Tomorrow's Golf League: a bold experiment or just a passing fad in professional golf?

The world of professional golf is awash with abbreviations, and the word “Tour” as shorthand for workplaces of those making a living from the sport to exist.

PGA, LIV, LPGA, DP World Tour, Sunshine Tour, Asian Tour, Korn Ferry Tour, PGA Tour Champions, Challenge Tour, PGA Tour Canada and the LET, to name a few, are there.

Well, you can add TGL to that list of word salad.

Tomorrow’s Golf League (TGL) is here today. For better or worse. It might be worse, but at the risk of being that arrogant commentator in the early 90s who wrote that cellphones won’t catch on, or the hacks that wrote off white-ball cricket in the late 70s, let’s say I’m undecided.

In the name of research I spent about four hours watching TGL over two nights (it wasn’t live), so you didn’t have to. The concept was developed by golfing god Tiger Woods, winner of 15 majors when golf was played outdoors and Rory McIlroy, himself the owner of four majors.

It was probably also tweaked by dozens of other people, but Barry from accounts and Lana from tech don’t move the marketing needle, no matter how much input they gave.

Concept

So what’s it all about?

It’s an indoor golf league played in a huge domed arena in Palm Beach, Florida, built specifically for TGL and pimped out by software and financial giant SoFi.

Presumably SoFi has also provided much of the financing for the $50-million purpose-built facility, although F1 great Lewis Hamilton and tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams are also investors. The Williamses have been regular spectators in the opening three weeks of TGL.

Top players from the PGA Tour have been competing since January in two-hour weekly competitions during prime time television hours in the US.

How it works 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwrZf27WW7A&t=47s

Each week features a match between two of the teams, with three players in each. There will be 15 holes across two sessions, with all the players competing over the first nine in the alternate-shot format. For the last six holes, the golfers play in head-to-heads. A point is awarded for each hole, with nothing for a half. A tie-breaker will be played if necessary. There is a referee and shot clock, teams can call time-outs. TGL has introduced the hammer, which teams can use to double the stakes of a given hole. It is a round-robin group stage featuring 15 matches, followed by semi-finals and a best-of-three final held over two nights.

Six TGL teams representing six different cities go head-to-head in a season-long competition. The players are mic’d up to allow “fans” to hear their trash talking. Or at least as much trash talking as golfers can muster.

The players hit their first shots of a hole from a tee area into a massive 19-metre high and 16-metre wide screen. From there virtual reality takes over, as a launch monitor tracks the ball’s trajectory, superimposing it hurtling towards a virtual fairway, rough, bunker or green.

This technology has broadly been used as a training tool for a few years, but SoFi has taken the concept, fed it software steroids and created something far bigger.

If the ball lands in a bunker, the player will hit his next shot from actual sand in the arena – sand which is the same as used at Augusta for the Masters. Once hit from the hazard, the software will again track the ball to its landing position.

Golfing greats Rory McIlroy of Northern Ireland and America's Tiger Woods. (Photo: Christian Petersen / Getty Images)

A state-of-the-art rotating green has been built inside the Palm Beach dome, and this green has the ability to shape shift. It can alter hole locations and undulations on the putting surface to mirror the virtual green the players have hit to.

Once on, or near the green, the competing players actually chip or putt to the hole inside the arena.

There’s a shot clock, with only 40 seconds for a player to hit a shot, which is actually one massive improvement on “real” golf. In fact, some pros have suggested that the shot clock be introduced in PGA tournaments.

There are also timeouts and something called a “hammer” to increase the points value of that hole. The virtual holes are also dramatic figments of a golfing imagination that couldn’t work in the real world because they don’t have to consider practical obstacles.

On one hole, players hit over an active volcano. Well, a virtual active volcano, but you get the idea. Already it’s blurring the lines between fact and fiction, which seems a perfect metaphor for sport in the world we live in.

The technology is truly impressive and the purpose-built arena looks amazing, even on TV.

“The first thing I would like to have people know is it’s golf, but it’s reimagined, sort of trying to take golf into the 21st century,” McIlroy said at the launch.

“We have teams, obviously there’s a lot of technology involved, trying to bring it into the digital era. A lot of things that we’ve taken from other sports like a shot-clock, a time-out, things that you don’t see in regular golf.

“We are trying to appeal to that bigger sports audience out there.”

Target market

McIlroy’s line of appealing to a bigger market suggests that this concept was founded on the principle of “build it and they will come”, and not on much market research.

TGL has top players, it takes place on Mondays and Tuesdays in the winter months between PGA events, and the tech is cool. But is that enough? Will Gen Z come flocking to golf because it’s quicker (two hours), has blaring music (it never stops), timeouts and shot clocks?

Every shot the player hits is in near perfect conditions compared with playing in a 60km/h wind in driving rain on the Scottish coast. The spectators in the arena seem to be mostly family members and sponsor invitees. There are some paying fans, who have dutifully bought LA or Boston shirts, but it feels contrived.

(Graphic: TGL Website)

Team golf works in the Ryder Cup, President’s Cup and Solheim Cup, but getting excited about the Boston Common Golf team featuring McIlroy (Northern Ireland), Keegan Bradley (US), Hideki Matsuyama (Japan) and Adam Scott (Australia) will take some selling.

The players seem to be enjoying themselves and it’s obvious that despite the music, lights, shot clocks and other distractions, when it comes down to it, they want to win. They remain competitive creatures.

The excitement of seeing players hitting shots into a giant screen, and then walking a few metres to an indoor green, did wear off pretty quickly.

It’s a bit like Padel or Squash — they’re great to play but not so great to watch. At least to this writer.

Time will tell whether TGL will catch on. Obviously the cost of the arena is a major barrier to entry for a start, but even if that reduces dramatically over time, will it take-off?

Traditional golf’s TV ratings have been dropping with the slow pace of play being one of the major turn-offs for people as well as the fractured nature of the sport.

TGL is offering an alternative experiment. Ironically, it’s adding to the fractured nature of the sport in a way, while also attempting to present a new version of golf deep into the third decade of the 21st century.

Will it work and will it catch on? I don’t know. But like the pioneers of white-ball cricket did with five-day Test cricket, someone has to try to adapt a cumbersome sport to suit a faster world.

The notion of selling golf purely on its traditions and legacy is not going to be enough. TGL might not be the final solution, but it has opened the door to an alternative golfing reality. DM