When you’re starting a new sports league, or really a new anything, you’re always praying for your first viral moment.
For TGL, a new golf league hoping to reinvent the game for a new era and a new audience, that moment came before the first season ever started. In 2024, Tiger Woods, the golf world’s biggest name and both a player and co-founder in the upstart league, showed up to a not-quite-finished SoFi Center, in West Palm Beach, Florida, where all TGL matches would soon be held. He stood near the center of the stadium, on a football field-sized slab of turf, and started hitting balls into the 53-foot-high simulator screen.
The next part seems to make TGL producer Jeff Neubarth laugh every time he tells it. He recounts it to me, months later, standing in almost the exact same spot. Neubarth points up to a tiny camera, barely visible five stories up atop that huge screen. “That’s camera 91,” he says. “I pointed it out to Tiger, and I said, ‘It’d be cool if you hit it.’ He said, ‘sure,’ dropped the ball, and hit it. First shot.”
The video of the ball flying upward and whacking the camera made the rounds on social media, before most people even knew what TGL was. It has since become a ritual for players — including some of the world’s best golfers — to try the “Tiger Camera Challenge” before their matches or during practice sessions. It quickly became a signature gimmick for a league hoping to create lots and lots more of them.
The team behind TGL, which just wrapped up its first regular season, has spent the last couple of years trying to figure out an entirely new way to play golf. It’s not played on huge, sprawling courses but rather on this relatively tiny turf field. Players hit their tee shots not into the blue sky but against that five-story screen, before turning around and finishing the hole on top of a green that can be spun in any direction and morphed into nearly any shape. TGL golf is a team sport, played in front of raucous crowds, and borrows ideas and techniques from the NFL and the WWE. It is, above all else, a show. It’s made for TV, and for the internet, far more than for anyone in the building. Which changes everything.
You can explain practically everything about TGL by explaining its constraints. Matches are played mostly on Mondays and Tuesdays because that’s typically a slow time for golfers, who are often at tournaments Wednesday through Sunday. (It’s also a slow time on ESPN, which owns the league’s broadcast rights — TGL has mostly replaced mediocre college basketball games.) They’re 15 holes instead of the normal 18, a better fit in a two-hour time slot. There’s a 40-second shot clock and a radically simplified scoring system, all in service of making TGL faster-paced and easier to follow than the whispered chaos of a typical golf tournament. Heck, the whole thing is set in West Palm Beach because most professional golfers living within driving distance.
Even the building itself is as much TV soundstage as sports arena. When I visit in late January, Neubarth, who helped determine so much of the look and feel of TGL, takes me through his process. His first challenge to Jonathan Evans, the show’s director: no camera operators on the field. He chalks that up to personal preference. “The second was, what are other sports doing that we think are really cool and useful to put in a space?”
Neubarth spins around and points to all the ways he’s set up to capture the TGL action, some borrowed and some entirely new. There’s a cable-suspended camera known as the Spidercam, which can move both vertically and horizontally all over the arena — you’ve seen that in NFL games. Two cameras zip along on a 400-foot track that goes around half the arena, shooting simultaneously tight and wide — necessary in track and field, mostly just fun in golf. There are super high-speed cameras pointed at the tee box, so they get slow-motion shots of every ball that gets hit. There are cameras in the lighting grid hanging from the roof, pointing straight down, getting the kind of shots nobody’s ever seen in golf before. There’s a remote-controlled camera on wheels, a tiny little go-kart of a thing, that circles players just before they take shots. There’s even a tiny first-person drone buzzing around the arena.
For Neubarth, and for the rest of the TGL team, it’s all been a bit of a learning curve. “This is much more akin to producing a basketball game than it is to producing golf,” he says. “You have to remind yourself, this is a primetime event, not a golf tournament.” The difference is all the more stark because some of the camera operators filming TGL are the same ones who will get on a plane the next day and go shoot a PGA tournament.
Maybe the most immediately obvious difference between TGL and other golf TV is the noise. Players enter with WWE-style, shouted announcements. There’s music playing, and fans shouting, from beginning to end. All the players are wearing Beats earbuds in one ear, and are constantly on the mic interacting with each other and the announcers. Part of TGL’s goal is to turn the players into personalities, and hearing them talk trash and strategize has been some of the best TGL content so far. It’s a lesson the league learned from exhibitions like The Match but also from hit documentaries like Formula 1’s Drive to Survive.
The night I attended, the match went into overtime — a first in TGL history. It was Woods’ team, Jupiter Links, against a team called Boston Common featuring Rory McIlroy, the other biggest name in golf and the other superstar TGL co-founder. The teams went to a “chip-off,” a format based on penalty kicks in soccer, in which each player took a shot and whoever got closest to the hole won for their team. Jupiter Links won, in slightly anticlimactic fashion, after nobody hit a particularly good shot. But that’s show business. “Don’t forget, this is a TV show,” Woods said later. “We need to have a quick ending.” Doesn’t matter that it was the most exciting match in the history of the league. Show’s over. Time to go home.
Even beyond the broadcast, the TGL story is as much about technology as it is about golf. And there’s nowhere to start but with the screen, the 64-by-53-foot panel the players hit most of their shots into. (However big you think a 3,392-square-foot screen looks in person, I promise: it’s bigger than that.) Andrew Macaulay, CTO of TMRW Sports and the technical mastermind behind TGL, won’t tell me the exact resolution of the screen, but he does happily point up to the array of nine projectors all pointing at it. “Each one is sort of the biggest laser projector you can buy,” he says. There are nine of them in case one (or two or three) breaks mid-match, but also to achieve a certain level of brightness in the arena — getting a screen that big to look good on camera and in the arena with lots of other lights flashing is no simple feat.
TGL is, at its core, just a really complex golf simulator — a little bit pro golf, a little bit Wii golf. At the beginning of each hole, one golfer steps into a designated square of grass 35 yards away from the screen and lines up a shot. It’s 35 yards away in part for TV reasons, by the way — the TMRW team found that was just enough distance for a ball to start to change direction, which makes it feel more real, both to golfers and viewers. “But it also gives us enough time to get the data,” Macaulay says.
As the players step in, wind up, and drill the ball at the screen, an array of sensors goes to work to figure out how to mesh the real-world golf shot with the onscreen video game. A system called Toptracer tracks the ball’s spin, speed, and trajectory in the air, while another system called Full Swing studies the initial impact on the ball — club speed, immediate spin, ball speed, and more. If you’ve ever played Topgolf, you’ve used something like Toptracer, and if you’ve ever used a simulator, you’ve probably hit on a Full Swing launch simulator. TGL is that, just more: Macaulay points out all four Toptracer arrays pointed at the tee box and counts the six Full Swing monitors all running at once.
When Tiger Woods or anyone else hits the ball, all that tracking data immediately goes to a cluster of computers just outside the playing area, where TGL’s algorithms attempt to discern exactly where the ball was headed. Once it does, usually about a half-second after the ball thunks onto the screen, the virtual ball takes off from the spot of impact and finds its resting place toward the virtual hole.
Getting the ballflight right is ultimately the most important thing for TGL. It has been tricky so far. In one of the league’s first matches, Woods hit two balls into the water — not the kind of thing one of the greatest golfers ever tends to do. Woods chalked it up to a bad night, and TGL said it was confident in the technology, but fans started to wonder: is the physics engine here really getting it right? Is this really the best tech TGL could have used, or is it skimping on the simulators for business reasons?
A few weeks later, when the sensors picked up a chunk of grass instead of the ball and measured Tommy Fleetwood’s great shot as a terrible one, the concerns got even louder. (That one, Macaulay says, is a known problem with shot trackers of all kinds, and his team has already found ways to make sure it doesn’t happen again.) Most simulators are reasonably accurate but don’t claim to be inch-perfect. If TGL wants to approximate real golf with 35 yards and a bunch of sensors, it needs to be.
Once the golfers get within a chip shot of the hole, they encounter a different technological project. On the other side of the arena, behind the players as they face the screen, there’s a round green area about 40 yards across that includes a couple of sandy bunkers, a small hill, and the hole into which every player is trying to put their ball. The whole thing rests on a turntable, which can rotate to face any direction. The green itself sits on top of hundreds of tiny actuators, each of which can raise and lower to change the shape and trajectory of the green. Put the movements together, and this one hole can turn into just about anything.
Macaulay shows me underneath the turntable, which we access by climbing over some of the arena’s structure and heading down a hidden staircase. The turntable is just a huge, rust-colored metal slab with dozens of slanted supports, and each actuator is connected to a battery pack with blinking lights. The overall effect is a little like we’ve just planted an enormous underground bomb. It’s all controlled remotely, from a computer elsewhere in the arena — all the operator has to do is select which hole is being played, and the green turns and reshapes to fit. The rig is thoroughly disconcerting to stand next to as it undulates, like the sand in Dune before a worm pops out. During a match, it happens all but invisibly.
With all the parts of a golf course reduced to actuator degrees and pixels on a huge screen, a TGL hole could be practically anything. In this first season, they’re mostly fairly normal — a hole or two played over lava, but nothing wilder than that. How wild it ought to be, no one seems to know. Is the benefit of a largely virtual golf course that players can play a selection of well-known holes from around the world, all in a single night? Or should TGL embrace its video game possibilities and play holes on the moon, underwater, and from the top of the pyramids? One feels like golf; the other feels like fun. And maybe it can be both: one thing the TGL folks say to me over and over is that they’re not trying to compete with the golf people know and love. They’re trying to build something else, even if they don’t know exactly what it is yet.
As its first season winds to a close, TGL has, by most measures, been a success. The ratings are solid, consistently beating whatever was in the same time slot a year ago. The matches have largely been fun to watch — and have generated some genuinely thrilling moments, even if the overall vibe of the league feels more like “pro golfers goofing around on an off day” than “high-stakes competition.” Nearly everyone I talk to has a long list of ways to improve the product, whether by tweaking rules to raise the stakes or through tech improvements meant to make things feel even more realistic. And the league still has plenty of critics, both from golf purists who find this all a bit ridiculous and from non-fans who still can’t find a reason to care.
There’s no question, though, that things like TGL are the future of sports. (And in case you’re wondering: yes, there’s a gambling plan.) As our lives shift ever more into personalized bubbles, shared cultural experiences are few and far between — and they’re mostly sports. As a result, any live sport that can draw an audience becomes a hot commodity, which is both the reason for TGL’s existence and the reason for the countless upstart leagues trying to reinvent and tweak sports from basketball and soccer to volleyball and lacrosse to darts and snowboarding.
TGL, though, may have the hardest road to follow. It’s not just trying to build a new league, but practically a new sport altogether. It’s video games; it’s augmented reality; it’s the biggest screen you’ve ever seen. It’s golfers hitting golf balls, and yet, it’s almost not golf at all. It’s unfamiliar terrain for everyone involved, but the TGL team seems excited to figure it out. After all, with the push of a button or two, that terrain can become whatever they want it to be.
Photography by David Pierce / The Verge
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