When you’re beginning a brand new sports activities league, or actually a brand new something, you’re all the time praying in your first viral second.
For TGL, a brand new golf league hoping to reinvent the sport for a brand new period and a brand new viewers, that second got here earlier than the primary season ever began. In 2024, Tiger Woods, the golf world’s largest title and each a participant and co-founder within the upstart league, confirmed as much as a not-quite-finished SoFi Center, in West Palm Beach, Florida, the place all TGL matches would quickly be held. He stood close to the middle of the stadium, on a soccer field-sized slab of turf, and began hitting balls into the 53-foot-high simulator display.
The subsequent half appears to make TGL producer Jeff Neubarth chuckle each time he tells it. He recounts it to me, months later, standing in nearly the very same spot. Neubarth factors as much as a tiny digital camera, barely seen 5 tales up atop that massive display. “That’s digital camera 91,” he says. “I pointed it out to Tiger, and I mentioned, ‘It’d be cool for those who hit it.’ He mentioned, ‘certain,’ dropped the ball, and hit it. First shot.”
The video of the ball flying upward and whacking the digital camera made the rounds on social media, earlier than most individuals even knew what TGL was. It has since turn into a ritual for gamers — together with a few of the world’s finest golfers — to attempt the “Tiger Camera Challenge” earlier than their matches or throughout observe classes. It shortly grew to become a signature gimmick for a league hoping to create heaps and much extra of them.
The workforce behind TGL, which simply wrapped up its first common season, has spent the final couple of years attempting to determine a completely new option to play golf. It’s not performed on large, sprawling programs however slightly on this comparatively tiny turf subject. Players hit their tee pictures not into the blue sky however in opposition to that five-story display, earlier than turning round and ending the opening on prime of a inexperienced that may be spun in any course and morphed into practically any form. TGL golf is a workforce sport, performed in entrance of raucous crowds, and borrows concepts and strategies from the NFL and the WWE. It is, above all else, a present. It’s made for TV, and for the web, excess of for anybody within the constructing. Which modifications all the things.
You can clarify virtually all the things about TGL by explaining its constraints. Matches are performed totally on Mondays and Tuesdays as a result of that’s sometimes a gradual time for golfers, who are sometimes at tournaments Wednesday via Sunday. (It’s additionally a gradual time on ESPN, which owns the league’s broadcast rights — TGL has principally changed mediocre faculty basketball video games.) They’re 15 holes as a substitute of the traditional 18, a greater slot in a two-hour time slot. There’s a 40-second shot clock and a radically simplified scoring system, all in service of constructing TGL faster-paced and simpler to observe than the whispered chaos of a typical golf event. Heck, the entire thing is ready in West Palm Beach as a result of {most professional} golfers residing inside driving distance.
Even the constructing itself is as a lot TV soundstage as sports activities area. When I go to in late January, Neubarth, who helped decide a lot of the appear and feel of TGL, takes me via his course of. His first problem to Jonathan Evans, the present’s director: no digital camera operators on the sphere. He chalks that as much as private desire. “The second was, what are different sports activities doing that we expect are actually cool and helpful to place in an area?”
Neubarth spins round and factors to all of the methods he’s set as much as seize the TGL motion, some borrowed and a few completely new. There’s a cable-suspended digital camera often called the Spidercam, which may transfer each vertically and horizontally everywhere in the area — you’ve seen that in NFL video games. Two cameras zip alongside on a 400-foot monitor that goes round half the world, taking pictures concurrently tight and huge — vital in monitor and subject, principally simply enjoyable in golf. There are tremendous high-speed cameras pointed on the tee field, in order that they get slow-motion pictures of each ball that will get hit. There are cameras within the lighting grid hanging from the roof, pointing straight down, getting the sort of pictures no one’s ever seen in golf earlier than. There’s a remote-controlled digital camera on wheels, a tiny little go-kart of a factor, that circles gamers simply earlier than they take pictures. There’s even a tiny first-person drone buzzing across the area.
For Neubarth, and for the remainder of the TGL workforce, it’s all been a little bit of a studying curve. “This is way more akin to producing a basketball sport than it’s to producing golf,” he says. “You must remind your self, this can be a primetime occasion, not a golf event.” The distinction is all of the extra stark as a result of a few of the digital camera operators filming TGL are the identical ones who will get on a aircraft the subsequent day and go shoot a PGA event.
Maybe essentially the most instantly apparent distinction between TGL and different golf TV is the noise. Players enter with WWE-style, shouted bulletins. There’s music taking part in, and followers shouting, from starting to finish. All the gamers are sporting Beats earbuds in a single ear, and are continually on the mic interacting with one another and the announcers. Part of TGL’s purpose is to show the gamers into personalities, and listening to them discuss trash and strategize has been a few of the finest TGL content material to this point. It’s a lesson the league realized from exhibitions like The Match but additionally from hit documentaries like Formula 1’s Drive to Survive.
The night time I attended, the match went into additional time — a primary in TGL historical past. It was Woods’ workforce, Jupiter Links, in opposition to a workforce referred to as Boston Common that includes Rory McIlroy, the opposite largest title in golf and the opposite celebrity TGL co-founder. The groups went to a “chip-off,” a format based mostly on penalty kicks in soccer, during which every participant took a shot and whoever received closest to the opening gained for his or her workforce. Jupiter Links gained, in barely anticlimactic trend, after no one hit a very good shot. But that’s present enterprise. “Don’t overlook, this can be a TV present,” Woods mentioned later. “We have to have a fast ending.” Doesn’t matter that it was essentially the most thrilling match within the historical past of the league. Show’s over. Time to go residence.
Even past the printed, the TGL story is as a lot about know-how as it’s about golf. And there’s nowhere to begin however with the display, the 64-by-53-foot panel the gamers hit most of their pictures into. (However huge you assume a 3,392-square-foot display appears to be like in individual, I promise: it’s larger than that.) Andrew Macaulay, CTO of TMRW Sports and the technical mastermind behind TGL, gained’t inform me the precise decision of the display, however he does fortunately level as much as the array of 9 projectors all pointing at it. “Each one is kind of the most important laser projector you should purchase,” he says. There are 9 of them in case one (or two or three) breaks mid-match, but additionally to attain a sure degree of brightness within the area — getting a display that huge to look good on digital camera and within the area with numerous different lights flashing isn’t any easy feat.
TGL is, at its core, only a actually advanced golf simulator — a bit bit professional golf, a bit bit Wii golf. At the start of every gap, one golfer steps into a chosen sq. of grass 35 yards away from the display and contours up a shot. It’s 35 yards away partly for TV causes, by the way in which — the TMRW workforce discovered that was simply sufficient distance for a ball to begin to change course, which makes it really feel extra actual, each to golfers and viewers. “But it additionally offers us sufficient time to get the info,” Macaulay says.
As the gamers step in, wind up, and drill the ball on the display, an array of sensors goes to work to determine mesh the real-world golf shot with the onscreen online game. A system referred to as Toptracer tracks the ball’s spin, pace, and trajectory within the air, whereas one other system referred to as Full Swing research the preliminary affect on the ball — membership pace, instant spin, ball pace, and extra. If you’ve ever performed Topgolf, you’ve used one thing like Toptracer, and for those who’ve ever used a simulator, you’ve most likely hit on a Full Swing launch simulator. TGL is that, simply extra: Macaulay factors out all 4 Toptracer arrays pointed on the tee field and counts the six Full Swing displays all working directly.
When Tiger Woods or anybody else hits the ball, all that monitoring knowledge instantly goes to a cluster of computer systems simply outdoors the taking part in space, the place TGL’s algorithms try to discern precisely the place the ball was headed. Once it does, often a couple of half-second after the ball thunks onto the display, the digital ball takes off from the spot of affect and finds its resting place towards the digital gap.
Getting the ballflight proper is finally an important factor for TGL. It has been tough to this point. In one of many league’s first matches, Woods hit two balls into the water — not the sort of factor one of many best golfers ever tends to do. Woods chalked it as much as a nasty night time, and TGL mentioned it was assured within the know-how, however followers began to marvel: is the physics engine right here actually getting it proper? Is this actually the perfect tech TGL might have used, or is it skimping on the simulators for enterprise causes?
Just a few weeks later, when the sensors picked up a bit of grass as a substitute of the ball and measured Tommy Fleetwood’s nice shot as a horrible one, the considerations received even louder. (That one, Macaulay says, is a recognized drawback with shot trackers of every kind, and his workforce has already discovered methods to verify it doesn’t occur once more.) Most simulators are fairly correct however don’t declare to be inch-perfect. If TGL needs to approximate actual golf with 35 yards and a bunch of sensors, it must be.
Once the golfers get inside a chip shot of the opening, they encounter a special technological challenge. On the opposite facet of the world, behind the gamers as they face the display, there’s a spherical inexperienced space about 40 yards throughout that features a few sandy bunkers, a small hill, and the opening into which each participant is attempting to place their ball. The entire factor rests on a turntable, which may rotate to face any course. The inexperienced itself sits on prime of lots of of tiny actuators, every of which may elevate and decrease to alter the form and trajectory of the inexperienced. Put the actions collectively, and this one gap can flip into absolutely anything.
Macaulay exhibits me beneath the turntable, which we entry by climbing over a few of the area’s construction and heading down a hidden staircase. The turntable is simply an enormous, rust-colored steel slab with dozens of slanted helps, and every actuator is linked to a battery pack with blinking lights. The general impact is a bit like we’ve simply planted an infinite underground bomb. It’s all managed remotely, from a pc elsewhere within the area — all of the operator has to do is choose which gap is being performed, and the inexperienced turns and reshapes to suit. The rig is totally disconcerting to face subsequent to because it undulates, just like the sand in Dune earlier than a worm pops out. During a match, it occurs all however invisibly.
With all of the components of a golf course decreased to actuator levels and pixels on an enormous display, a TGL gap may very well be virtually something. In this primary season, they’re principally pretty regular — a gap or two performed over lava, however nothing wilder than that. How wild it must be, nobody appears to know. Is the advantage of a largely digital golf course that gamers can play a collection of well-known holes from world wide, all in a single night time? Or ought to TGL embrace its online game prospects and play holes on the moon, underwater, and from the highest of the pyramids? One seems like golf; the opposite seems like enjoyable. And perhaps it may be each: one factor the TGL people say to me time and again is that they’re not attempting to compete with the golf folks know and love. They’re attempting to construct one thing else, even when they don’t know precisely what it’s but.
As its first season winds to a detailed, TGL has, by most measures, been a hit. The scores are stable, constantly beating no matter was in the identical time slot a yr in the past. The matches have largely been enjoyable to observe — and have generated some genuinely thrilling moments, even when the general vibe of the league feels extra like “professional golfers goofing round on an off day” than “high-stakes competitors.” Nearly everybody I discuss to has an extended record of how to enhance the product, whether or not by tweaking guidelines to lift the stakes or via tech enhancements meant to make issues really feel much more reasonable. And the league nonetheless has loads of critics, each from golf purists who discover this all a bit ridiculous and from non-fans who nonetheless can’t discover a motive to care.
There’s no query, although, that issues like TGL are the way forward for sports activities. (And in case you’re questioning: sure, there’s a playing plan.) As our lives shift ever extra into customized bubbles, shared cultural experiences are few and much between — they usually’re principally sports activities. As a consequence, any dwell sport that may draw an viewers turns into a scorching commodity, which is each the explanation for TGL’s existence and the explanation for the numerous upstart leagues attempting to reinvent and tweak sports activities from basketball and soccer to volleyball and lacrosse to darts and snowboarding.
TGL, although, could have the toughest street to observe. It’s not simply attempting to construct a brand new league, however virtually a brand new sport altogether. It’s video video games; it’s augmented actuality; it’s the most important display you’ve ever seen. It’s golfers hitting golf balls, and but, it’s nearly not golf in any respect. It’s unfamiliar terrain for everybody concerned, however the TGL workforce appears excited to determine it out. After all, with the push of a button or two, that terrain can turn into no matter they need it to be.
Photography by David Pierce / The Verge
