Tiger Woods’ first TGL start won’t come until the second week of the league.
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After many months of anticipation, Tiger Woods’ golf league has schedule 1 week.
The weird part?
Tiger Woods is not in it.
Huh?
Yes, when the action begins in the brand new TGL from the brand new SoFi Center in West Palm Beach in January, there will be a matchup between none of the league’s biggest stars: New York Golf Club (owned by Xander Schauffele, Cam Young, Matt Fitzpatrick and Rickie Fowler) and The Bay Golf Club (Ludvig Aberg , Wyndham Clark , Min Woo Lee and Shane Lowry). Neither Woods nor Rory McIlroy will take part in the first week, which will be broadcast on ESPN at 9pm on Tuesday, January 7 – a decision that leaves the simulator-focused golf league to debut in world under a group of people liked but not. quite a few needle moving stars.
Sorry for your confusion. Wasn’t the whole point of the new league to increase Tiger Woods’ television presence in his post-full-time career? Did the league not understand the increasingly short attention spans of the sports viewing world? Did he not know that Tiger Woods was an essential part of the league’s long-term audience success, or did he just not care?
As it turns out, the answer is much more sensitive than it seems.
While the league still has every hope of delivering a high-entertainment, big-audience telecast of Week 1, TGL placed Woods’ first competitive appearance in Week 2 for a very tactical reason: the NFL.
TGL’s second week broadcast — which will feature Woods’ Jupiter Links GC against Collin Morikawa’s LAGC — has the benefit of a rare gift in sports television: the NFL promotion. The telecast will air on Tuesday, January 14 at 7:00 PM on ESPN, exactly one day after the final game of the NFL’s wild card weekend airs on the same network and at the same time.
Of course, a Tuesday 7pm window isn’t exactly one daydream long slot a busy stretch on the sports calendar, but it’s a prime-time TV window at a time when many sports fans will be uniquely attuned to their televisions. In addition: the broadcast is broadcast one day AFTER The NFL gives TGL what figures to be a full evening of Tiger promotion to one of the biggest television audiences of the sports year.
In other words, Tiger’s decision aims to deliver the league’s biggest star at a time when its television audience will be largest. This makes a lot of business and competitive sense. More importantly, though, it shows that TGL understands the biggest hurdle facing the league in Year 1: converting its early viewers to the fans.
There are other, equally big TV challenges for TGL’s inaugural season. Like establishing viewing habits during a schedule that bounces around days, networks and times; cultivating a sense of loyalty among teams that will never play home games in front of the cities they represent; and providing a highly entertaining viewing experience in front of an audience of just 1,500 or so. But all of these challenges speak to a common thread that the Tigers’ Week 2 debut tries to address: For a sports league, television viewership is currency.
Thankfully, for Tiger Woods, TV viewership is all but a given. At least, that’s what viewership data from the last 25 years of golf television tells us. The hope is that the same is true with a new pro golf product in 2025.
For once, that means Tiger comes second. But with TGL, that can be a good thing.
