Indoor Simulated Golf League, Backed by Woods and McIlroy, Tees Off | Sports Destination Management

Indoor Simulated Golf League, Backed by Woods and McIlroy, Tees Off

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Jan 30, 2025 | By: Michael Popke

Photo © Erepich7 | Dreamstime.com

Almost one million viewers tuned in to ESPN to watch the debut of TGL Golf, the new six-team indoor simulator golf league co-created by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. (TGL is short for TMRW Golf League, which is part of TMRW Sports.)
 

“Even though the TGL co-founders were not in action, [the] broadcast attracted an average of 919,000 viewers during the 9-11 p.m. ET time slot,” the network noted.To put that in perspective, that is a larger audience than any LIV Golf broadcast on The CW in 2023 and 2024, and also larger than [the previous] week’s PGA Tour season opener on the Golf Channel and NBC, according to Sports Media Watch.”
 

As The Athletic put it, the January 7 broadcast featured “six PGA Tour stars hitting golf balls into a five-story screen before turning around and chipping and putting on a green inside the SoFi Center in Palm Beach, Fla.”
 

The first-of-its-kind venue, built specifically for the league on the campus of Palm Beach State College, will host the entire two-month season. The six TGL teams, each with four members who collectively have a ton of PGA Tour experience, represent six different cities — Atlanta; Boston; Jupiter, Fla.; Los Angeles; New York; and San Francisco — although not all players are from the United States. All matches will be held on weeknights and broadcast in the U.S. via ESPN and ESPN+.

Some of the big names competing include Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa, Rickie Fowler and Wyndham Clark.

Here’s a breakdown of the basics, courtesy of the TGL website:

Field of Play: The playing area within SoFi Center is roughly the size of a football field — 97 yards long x 50 yards wide. It’s made up of two zones where the players will take shots: the ScreenZone — for shots into the simulator screen — and the GreenZone – for short-game shots and putting.

The Screen: The players start by hitting into a giant 64 x 53 foot simulator powered by Full Swing. They hit from areas with real grass, fairway, rough and sand into the screen for tee shots and approach shots. Then, for shots of approximately 50 yards or less, they transition to the green.

The Green: For anything inside approximately 50 yards, players move to a physical, custom-built GreenZone, a 22,475-square-foot short-game area that transforms between holes. The GreenZone includes a 41-yard-wide turntable that rotates the green to change approach angles and can morph its topography using nearly 600 actuators.

Photo © Nadzeya Haroshka | Dreamstime.com
Photo © Nadzeya Haroshka | Dreamstime.com

The Course: Three world-class golf course design companies created 30 original holes that start in the virtual world with shots into the screen and end in the real world on the green inside SoFi Center. Each match, 15 of these holes will be selected and placed in a unique order to form that night’s course.

Match Format: We’ll be playing 15 holes over two sessions: Triples will be 9 holes and Singles will be 6 holes. Each hole is worth 1 point and the team with the fewest shots wins the point. Ties are worth 0 points and there are no carryovers. The team with the most points after 15 holes wins the match. If tied, overtime is a 3-vs-3 closest-to-the-pin competition.

League Format: Similar to professional hockey, TGL will use a points-based system that includes two points for a win and one point for a loss in overtime. The regular season will feature each team playing the other teams in a round-robin format as they accumulate points in the battle for a playoff place.

Postseason: The top four teams in the SoFi Cup Standings will advance to the playoffs, which will include single-elimination semifinals and a “best-of-three” Championship.

I thought this would be a disaster six months ago and came in so cynically, but I see something here,” wrote Brody Miller, a staff writer for The Athletic who watched the first match (in which The Bay Golf Club defeated The New York Golf Club) on ESPN. “People love match-play golf, but the problem with match-play tournaments is a whole lot of lag time and/or difficulty keeping up. Something about the speedy, pressure-filled setup leads to the parts of match play we actually like.”

That said, the TGL is way too young to make any kind of predictions about its long-term success.

 

“The league still has to prove that it can generate TV audiences when its novelty has worn off,” cautioned James Colgan for Golf.com. “For now, the news is good. We can say confidently after Week 1 that the TGL is not an immediate flop. We can agree that the first batch of numbers is good, and they might get better still. But we should temper that optimism with a dose of reality: long-term TV ratings growth is still the single-largest challenge for the league, and we know nothing about how these numbers will look in a few weeks.”

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