TGL had a problem. Then came a strange, chaotic new hole

“Gimme one more.”

It’s been four hours since the sun went down inside sport’s strangest arena, and Billy Horschel was reaching out.

A staff tossed him another title, Horschel tossed it to him, and then he stepped back, bowing his head slightly as he sized up the massive red stones projected on the screen in front of him. And then he started laughing.

Horschel had completed his last tour of the season the day before. He had come down to Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., to check out the latest developments inside the SoFi Center, home of the golf-adjacent experiment that is TGL. He had been doing some promos for his team, the defending champion Atlanta Drive. He had been practicing on the new, enlarged green, hitting a number of chip shots alongside new teammate Chris Gotterup. And then he was back from the short game area to the big screen to try out the league’s most exciting changes: its new holes. And when he and Gotterup were still stuck in one of them half an hour later, something became immediately clear.

TGL had a new, unexpected star: Stinger.

Horschel took out the driver and aimed this time to the right, setting up to hit a high putt over and around a large overhanging red plate. He and Gotterup had already spent a dozen swings, each testing different club choices for a low-flying line on the left side of the hole. They had joined an unofficial competition as the pros pursued the lowest possible launch angle, as measured by the bank of Full Swing monitors behind the limp area. (Some pros dropped the ball in less than one rung.) But now Horschel was going up, taking an alternate route. He jumped out of his shoes. He looked hopefully at the screen. His ball went up a promising line, pulling from right to left. And then he crashed into the great sand arch that frames golf’s most chaotic new fairway and fell into the water.

He reached for another ball.

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STINGER ROCKS. This is not a geological pun. not only a geological pun, I should say. Instead, it’s a near-universal opinion among those of us in the odd subset of sports fans who have decided that golf in the mixed reality arena might be for us.

If TGL had a Season 1 problem, it was that its holes, while breathtaking if they had existed in real life, were still conventional enough that they had a tendency to blend together. Its architects admitted they weren’t quite sure where to land in a world without limits. Did golfers and fans and this new golf league want real-life style golf holes – or did they want to get weird?

As someone who has played an unhealthy amount of Golden Tee—we have one in our New York office, and it became a happy hour habit in the other four years I spent there—I knew what The wanted. Bring on the weird.

And no, I don’t think the league took its turns directly from the arcade game. But I think they adopted some of the same creative ethos.

And so when TGL teased its new hole in a social media announcement in December, it was fascinating to watch the reactions that poured in. Social media seems to be made mostly for mockery, skepticism, or both, but the general sentiment this time was something different. Mostly it was hell yes. So a TGL tweet scored nearly two million impressions. And the real thing is just as weird and cute as advertised.

What’s different about the Stinger? The tee shot asks a question we’ve never seen in “real” green grass professional golf: Can you hit it under this rock? That doesn’t mean it will work everywhere. If you put it on a PGA Tour course, it’s possible the players will walk out in protest. The beauty of the hole is that if you hit it too high, if you don’t make the putt, your ball will either go into a watery grave or bounce right back at you. As a professional golfer you will look and feel very silly. But in this format everything is fine. TGL is not “real” outdoor, green grass golf. The Stinger takes full advantage of this.

IT’S LIKE THIS ALL THE TIME I have read this question and answer between the PGA Tour’s Paul Hodowanic and inspired course architect Agustin Pizá, the man behind this hole and several other TGL designs that will make you sit up and take notice. It’s easy to laugh at everything on the TGL mega-screen, but Pizá is both an artist and a scientist. (Alchemist, in his own words.) He studied for five years to get his architectural degree. He does everything by hand, working obsessively in his notebook. He is pursuing “maximum artistic expression” through minimalist design. And he says things like:

“Let’s take Le Corbusier and that ‘less is more’ movement. What you’re looking at is how can we create a very good feature of, say, risk and reward with a minimalist approach? Architecture is playing with form.”

Pizá was the man behind Spear, the triangle-reward-reward mastermind from Season 1. But he felt he could push the boundaries further, telling Hodowanic that “this season I wanted to play with verticality.” His take on Cenote, the next biggest new hole? “I like to question everything. Why can’t we play a hole from back to front?” But Stinger also came from another calling: “One of the first things I wrote in my notebook was, ‘Let’s create an ode to Tiger Woods,'” he said.

Thus the Stinger was born. It is a monument to the greatest player of the generation and his signature shot. Woods saw the hole in the competition for the first time on Tuesday when he tried to talk his Jupiter Links teammate Max Homa into the successful staking strategy. (It didn’t work; Homa hit the rock. I believe more than half the Stinger players have now hit the rock or hit it in the water. And in the end Jup Links missed the hole.)