Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy’s high-tech indoor golf league has officially gone live.
TGL had the first match at its dedicated SoFi Center on Palm Beach State College’s campus in Florida on Jan. 7, with The Bay Golf Club ultimately beating the New York Golf Club 9-2. Its live prime-time broadcast on ESPN averaged 919,000 viewers, according to the network.
The team-centric league is a creation of TMRW Sports, a company founded by Woods, McIlroy and former NBC Sports executive Mike McCarley. It was developed in partnership with the PGA Tour.
During the process of getting the league running, TGL notched a slew of big name partners, including luxury automaker Genesis, consulting company Businessolver and consumer electronics retailer Best Buy as “founding partners.” It has a dozen official partners in total, according to a recent press release.
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Its matches “feature three players competing on each team in a two-hour team golf competition, offering a fresh approach to the sport with a focus on technology, innovation, and fan engagement,” TGL explained on its website. Two of the league’s six teams go against each other in a match.
TGL’s regular season consists of 15 matches, all played indoors at So-Fi Center, named after the digital finance company that inked a multi-year deal to be its presenting sponsor.
The venue sprawls nearly 250,000 square feet. Inside there, competitors – all big names in golf – play their way through 15 holes in a high-tech space “roughly the size of a football field” that includes a “ScreenZone” and a “GreenZone.”
A massive 64-by-53-foot simulator screen created by Full Swing plays a key role in the match in the “ScreenZone.”
Meanwhile, the “GreenZone” serves as a dedicated area for the short game, with a massive rotating turntable green that uses hundreds of actuators to “change the slope of the green, creating a variety of play on every hole,” TGL said.
The league uses a triples format for nine holes and singles for six holes. About 1,500 people can watch in-person at SoFi Center from seats around the playing area, per the high-tech golf league.
TGL’s inaugural season was planned to be played in 2024. However, a November 2023 “failure of temporary power system and backup systems caused the dome to deflate” and resulted in some damage, prompting the league to change the start to this year, according to a TGL press release from the time.
Now, with one match under its belt, TGL will hold the rest of its regular season games over the next couple months, with a two-round post-season coming after. The team that lands the championship title will receive $9 million of the total $21 million prize money for the season, according to Golf.com.
The six four-player teams include Home Depot co-founder Arthur Blank’s Atlanta Drive GC; Avenue Sports Fund and NBA star Stephen Curry’s The Bay Golf Club; Fenway Sports Group’s Boston Common Golf; TGR Ventures and businessman David Blitzer’s Jupiter Links Golf Club; Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian and former tennis stars Serena Venus Williams’ Los Angeles Golf Club; and hedge fund founder Steven Cohen’s New York Golf Club, per TGL.
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