Watching the debut of the new TGL—that’s “Tomorrow’s Golf League”—on ESPN on Tuesday, I kept wondering: Why does this exist?
It may be best to answer a different question first: What is TGL? It’s an indoor golf league. The course is a domed practice area in Palm Beach, with a 60-foot screen that players hit shots into. A launch monitor simulates where the shot would go in the real world, only the holes here are a bit of golf science fiction. If your shot lands in virtual sand, you will hit your next one out of real sand in the arena. Squads of three players go against each other in a mix of team competition and one-on-one matches. The whole thing takes two hours or so, a nice improvement on a five-hour round (or a 10-hour broadcast) on the PGA Tour. The players all come from that tour. Most are prime-aged stars, but the league’s centerpieces are Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, whose joint business got this whole thing started.
Watching the debut of the new TGL—that’s “Tomorrow’s Golf League”—on ESPN on Tuesday, I kept wondering: Why does this exist?
It may be best to answer a different question first: What is TGL? It’s an indoor golf league. The course is a domed practice area in Palm Beach, with a 60-foot screen that players hit shots into. A launch monitor simulates where the shot would go in the real world, only the holes here are a bit of golf science fiction. If your shot lands in virtual sand, you will hit your next one out of real sand in the arena. Squads of three players go against each other in a mix of team competition and one-on-one matches. The whole thing takes two hours or so, a nice improvement on a five-hour round (or a 10-hour broadcast) on the PGA Tour. The players all come from that tour. Most are prime-aged stars, but the league’s centerpieces are Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, whose joint business got this whole thing started.
Those are answers for people who have a piece of the action. For a sports league to really work, some reason for existing needs to filter down to fans, too. It needs to differentiate itself from everything else. Fake golf has its uses; a simulator is great for practice, and it can be a nice fallback when an actual golf course is too far or too busy. But it turns out that fake golf is not quite as useful to watch as it can be to play. The technology on display at TGL is incredible, but once you have seen it, you have seen it. You might call this golf a diet version of the real thing, but that’s not right, because it is clear why diet drinks might appeal to the masses. The same cannot be said for TGL.
Cool things are happening here. The arena that hosts the matches is a tech marvel, surely the finest golf simulation man has ever invented. The putting green is “tech-infused,” as the league says, and is adjusted to create different sloping for different holes. The grass in the venue is real, and a crane replaces pieces of it when it gets worn down. Obsessives who dream about putting a golf sim in their basement will tune in for the same reason they might scroll through Instagram Reels of home-build simulators. Who’s projecting about this? Certainly not me.
In at least one way, this brand of half-virtual golf differentiates itself from the real thing in a way that adds value. The holes are all fictional—not better than real golf holes, but weirder, more tricked out, and less constrained by practical considerations. The holes are in a mixture of settings and often not thematically connected to one another in the way holes on a real course are. Any golf architecture dweeb will tell you (correctly) that a great course is full of complementary holes, but here, at least TGL offers a change of pace. You will see some strategic challenges that do not exist on real tour-level courses. My favorite was the hole that asked players to hit the ball 300 yards in the air over an active volcano.
The medium has major limits, though, because of the nature of simulation golf. The digital courses create fresh dilemmas for players, but they are still swinging the club in a perfectly manicured, state-of-the-art, indoor facility. Nothing on Tuesday was as fraught as the time Jordan Spieth almost killed himself hitting a shot from a cliffside or the time he almost launched himself into a Great Lake so he could hit a flop shot at the Ryder Cup. The virtual world of TGL is imaginative, but the physical one is as sterile as golf gets. There are no live alligators roaming the arena to mimic a proper Floridian course.
