After years of development — plus a storm-forced year of delay — TGL, the technology-infused indoor golf league backed by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy’s TMRW Sports, gets underway this week. Here’s everything you need to know about one of the boldest gambles in the history of men’s professional golf.
What’s the deal with TGL?
Simple: it’s prime-time indoor golf played on a combination of a simulator screen and an actual green. Teams of pros, including several major winners, will compete in a head-to-head match-play and team-play format over the course of two-plus months.
At stake: millions of dollars, pride … oh, and a possible route forward for the future of the game. The PGA Tour, ESPN and TMRW Sports are banking that this will be a way to get golf fans through the grim winter months until the azaleas start blooming.
“You take a sport like golf that’s got 600 years of history and tradition and everything that comes with that, the good and the bad. We really wanted to keep one foot firmly planted in the traditional game,” said Mike McCarley, CEO of TMRW Sports Group. “With the other foot we really wanted to be trying to bring the game more into the future and embracing technology.”
Where will TGL take place?
All matches will be played at the SoFi Center, a brand-new facility nearly the length of a football field, built on the campus of Palm Beach State College. It’s about a half-hour from Jupiter, Fla., meaning it’s an easy drive for virtually all the pros who play in the league.
The marquee attraction of the SoFi Center is the mammoth 64-by-53-foot screen, five stories high and nearly that wide. Players will tee off into the screen, which will then display the virtual trajectory of the virtual ball on a virtual golf course, accurate right down to the virtual houses along the virtual fairways. However, the players will tee off from one of three tee boxes — one with actual fairway-length grass, another with rough-level grass, and a third with sand should they end up in a virtual fairway bunker. Players can take divots off the grass, and can splash the sand as they make their approaches.
Once the ball hits the screen, all the tech behind TGL takes center stage. The screen zone includes 18 Full Swing radar devices and eight Top Tracer optical cameras to track and translate each shot to its virtual equivalent.
Each TGL match covers 15 holes, but course designers — including Nicklaus Design, Beau Welling and Augustín Pizá — have created 30 different holes ranging from the standard to the exotic. The holes can be arranged in any order.
Once players get to within 50 yards of the pin, they’ll turn 180 degrees and begin firing into the massive green complex, a 22,475-square-foot zone with three bunkers filled with Augusta National-quality sand. The 41-yard-wide circular green surface itself is laid over nearly 600 actuators which use hydraulics to change the slope of the green from hole to virtual hole, so that no two hole approaches and green slopes are exactly alike.
More than 1,000 seats surround the entire arena, and an array of pulsing lights and deep-bass speakers give the event a propulsive, rave-like feel. This isn’t Pebble Beach; this is a whole lot closer to a golf-simulator-enhanced concert hall, with the best players you’ve ever seen teeing it up.
“If it’s a country club in here, we have failed,” Billy Horschel said last month at TGL’s Media day. “I want it to be what you would experience in Mercedes-Benz Stadium with the Atlanta Falcons, the Florida Gators stadium, an NBA arena, an NHL arena. You want it to be where you can feel that energy, you can feel the excitement from the crowd.”
The prior iteration of a TGL facility suffered a catastrophic failure when a generator failed and the facility’s fabric roof was shredded in a late 2023 storm. The new facility has a fixed roof, and while landscaping and touch-up efforts were still underway just weeks before opening, the competition surface is ready to go.
How do matches work?
Matches will take place in prime time on ESPN and ESPN2, starting with Tuesday night’s 9 p.m. ET matchup. Two teams of three players will compete head-to-head, playing 15 holes across two sessions. The first nine holes will be triples, with the three teams playing alternate-shot format, low player wins. Holes 10-15 will be singles, where each player will play two holes, head to head against another player. Each hole is worth one point, and there are no ties and no carryovers. Overtime, if the match is tied, is a closest-to-the-pin challenge.
The most notable change to outdoor golf is the shot clock, where players have just 40 seconds between shots. That means no waggling, no delaying, no stepping back and assessing the shot. It’s going to be quick, and it’s going to make for some tension for players used to taking their time.
TGL also features a challenge called “The Hammer.” Each team can increase the value of a hole by a point by throwing The Hammer, which switches hands after every use. If you decline the Hammer challenge, you forfeit the hole. Players can throw the Hammer multiple times on one hole.
Matches are designed to be over and done inside of two hours, a key selling point for the league. You can settle in for a couple hours of golf and get the entire story before bed.
Who’s on TGL’s teams?
Each of TGL’s six teams features four players, three of whom will play in any one match. The teams are labeled with cities based on their ownership groups’ origins; some of the members have connections to their “home” teams and some are just along for the ride. The teams are as follows:
Atlanta Drive GC: Patrick Cantlay, Lucas Glover, Billy Horschel, Justin Thomas. Ownership: Falcons owner Arthur Blank.
Boston Common Golf: Keegan Bradley, Rory McIlroy, Hideki Matsuyama, Adam Scott. Ownership: Fenway Sports Group, owners of the Boston Red Sox, Liverpool and others.
Jupiter Links: Max Homa, Tom Kim, Kevin Kisner, Tiger Woods. Ownership: Woods’ TGR Ventures.
Los Angeles GC: Tommy Fleetwood, Collin Morikawa, Justin Rose, Sahith Theegala. Ownership: Alexis Ohanian, Serena Williams, and limited partners including Giannis Antetokounmp, Shonda Rhimes and Michelle Wie West.
New York GC: Matt Fitzpatrick, Rickie Fowler, Xander Schauffele, Cameron Young. Ownership: New York Mets owner Steve Cohen.
The Bay GC: Ludvig Aberg, Wyndham Clark, Min Woo Lee, Shane Lowry. Ownership: Steph Curry and Avenue Sports Fund, with limited partners including Andre Iguodala and Klay Thompson.
How does the season work?
The TGL season begins Tuesday night with New York versus The Bay, and continues on Mondays and Tuesdays through early March. Some days will feature two matches; Presidents’ Day (Feb. 17) will have three. The regular season runs through early March, and then the playoffs run to late March … taking us right up to major season.
“It’s so cool for golf that we’re going to be primetime, kind of taking that Monday night slot of where football normally is,” Clark said last month. “I just think it’s so great for golf. It’s great for our personal brands, the brands we represent, and it’s great for TGL. I think it’s just an awesome thing. I’m hoping this is just the start of a lot of primetime for golf.”
From a standings perspective, TGL will work like hockey, with points awarded (or not awarded) based on the match’s outcome: two points for a win, one point for an overtime loss, and no points for a regulation-time loss. The top four teams will advance to the playoffs, which will include single-elimination semifinals and a best-of-three Finals.
The winning team splits $9 million, the second-place team gets $4.5 million, and on downward from there. The sixth-place team gets $1.5 million, meaning every player is guaranteed nearly $400,000 for a few weeks’ work.
Will Tiger Woods play?
TGL is set up exactly for Woods’ physical needs right now — meaning, he doesn’t need to hike an 8,000-yard course for four days in a row. All he needs to do is hit a drive, turn around and walk 50 feet to the green. Woods played in the PNC Championship a few weeks back alongside son Charlie and nearly won while being allowed to use a cart; taking the grind of walking up and down hills off his legs could open up new opportunities for Woods to win. Like he needs more of those.
Woods’ Jupiter team is scheduled to play next Tuesday, Jan. 14, but Woods himself hasn’t announced if he’ll play. Rory McIlroy’s Boston Common Golf team is first scheduled to play on Jan. 27 — against Woods’ Jupiter — but again, no word yet on if McIlroy will be in the trio.
What the players are saying
TGL will hold 50 test sessions for players at the SoFi Center prior to Tuesday night’s debut. Some, like Rickie Fowler, are a short drive away; others, like Clark, need to take a plane. TGL has endeavored to make competing in the event as easy as possible for everyone involved by working around schedules and providing charter jets to players coming in from the previous week’s tournaments … anything to get the talent in-house.
Still, even Tiger Woods himself won’t be able to keep a suspect product afloat for long, and that’s where TGL’s supporters step in, hoping to change preconceptions about the league.
“Someone hears about us [thinking] simulator golf is maybe a little gimmicky,” Atlanta GC’s Horschel said, “and it’s not that. We’re hitting off real grass, we’re hitting real shots. We’re playing on some artificial surface, but there’s a lot of technology that’s gone into this. This isn’t just some ‘put-it-together and let’s do this.’ This is a lot of high-tech stuff.”
The live element will be a significant new development; the stated goal is to create an environment much like the Waste Management Open’s famed 16th-hole stadium — minus the drunken revelry and beer-can tossing, of course.
“What’s sometimes a challenge with golf is people are farther away and sometimes the fans are intimate, but this is really intimate,” Clark said. “I think it’s fun. People are going to see our personalities. We’re going to be mic’d up. Some things could come out that maybe we don’t want to say. But that’s how other sports are.”
In the end, TGL will rise and fall on the personalities of the players. The tech infusion is a fascinating and necessary aspect, but if the players can’t communicate their interest, the fans won’t feel it either. The goal is to show golf and its best players in a new, bright, concert-level light.
“We want to make it different than what people are seeing on the golf course,” Horschel said. “This is supposed to be different. It’s supposed to be new, it’s supposed to be fast, engaging, in a two-hour window when you’re going to be able to see every golf shot. You’re going to be able to see guys more engaging than they would be out on a PGA Tour event.”
