PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla.—The first thing you notice when you walk into the SoFi Center, the site of the soon-to-debut TGL indoor golf league, is that the screen that covers one side of the arena is huge. Like, five-stories-high huge. Big enough that even you could probably hit it with a tee-shot huge.
The second thing you notice is that the green at the other end of the arena looks like it was sliced right off of a PGA Tour stop and dropped in here. Ringed by bunkers, the green rises and falls, a challenging surface made all the more tricky by the hundreds of tiny, adjustable platforms just beneath its surface. This isn’t some sporting-goods turf swatch here, in other words.
TGL, the indoor team golf league headlined by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, kicks off its debut season on January 7. This week, TGL opened its doors to give golf media outlets, Yahoo Sports included, an up-close look at the showplace arena of the biggest prime-time golf endeavor in the sport’s history.
Heavy on tech and spectacle, TGL is a variant of golf in a way the slam-dunk or the three-point contests are variants of basketball. If you’re looking for pure authenticity, well, there are weekly PGA Tour events for that. But if you’re looking to spend two hours every Tuesday night watching golf blended with arena music, a live DJ, and some technological wizardry, TGL is ready for you.
The Screen Zone: Think big. No, bigger.
Players competing in the TGL, a group which includes multiple major winners, top-10 players and Ryder Cup stalwarts, will start each “hole” facing the 64-foot-high, 54-foot-wide screen. Onscreen, they’ll see the view from the tee box of any of 30 virtual holes, and they’ll swing away, from a tee box located either 35 or 21 yards from the screen. Here’s Billy Horschel demonstrating a tee shot:
The real ball hits the screen with an audible thwack!, and an instant later, a virtual ball with the exact same velocity and trajectory flies through virtual space, to land on a virtual fairway or perhaps virtual rough, virtual sand or—uh oh—virtual water or a virtual canyon.
If the second shot is farther than about 50 yards from the virtual pin, the players will again fire out of one of three tee boxes—one with fairway grass, one with 2 ½-inch high rough, and one with sand. The two grass boxes are indeed real grass, while the sand is SB55 quartz, extremely similar to the sand used at a certain club in Georgia in April.
When a player’s shot gets within about 50 yards of the pin, the virtual action switches back to reality once again, and then it’s time to move to the Green Zone.
The Green Zone: Infinite options
Three bunkers and a small hill ring the massive green at the other end of the SoFi Center arena. There are seven potential pin placements on the green, and 567 hydraulic jacks beneath it. Competition controllers can manipulate the green through a range of heights and slopes; the green looks like it’s breathing when the jacks are in motion.
Players can chip onto the green or blast out of the sand, and once there can read the putts just like they can outdoors … although this time, they’ll have a shot clock watching their every move.
The Format: Team golf with a tech twist
Twenty-four players have signed up for TGL, including Woods and McIlroy, and they’ve been divided into six four-man teams. Each team represents a locale—Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York and South Florida—closely associated with either certain players or team franchise owners.
Every match will pit three players from each team against one another in a 15-hole match. The first nine holes are triples, with each team of three playing alternate-shot. The final six holes are singles, with each player playing two holes head-to-head against another player. Each hole has a value of one point, won via carding the lowest score on the hole, and the team with the most points after 15 holes wins the match. (Ties are settled by a closest-to-the-pin contest.)
Matches will have a 40-second shot clock, and players will be mic’ed up for the duration of the match. The TGL schedule will run from early January to late March, just before the Masters tees off.
We’ll have to wait a few weeks to see how the actual gameplay unfurls, but the technological elements of TGL make for an impressive start.
