In mid-February, Tiger Woods stood over his golf ball on a course in Florida and sent a wedge arcing through the sky, traveling some 117 yards. On most any other golf course, this would have been a good thing: Tiger, though still struggling with the effects of multiple surgeries and a 2021 car accident, remains capable of sending a golf ball exactly where he wants it to go. Here, though—inside the SoFi Center, an amphitheater in a parking lot in Palm Beach Gardens custom designed for TGL, a built-for-TV indoor golf league that launched in January—Tiger’s wedge flew toward a simulator screen the height of a small apartment building, where a number of sensors and monitors plotted its path along a virtual golf hole and determined that the ball would roll to a stop…a full hundred yards short of the green. The crowd—1,500 strong, in bleachers that form a giant U around the field of play—murmured in confusion. His Jupiter Links Golf Club teammates fell over laughing on the sidelines. An ESPN reporter walked onto the turf to figure out what the hell had just happened. Tiger, it turned out, had miscalculated the distance: He’d thought he was supposed to hit the ball 99 yards, when in fact the flag was one hundred and ninety nine yards away. The GOAT had goofed.
In some ways, this was exactly the sort of moment TGL was engineered to deliver. Pure entertainment, as distinct from competition. Over the past three years, as I’ve reported for GQ, golf has endured something like a slow-rolling existential crisis. Post-pandemic, the recreational game of golf is more popular than ever, and with a broader and more diverse group of players than ever before. But the professional product has squandered this historic organic interest by bifurcating into two professional leagues, each of which is weaker than the one league that previously existed. The rise of LIV Golf, backed by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, has cleaved the sport in two, enlisting a large handful of the game’s biggest players in a series of little-watched tournaments (the LIV Golf Riyadh event in January averaged 40,000 viewers on TV) on second-tier courses around the world. The PGA Tour, meanwhile, is struggling to appease the golfers who turned down major LIV paydays. Much of this drama has been captured by the cameras of Full Swing, a Netflix docuseries intended to juice interest not just in the sport but its practitioners—to help generate the sort of viral, shareable moments that have become the lifeblood of modern sports leagues.
It was into this environment that Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and their fellow founding investors launched TGL: a brand-new simulator golf league featuring six teams of 24 total players, with matches broadcast in primetime on Mondays and Tuesdays (PGA Tour events are typically Thursday through Sunday) on ESPN and ESPN2 this winter. But TGL has aspirations to be more than golf’s newest, shiniest object. More than that, it represents an act of image rehab for a sport in need of it—and, maybe, a chance to appeal to (and perhaps even create) a new kind of golf fan.
So: how’s it going? On balance, it seems, pretty well. The season launched in early January, and runs until the end of March, just ahead of the Masters—the first major of the golf season. Viewership is about 25% stronger than the college basketball games that aired in the same time slots last year. Celebrities like Serena Williams and Eli Manning, both of whom are co-owners of TGL teams, have swung by for matches. The golfers seem to be enjoying it (“I wish I had this much fun on the golf course,” Wyndham Clark said after a recent match). And it’s generating the sort of shareable moments, like that Tiger flub, that golf broadcasts—sedate, laden with commercials, and scattered both temporally and geographically among players at different places on the course and in the round—have long struggled to showcase.
