The inaugural event on the Golfzon Tour will pay a first-place prize of $150,000.
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The courses are virtual. The competition is real.
Sport is golf on the screenand the world’s largest platform for it is GTour, a South Korean circuit that has been operating since 2012, organizing more than 200 tournaments and distributing about $12 million in cash.
Now, the company behind that professional simulator league is bringing the concept west.
On Tuesday, Golfzon America, the US branch of South Korean simulator giant, announced the launch of the Golfzon Tour, which will launch its first tournament this fall.
The competition will have 12 teams of five players from the United States (Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los AngelesLouisville, Minneapolis, New York City, Orlando and Tulsa), Toronto, London and Monterrey, Mexico, with regionals in October giving way to playoffs in November, and tournament finals contested in January at 2025 PGA Showin Orlando, where the winning team will share the $150,000 first-place prize. The playoffs and finals will be streamed on the Golfzon YouTube channel and the official Golfzon Tour website.
“The goal is to make it as competitive and attractive as possible,” said Steve Brown, director of marketing for Golfzon America.
Although Golfzon isn’t new to the United States — it opened its first outlet here in 2016 and has grown to about 140 locations across the country — it wasn’t until recently that an American golf circuit struck the company as an idea. applicable.
“There’s always been a desire to bring the tournament here,” Brown said. “It was a matter of allowing the American market to mature to where we could do that. If we tried this two or three years ago, I don’t think we would have the commercial footprint for this thing. And I’m not sure American consumers were understanding the concept.”
Any remaining doubt was extinguished the birth of TGLthe indoor televised golf league backed by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, which, after a year’s delay, is scheduled to debut on ESPN in January.
“The whole behavior of TGL here was a pretty strong indication that we were ready to do our own version of this thing,” Brown said.
Unlike South Korea’s GTour, which revolves around individual competitions, the Golfzone Tour will rely on a cumulative score, team match play format and round-robin brackets inspired by the college football playoff system . Modifications of this kind, Brown said, are part of an effort to “Americanize a Korean product” to make it more accessible to a Western market.
“That was something we thought a lot about,” Brown said. “How do we ‘culturalize’ this the right way.”
The teams themselves will be a cross-section of regional talent, selected from Golfzon locations in each of the participating cities. Anyone 18 years of age or older, male or female, is eligible. The preliminary matches will also be organized by region, so that opposing teams will each compete on their home turf, but in similar time zones.
For this inaugural tournament, Brown said, all 12 teams will be invited to the tournament finals in Orlando, with Golfzon covering travel expenses for the top two seeds. As part of the tournament coverage, Brown said Golfzon plans to “help people get to know the players” by highlighting their personal and professional backgrounds, a promotional formula used in competitions ranging from the Summer Olympics to “Survivor.”
“We want to touch their stories and let them build their brands,” Brown said.
Although no tournament is scheduled beyond this first event, Brown assured that the tournament will continue, complete with the addition of a miniature golf tournament on display.
“In no world are we going to go through everything we have to get this off the ground, and then just dust it off our hands and walk away,” he said. “There are many ways to take this concept. It will grow and develop. At this point, we’re thinking, well, what do years two, three and four look like.”
