PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. – The talk of SoFi Center, home of the new TGL Indoor Golf League, is the massive five-story-tall screen. It’s so vast that you can almost get lost in its picturesque views of virtual green hillsides, streets along virtual oceans, and virtual car-swallowing canyons. You walk into the SoFi Center and all you want to do is look at that screen…and maybe make some cuts too.
The putting green complex is equally impressive: a true-to-life application of Augusta’s synthetic turf, national-grade bunker sand and hydraulic technology that together looks and feels like it was carved directly from a club’s tournament course. field.
Everything is fascinating to the point of becoming an almost astonishing reality. The tee boxes are real grass, the green complex feels like a wavy strip. From a technological point of view, TGL has already won the game. TGL’s technological underpinnings are as impressive as anything ever seen in the history of golf.
But here’s a little secret about technology: Technology alone will attract curious glances, but there has to be a human component to keep you coming back. And that’s where TGL’s challenge lies: not in building a hyper-realistic golf course, but in ensuring that the professionals who play it can connect with the fans who are watching it all happen.
Billy Horschel, winner of the 2014 Tour Championship and member of TGL’s Atlanta Drive GC, understands the task. “If the players aren’t entertained and don’t participate, if they don’t talk and analyze things… it’s not going to be successful,” he said at a TGL media day last month. “We have to be entertainers. We have to move away a little from what we are in the PGA Tour tournaments inside 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 cover it here.)
That’s the key, and that’s the challenge of TGL: getting players to do something they normally find foreign, out of their own skulls. Golf is a sport played between the ears, and the instinct of every great player is to limit his attention to the small ball in front of him. That approach is what helps them win big prizes and millions. But that approach also excludes fans… and fans are what TGL (and golf in general) desperately needs right now.
Fans crave authenticity, or at least relatability. To name a couple of examples, the PGA Tour would probably prefer you not to consider them: Phil Mickelson can always be identified on the golf course, even though he is a multiple major winner and you are not. Phil always seems to be one shot away from the “wow, let’s see what happens if I try this” approach that the rest of us call our golf game. He may not be relatable to Bryson DeChambeau, with his US Open trophy and his ability to launch balls into orbit, but he is absolutely authentic in his pursuit of whatever he’s trying to do, whether it’s breaking 50 or scoring a hole-in-one on his home.
TGL players have to find a way to make those kinds of connections with fans, be authentic in their conversations, and relatable in the fact that, damn, this is a fun game they are playing here. Sure, some will be better than others, just like some of your golf buddies have outgoing personalities and some are smoother than a dry BLT on the turn. But there’s a camaraderie on the golf course that we’re not often aware of, and if TGL players can take advantage of a little bit of that, this league will accomplish something.
“We have to show more of ourselves here than we would 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 is give him “Tiger more bragging rights.”
Pop. That’s it right there. If you can get Tiger Woods to start criticizing his teammates on camera for not winning 15 majors, and if you can get them to bark at him too, then you’ll have a winning formula. Give people a reason to care, TGL, and they absolutely will.
Speaking of Woods, it’s curious why he and Rory McIlroy won’t be playing on the event’s opening night, although they will apparently be in attendance. But one of these days, golf will have to stand on its own without Woods behind 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 Shane Lowry, always up for fun, who reported Monday that he will take TGL’s first official shot Tuesday night.
“I’m going to have to be very careful with my bad language, but on our team, Shane Lowry (has the biggest mouth),” US Open champion and Bay GC teammate Wyndham Clark said last month. “He gets some bad words on the trigger pretty quickly, so he’s going to have to be very careful.” Or not!
Each of the six four-man teams already has at least one player who can definitely make a difference for golf fans; The key is to find out which of the other three will push their way into the spotlight and which of the teams will show the most fight and personality.
“We have some lively guys on social media or guys you’d like to go have a beer with, and then there’s the killer in Ludvig (Åberg),” Clark said. “We have a whole range. Our team is pretty fun.”
Promotion is easy. Authenticity is harder, and authenticity when things don’t go your way… is a challenge, to put it mildly, for image-obsessed professionals.
“The last thing we want to do is look like idiots on live TV in prime time, wasting a chip or messing something up, which is going to happen,” Horschel said. “Someone is going to hit a bunker shot into the crowd and it’s going to be awesome, but you don’t want to be that guy who does it the first time.”
TGL is golf, yes, but it is golf with a different approach and aimed at amateurs. This is the sporting equivalent of a dunk contest, spectacle without risk of compromising one’s place in the game. And if everyone approaches it the right way, it could be a great bridge between New Year’s Day and the Masters.
“We are competitors. We want to win. But at the same time we also have to be encouragers,” Horschel said. “I think everyone who has signed up to be a part of this knows that and will do their part to make sure this is successful.”
Everyone will want to see TGL’s huge screen. The key to your future success is to make us care about who hits you.