Instant reaction: TGL's star-studded ESPN opening night

TGL premiered Tuesday night on ESPN and Mike McCarley had the best seat in the house. The former Golf Channel president, who had taken his own talents to South Florida to start up an all-new arena concept, was sitting between the co-founders Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods as they watched the premier match of their brainchild in an arena at SoFi Center in Palm Beach Gardens near PGA National. 

Ever since Topgolf began its aggressive expansion last decade, there has been more and more mindshare in golf devoted to alternative golf concepts. This trend accelerated during COVID as golf participation spiked big-time, and golf was so popular it was hard to get a tee time. 

Enter new simulator and VR concepts designed to create an immersive golf experience in a footprint as small as a few thousand feet in a strip mall. 

This isn’t the first alternative golf concept to hit the airwaves. Who remembers Shotmakers, the painfully cringe reality TV contested at Top Golf on Golf Channel? It lasted one season before being canceled. Or Holey Moley on ABC, a kind of slapstick, mini-golf version of American Ninja Warrior, albeit with people in far worse physical shape. It had a little more success and some meme-able moments, but lasted four seasons. 

Can TGL top these? It certainly has the budget, media deal, backing, and name-brand firepower in the sport. Some observations after the first evening: 

TGL Likes

ESPN knows how to produce events like this, even if it's a made-for-tv exhibition, to feel big and meaningful. The best golf anchor in their stable, Scott Van Pelt, anchored the action, and the first few minutes really pumped up the concept, the technology, and the names playing. Regular interviews from Rory, Tiger, DJ Khalid, etc., reminded you this was truly a groundbreaking concept that will take golf to the next level.  

Each team had 40 seconds to hit a shot. It’s amazing that when the incentives are there, pro golfers play pretty quickly. If TGL succeeds at anything, I hope it’s an ability to normalize putting golfers on a shot clock. The pro tours are all too slow and their pace has terrible effects on the whole sport. Snails trickle down to the junior game where slow rounds are a plague and too many weekend amateurs play at the muni with no care who’s behind them. 

The course design was awesome. If you’re going to build a virtual course with no land constraints, you might as well get weird. These holes, designed by firms Agustín Pizá, Beau Welling and Nicklaus Design, were built on coasts, mountains, and lava fields. Some were even geometric in shape. Others were incredibly long at over 700 yards, designed to create a true 3-shot par 5. The holes with three different routed to the green were particularly cool. I’m not sure why they put empty grandstands behind certain greens. Is backstopping part of indoor golf, too? 

The tech is cool: robot cameras cruising around, a rotating, evolving green, a giant simulator screen, instant stats, cool lighting, and music all made the most of a controlled, small indoor environment. It was a showcase for the best tech in the game and we can expect some of these things to trickle down into the consumer game coming soon to your local market. 

TGL Dislikes

I simply don’t care about the teams, the names, the uniforms. A day later I don’t remember who won or what was at stake. How many teams are there? It’s hard to really care about the overall picture. 

It felt too easy. The hole designs have a lot of elevation change and tumbling fairways. The real grass fairway, rough and sand bunkers to hit out of are a cool touch, but if your hole designs are so dramatic, the hitting platforms should be contoured up, down, and side to match the lie. 

Golfers really only get truly uncomfortable on awkward lies, bad wind (how about some fans blowing at the player?) or blind shots. All three lacking in the arena. 

This would have been a perfect format for a mixed-team event with LPGA stars. The event was very painfully male-dominated from announcers to participants. It seemed like no women at all were involved in anything. Time and time again, there are opportunities for the game’s top male players to give a platform to the best women in the game, like Nelly Korda or Lydia Ko, and for whatever reason, the boys in charge fumble it. 

‍It’s attempting to simulate real golf when it should be American Gladiators: The team concept was interesting though a bit difficult to understand watching casually without placing bets on Fan Duel. The coolest wrinkle was the “hammer,” a strategic enhancement teams can use to make a hole worth more points. 

But at the end of the day, you just had golfers wearing their normal clothes and playing their normal game with announcers buttoned up. An arena environment blaring DMX tracks with psychedelic hole designs should just go the full Monty. Bring in WWE-style dramatic effects like storylines, wild outfits, babes, fights, staredowns, and one-off challenges. 

So that’s where my head is at. TGL is certainly interesting to view with a polished ESPN presentation on a snowy Tuesday night when your favorite basketball or hockey teams are off. It will spotlight the emerging technology the sport offers beyond your traditional green grass facility. You could see your home club introduce fun indoor league nights if they haven’t already. But it whiffed on including women, and it’s hard to care about the results. 

Somewhere, a promoter with less institutional attachment than McCarley, with no need to kiss any rings on the pro tours or governing bodies, may devise an alt concept that takes the best of pro wrestling drama, personalities on the mini-tours, YouTube, or long-drive circuits, combines it with arena golf and brews up a bonafide TV spectacle.

• By Brandon Tucker, Editor GolfN