The Tiger Woods Arena Golf League, TGL, kicked off Tuesday night in Florida. This is how I personally felt.
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PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. – Rarely has a room elicited such curiosity. In the minutes before the arena golf league was named DATE started, that’s what filled the SoFi Center. The cocktail of giddiness, skepticism and novelty known as curiosity.
All kinds of people brought it, their active eyes dancing around the stadium floor. Billionaire ownersprofessional athletes, Instagram influencers, golf dads and their kids; even Rory McIlroy, in his unbuttoned knit shirt and sneakers, watching Wyndham Clark’s warm-up routine. SoFi Center full of questions: How do all these gizmos work? How loud will you loudly be? There is a camera on wheels, without an operator. There goes the sandman with his broom, cleaning up after a bunker shot. There goes a 2,000 pound plank of real grass. Hey, there goes Tiger Woods!
Thirty minutes before the show, Woods was standing in his 30-foot bubble right in the center of this curiosity. His arms were crossed and his legs spread wide – contemplation in a position of power. You wouldn’t blame a co-founder of this mixed reality craze for being a little introspective after it finally came to life.
Woods has been explaining this space to people for years. In 2022, when the 49-year-old was just 46, he signed away a good chunk of his future golf to this simulated thinglaunching TGL’s parent company, TMRW Sports. Then, he appeared with a shovel in hand for the “people’s” photo-op about six months later. He then saw the original infrastructure – an inflatable dome – literally blow up. just nine months after that. Who answers questions about such disasters? Woods did in various press conferences.
Before long, Woods found himself on the second floor of this permanent building, curiosity subsided as the lights dimmed. Broadcasters, ball boys and girls, event staff – the referee! – mixed in position. Woods leaned forward in his front-row seat next to television executive Mike McCarley, the man who dreamed most of it up, only to see Irishman Shane Lowry of Bay Golf Club walking through a smoky tunnel to the all-time hit. , “Snap Yo Fingers.” .
Just as strange as many of us had hoped.
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Even if you didn’t have Lowry going to Lil’ Jon on your opening night Bingo card, the league’s debut showed it can live up to its futuristic promises. The best golfers in the world will jump from the Screen Area to the Green (and back) at an incredibly fast pace. They won’t wait for the approaches to miss the green before their teammates start analyzing the bits of terrain and mounds they’re about to smash into. When one imaginary hole is finished, an overflight video for the next one soon appears. from Let them crawl THE archers THE Set in stone, you are taken on a bit of a dizzying ride.
On a night where the media racked their brains for the best description of the place, it was New York Golf Club’s Rickie Fowler who offered the best: “It’s a glorified man cave, in a way.”
There is an owner’s box with comfortable leather seats, like what you see in English football. It is always present here shot clock and LED displays that broadcast instant shot information, highlights, and even the sound of a racing heartbeat. Of course, there are also $18 mixed drinks, just like Yankee Stadium. A bottle of water sets you back five times, because entering the SoFi Center, like any other modern sporting event, means surrendering to capitalism, marketing and inflation. The rumored price tag for building the arena is $50 million. Logos for KPMG, FedEx, Best Buy and SoFi rotate around the room.
Perhaps the most important promise made by TGL is one repeatedly offered by its player roster in recent weeks: that the arena is more impressive than they thought it could be. That the connective tissue between mixed realities and music and shape-shifting green is smoother than they imagined, and the frenetic pace just feels more… FUN than they ever dreamed this sport could be.
“Honestly, I said last night when I got home,” Lowry began, “because I, like everybody else, didn’t know what this was going to be like. And I came here and played my first proper, full practice game last night , and I walked away going, ‘That was the most fun two hours I’ve ever had on the golf course.’
The last time I had this much fun tonight was probably last September (at the Ryder Cup).
Now, the question everyone will be asking is the one Shane Lowry isn’t allowed to answer: Is your $200 ticket worth it? It all depends on what $200 means to you. Not many $200 experiences can get you this close to the action and skills of the world’s best without hitting you with sunburn, heat exhaustion or … boredom.
Critics might argue that the arena isn’t as important to the league’s success as its television product, and marketing teams would have to agree. The vast majority of those who experience TGL will do so through their devices. But it is in person that you realize how important a product duality really is. No, TGL’s billionaire backers aren’t making a return on investment through the roughly 1,000 people who will attend game nights this spring. But seatbacks matter to the arena atmosphere that ESPN is transporting sports fans from home. It was reported last week that TGL was paying people to participate. It was later reported that it was mainly for dress rehearsals. No matter what, the essence remains. TGL needs people at SoFi Center who create sounds and an aspirational sense of place. People who love to cheer on good shots, moan about bad ones, and even boo Xander Schauffele when he drops a chip.
“They had good reason to exult. Maybe he would have cursed me too,” Schauffele joked. But Ludvig Aberg, the star of the night in Bay Golf Club’s 9-2 victory, wasn’t kidding about the jealousy he feels for his pro basketball and football friends.
“I think it’s really cool to be in a crowded environment where people are literally on top of you and screaming,” Aberg said. “There’s a lot of betting going on, so you’ll hear a guy saying, don’t miss it, don’t do it. I think it’s very interesting… When I watch other sports, that’s what I really like.”
Did Aberg have fans? literally on top of him and screaming? Not exactly. Growing and maintaining such an image falls on the event staff moving forward, because for all it has, there are some that TGL certainly lacks. TV breaks are never fun for stadium audiences, but there was nothing else to distract the spectators from the fact that, between the 3rd and 4th holes, the next few minutes were undoubtedly going to the advertisers.
The microphones picked up the players – bracing with their teammates for spin speed and berating their opponents for missed shots. That’s the good thing, right? Only the TV audience knows. Organizers are working to develop headphones that spectators can use to actually hear conversations happening 30 meters away. You don’t want FOMO calls coming from inside the house.
When this technology officially arrives, TGL could reach its pinnacle, a long list of promises for a technology league finally realized. Until then, Night 1 set the table for something really good with obvious room for growth. Especially in the short term.
“We have Tiger Woods (playing) next week,” Lowry said. “So we’ll be fine next week, I know that.”
