PALM BEACH GARDENS, Florida — The SoFi Center conference, hosting venue for the new TGL indoor golf leagueis the huge five-story screen. It’s so vast that you could almost get lost in its picturesque views of virtual green hills, fairways along virtual oceans and breathtaking virtual canyons. You walk into the SoFi Center and all you want to do is look at that screen…and maybe make a few cuts to it, too.
Equally impressive is the putting green complex, a real-world application of synthetic turf, Augusta National-level bunker sand and hydraulic technology that together looks and feels like it was cut right on the course of a country club tournament.
All of this is fascinating to the point of becoming an almost strange reality. The tees are made of real grass, the green complex looks like a wavy fringe. From a technological point of view, TGL has already won the game. The technological underpinnings of TGL are as impressive as anything ever seen in golf history.
But here’s a little secret about technology: the technology alone will attract curious looks, but there has to be a human component to keep you coming back. And therein lies the challenge for TGL: not in building a hyper-realistic golf arena, but in ensuring that the pros who play it can connect with the fans who watch it all unfold.
Billy Horschel, 2014 Tour Championship winner and member of TGL’s Atlanta Drive GC, understands the mission. “If players aren’t entertaining and engaging, if they’re not talking and dissecting things… it’s not going to be successful,” he said at a media day last month. TGL. “We must be artists. We have to move away a little bit from what we are in PGA Tour tournaments on the ropes and we have to be different.
(If you want to dig deeper into what exactly TGL is and how it will work, we have what you need here.)
That’s the key, and that’s the challenge of TGL: getting players to do something that’s normally foreign to them, outside of their own skulls. Golf is a sport played between the ears, and every instinct of any great player is to focus on the small ball in front of him. This focus is what helps them win majors and millions of dollars. But that focus also excludes fans…and fans are what TGL (and golf in general) desperately needs right now.
Fans crave authenticity, or at least relatability. To cite a few examples, the PGA Tour would probably prefer if you ignored it: Phil Mickelson is always reliable on the golf course, even if he’s a multiple major tournament winner and you’re not. Phil always seems to be on the verge of the “eff, let’s see what happens if I try this” approach that the rest of us call our golf game. Bryson DeChambeau may not compare, with his US Open trophies and ability to send balls into orbit, but he is absolutely authentic in his pursuit of whatever he attempts, whether he act to cross 50 or make a hole in one above your house.
TGL players need to find a way to make those kinds of connections with fans, be authentic in their conversations, and be relatable in the fact that, damn, this is a amusing game they play here. Of course, some will be better than others, just like some of your golf partners have outgoing personalities and some are blander than a dry BLT on the turn. But there’s a camaraderie on the golf course that we’re not often privy to, and if TGL players can harness a little of that, this league will be on the right track.
“We have to show more of ourselves here than on the PGA Tour course or in a tournament,” Horschel said, “but we’re still going to be competitive, because like I said, the last thing you want to do it’s giving Tiger more bragging rights.
Slam. It’s all there. If you can get Tiger Woods to start ripping into his peers on camera for not, you know, winning 15 majors — and if you can get them to respond to him, too — then you’ve got a winning formula. Give people a reason to care, TGL, and they absolutely will.
Speaking of Woods, he’s curious as to why he and Rory McIlroy aren’t playing on the first night of the event, even though they will apparently be in attendance. But one of these days, golf will have to stand on its own two feet without Woods supporting it, and the next generation of players – or characters – will have to step up.
Early betting favorite for TGL’s engaging personality: Bay GC’s always-down-for-a-party Shane Lowry, who announced Monday he will hit TGL’s first official shot Tuesday night.
“I’m going to have to really watch my swearing, but on our team, Shane Lowry (has the biggest mouth),” US Open champion and Bay GC member Wyndham Clark said last month. “He triggers bad words pretty quickly, so he’s going to have to really watch himself.” Or no!
Each of the six four-man teams already has at least one player who can definitely shake things up with golf fans; the key is to determine which of the other three will fight their way into the spotlight and which of the teams will display the most fighting spirit and personality.
“We have dynamic guys on social media or guys you would want to go have a beer with, and then you have the assassin in Ludvig (Åberg),” Clark said. “We have a whole range. Our team is pretty fun.
Promoting is easy. Authenticity is harder, and authenticity when things don’t turn out the way you want them to…it’s a challenge, to say the least, for professionals obsessed with their image.
“The last thing we want to do is make ourselves look like idiots on live prime-time TV, chipping or doing something, which is going to happen,” Horschel said . “Someone’s going to throw a bunker into the crowd and it’s going to be awesome, but you don’t want to be that guy who does it on the first try.”
TGL is golf, yes, but it’s golf with a different, fan-oriented approach. It’s the sporting equivalent of a slam-dunk contest, showmanship without the risk of compromising one’s place in the game. And if everyone approaches it in the right way, it could be a nice bridge between New Year’s Day and the Masters.
“We are competitors. We want to win. But we also have to be artists at the same time,” Horschel said. “I think everyone who signed up to participate in this project is aware of this and will do their part to ensure the success of this project.”
Everyone will want to take a look at TGL’s giant screen. The key to its future success is to make us care about those who enter it.
