Now Set to Debut in 2025, TGL Has Space to Surprise

After being forced to postpone its start date due to a storm that wrecked a state-of-the-art simulator golf arena, TGL has officially rescheduled its inaugural season. 

The high-tech, indoor simulator league backed by the likes of Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy is slated for primetime Tuesday night ESPN broadcasts starting in January 2025. TGL was originally slated to start this past January before Mother Nature intervened. 

There will be a lot of shoulder shrugs about Tomorrow’s Golf League, centered around two-hour matches, shot clocks, timeouts and arbitrary teams representing random cities. 

At the same time, TGL has more than enough runway to surprise next year. I would argue that, from an entertainment perspective, it has significantly more potential than LIV. 

I get it. After all that has occurred in professional golf over the past few years, it’s hard to rally emotionally for yet another idea designed to put more money in the hands of elite professional golfers and other key stakeholders. 

It’s even more difficult not to cringe when Collin Morikawa suggests (jokingly, we hope) that his invitation to the league might have topped receiving a captain’s pick to the U.S. Ryder Cup team. Or when McIlroy, who joined the league’s Boston Common franchise despite having virtually no connection to the city, answers serious press conference questions while wearing a ridiculous frog logo on his shirt. 

“(TGL) is so far removed from what we know golf to be,” McIlroy said. 

Because of that, many will flat-out ignore TGL. They will dismiss the circuit for its virtual format and contrived nature. They will save their golf viewing for the majors and occasional final-round PGA Tour drama sprinkled throughout the year. 

At the same time, several people I’ve talked to in the golf industry are expecting TGL to be a hit.

Tiger Will Draw Casual Viewers

First off, if you want to watch Tiger play golf, this is going to be one of the only places you can do it. 

In fact, it might soon be the only place. That is a supernova when it comes to drawing in casual fans. 

Woods, who will be 49 by the time TGL starts, isn’t playing much serious golf. His tournament days are fading quickly because of lingering health issues that don’t hold up when he has to walk 72 holes. 

That problem won’t exist in TGL. SoFi Center, a 1,600-seat arena in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., a short drive from Woods’ home in Jupiter, will have players hit off real grass (or actual rough or actual sand) into a 4K screen 20 times larger than a standard simulator. The only walking will be when players get within 50 yards of the hole and the competition shifts to a football field-sized green complex that can turn 360 degrees and change contours. 

He isn’t merely a competitor. Tiger’s paw prints are all over TGL Woods partnered with McIlroy and former Golf Channel president Mike McCarley to found TMRW Sports, the sports and entertainment company behind TGL. He is an owner of Jupiter Links GC, one of six teams competing in the league. 

Tiger was a leading voice blending the physical with the virtual to create this new golf world. And as strange as it is to say out loud, maybe that could become more accepted as “real golf” in the future, especially given the explosion of TopGolf, Puttshack and other alternate forms of the game.

Woods could do an hour of stand-up comedy and draw serious ratings (come to think of it, I would love to see this). The fact he is playing some version of golf against a roster of the game’s best will garner attention. Remember that Tiger, Phil Mickelson, Peyton Manning and Tom Brady played a made-for-TV match in 2020 and drew an average of 5.8 million viewers. That was the most-watched golf event in cable television history.

An Enviable Primetime TV Slot

But perhaps even bigger than Woods is that TGL could have one of the best TV contracts in golf. You could argue this will be a time slot—and consistent primetime exposure—the sport has never enjoyed. 

Because of the two-hour window and getting to play indoors, TGL has an ESPN primetime spot on Mondays and/or Tuesdays. The league will be heavily promoted during the NFL and college football playoffs—Week Three of TGL will be played after the Jan. 21 college football national championship game. 

The league runs throughout the winter, stopping before the Masters, which is a period when golf entertainment consumption is particularly high. Much of the U.S. is shoveling snow and staying indoors, not playing golf. 

The country’s most popular sport, NFL football, ends in February. TGL will largely be going up against the regular seasons of college basketball, the NBA and the NHL. It shouldn’t overlap with March Madness, which plays the majority of its games Thursday through Sunday. TGL competing for eyeballs against those sports and the likes of NCIS: Los Angeles is a battle that can be won. It’s a mammoth difference compared to LIV, a league that has been relegated to the CW Network and regularly goes up against the PGA Tour and more enticing sports.

Fertile Ground For Gamblers

Another wildcard: TGL’s rapid-fire format has potential to be more suitable for gambling. 

One problem golf has endured with gambling is that it’s an individual game where players don’t necessarily compete head-to-head. Unlike other sports, golf is frustrating to track from a gambling perspective. 

Bettors may pick a player to win a tournament and only get to watch a limited percentage of their shots. PGA Tour golf is also notorious for its heavy commercial load, routinely asking golf fans to sit through nearly an hour of advertisements in a three-hour TV window. 

TGL bypasses most of that and has a relatively straightforward format. There will be six teams of four players. Each week, two of the clubs will face each other in a 15-hole match. Over the course of the season, each squad will play five matches. The top four teams at the end of the regular season go to the playoffs. 

It has potential to be a different vibe than the convoluted FedEx Cup Playoffs which struggle with a confusing format and apathy. 

Are people going to be emotionally invested in the outcome? Probably not, but it could be more entertaining. 

Only three of the four players will compete in each match. The first nine holes (“Triples”) will be a three-man alternate-shot format. The last six holes will be head-to-head singles matches with the three golfers rotating who plays each hole. 

Every hole won is one point with no carryovers. All 15 holes are played no matter what. Overtime is a shootout where teams keep hitting shots in a closest-to-the-pin contest until one team has two balls inside the best effort of their competitors. 

There is also a shot clock where players have 40 seconds to hit their shot. If they don’t, it’s a one-stroke penalty. Each team gets four timeouts per match. The timeouts could be used to “ice” a golfer, similar to what you see in football when teams try to ice kickers. 

It could all add up to fertile gambling ground. A lot of what makes other sports interesting to bet on—a fast-paced, head-to-head environment —has space to shift to a golf setting. 

“It’s exciting that this group of guys is coming together for a two-hour window and we’re just going to basically hit balls, talk a lot of (trash) and people are going to be gambling on absolutely everything, each and every shot,” Woods said. “Every shot there’s going to be a wager.”

Sports gambling has caught fire in the U.S. with some asserting the industry could be worth as much as $40 billion by the end of the decade. 

Of note, sports gambling is legal in Florida. The Hard Rock Bet app has been active for four months after a false start a couple of years ago. 

Can It Work?

Other reasons to be high on TGL relate to why YouTube golf and esports have become so prominent: the players are going to be mic’d up and accessible, entertainment is the primary focus, there will be limited interruptions, it’s not a heavy time commitment for fans, the crowd could be actively involved, and the product can easily be repackaged through social media clips and other on-demand offerings. 

There isn’t much at stake. Maybe that is exactly why TGL could work. A game of pool against your buddies in a basement is fun, intense and entertaining—the end result is mostly irrelevant but the path to getting there is interesting. 

That is the opposite of how watching pro golf normally works. We want to see who wins because it is sold as a serious competition between serious golfers. LIV sold itself as just another version of that but it wasn’t enough to differentiate itself from traditional tournament golf. 

TGL, however, looks like it could veer more into the absurd and casual. 

The people behind it are not used to losing in business. The franchise owners include Steph Curry (San Francisco), Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian with his wife Serena Williams (Los Angeles), Boston Red Sox owners Fenway Sports Group (Boston), New York Mets owner Steve Cohen (New York) and Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank (Atlanta). 

They are backing TGL for a reason. There is space for pro golf—which got itself into trouble by clinging to an archaic structure—to innovate in an engaging way. 

Detractors have their list of reasons. Some don’t envision golf as a compelling product unless it is an inherently serious competition, LIV implemented some of the same team elements but hasn’t gained traction. TGL is another money grab (the prize fund is $21 million with $9 million going to the winning team and players eventually getting equity in their franchises), attaching teams to cities won’t be appealing because most players don’t have a connection to those cities, all the matches are played in one place, pro golfers don’t necessarily have entertaining personalities and simulator golf might not be satisfying to watch. 

Those are legitimate concerns. TGL should be particularly worried about the lack of personality. The golfers have to lean into the entertainment factor to make this successful. 

“I couldn’t care less,” will be a popular comment when people read articles like this one. 

But a lot of people—especially casual followers of the game—are going to care enough to at least tune in for a few minutes. 

When they do, there could be enough going on to make them stay. 

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