excessive-profile companions
Efficiently launching a brand new sports activities league takes a daring thought (examine) and the proper expertise (examine), however it additionally takes the proper tv companion and deep pockets. TGL signed a take care of ESPN; its major sponsor is SoFi, the monetary providers agency that anted up $625 million for naming rights to its glittering NFL stadium in Los Angeles. SoFi CEO Anthony Noto was on the hunt for sports activities publicity in prime time in winter, when the NFL was out of season; the corporate had a take care of U.S. Open winner Wyndham Clark, however with sponsorships already snapped up for golf’s majors, discovering the proper alternative proved elusive. Till TGL.
“It’s not solely model new: it’s leveraging a platform of familiarity,” Noto says of the brand new league. The SoFi Middle is an nearly 250,000-square foot enviornment in Palm Seaside Gardens, a web site chosen to make it straightforward for PGA gamers—70 p.c of whom stay within the sunshine state—to take part throughout the tour’s Florida swing. “So then it’s actually a wager on the expertise and the authenticity of it, which we’ve achieved a major quantity of diligence on.”
Excessive-profile buyers
TGL has attracted a starry roster of group buyers and homeowners, a listing that features Jimmy Fallon, Derek Jeter, and Steph Curry in addition to Shohei Otani, Josh Allen, Alex Ohanian, and Serena Williams. It’s clearly banking on a lot of Instagram shares and Tik Toks from these buyers, whose whole social media followers exceed 100 million. Its group possession teams are equally high-profile, and embrace sports activities tycoons like Atlanta Falcons proprietor Arthur Clean and New York Mets proprietor Steve Cohen.
However whereas TGL principals are pleased to relay any variety of knowledge factors about why the brand new league will succeed, what they’ll not relay is any details about its funds, which stays as elusive as McIlroy’s subsequent main win. How a lot did it price to construct its new stadium? What are TGL’s working prices? How a lot did ESPN, which is able to start airing the matches January 7th, pay for tv rights, and for a way lengthy? Ask these questions and also you get silence. McCauley will solely reveal that the preliminary funding is in “the lots of of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}.”
In the long run, it can come down as to if TGL can flip the well mannered, nation membership sport of golf right into a raucous good time that Gen Z can’t wait to observe. Time will inform. However not less than this a lot we all know: They’re popping out swinging.