It’s golf’s boldest new venture. And it likely would never have gotten out of the gate without a mighty shove from the man who upended the sport thirty years ago: Tiger Woods.
Mike McCarley was a sports television executive with impressive bona fides—he’d overseen marketing and communications for telecasts of the Olympics and the Kentucky Derby (for TV sports pioneer Dick Ebersol)—but his passion was golf, evidenced by his decade as president of golf and global strategy at NBC Sports, where he also ran the Golf Channel. In 2021 he founded a company called TMRW (pronounced “Tomorrow”) Sports, which he thought could revolutionize golf by combining three huge forces in popular culture: professional athletes, technology, and television.
Enter Tiger. McCarley got a meeting with the golf legend to pitch his idea for a brand new kind of sports platform made for the 21st Century: TGL, where two teams comprised of four elite PGA Tour players would compete in an indoor arena, going head-to-head for fifteen holes on an epic, high-tech simulator and stadium green. Forget Topgolf on steroids; this is more like Topgolf on gene doping. Woods, as is his custom, was thoughtful, inquisitive, and direct.
“At the end of the 90 minutes,” McCarley recalls, “he looked at me and said, ‘I completely understand the technology. I think the game is ready for this. I know the players are ready for this.’” He then looked McCarley square in the eye. “If I commit to doing this,” he asked, “will you commit to doing it, too?”
For McCarley, it was the equivalent of a putt dropping in to win a major. TGL was happening.
Re-inventing golf for primetime
Even amid the muscular swagger of contemporary professional sports, TGL is an audacious idea: a new, made-for-television, six-team league where PGA Tour golfers will compete live, in prime-time matches televised on ESPN and ESPN+ over 12 weeks until a winning team earns the SoFi Cup and pockets the $9 million in grand prize cash. (The total SoFi Cup Purse across all teams for the launch season is $21 million.) Comfy money for a couple of loose rounds with your buds, but it seems clear the purse is not what’s motivating players. A chance to chart the future of the sport very much is.
The very idea of TGL may strike a certain kind of golf purist as sacrilege: here is a golf match played indoors, in front of 1,500 fans who will be encouraged to make noise, with swirling kleig lights and a bombastic, “let’s get ready to rumble” vibe. Players will face a 40-second shot clock, and each will be mic’d up, so fans in the arena and at home can hear some good old-fashioned (albeit PG-rated) trash talk. All players will also be able to hear, and respond to, the ESPN announcers in the booth.
Players hit tee shots into a five-story screen, with holes created by some of the country’s top course designers and translated digitally. Once players land a shot within 50 yards of the pin, a Skymark light from the ceiling marks the exact spot of the ball in the GreenZone. From there, players hit off synthetic turf, navigating bunkers with real sand until they land on the green. Set on a grass turntable about the size of an NBA court, the green contains nearly 600 actuators that allow for surface modifications. Every TGL hole has a unique design.
Augusta, this is not.
“The biggest part of our audience, I hope, are people who don’t watch golf, but they’re sports fans who love to root for a team, and their team beating the other team,” says Andrew Macaulay, TMRW Sports CTO. The former Topgolf CTO, he’s responsible for every bell and whistle aiming to turn the gentlemen’s game into a hybrid of NBA playoff and Metallica concert. “It’s all tied in to get that level of sports fan, and I think they’re going to bring their experience with other team sports that all work that way.” The ultra-traditionalists, he says, will “tune in just to hate it. We’ll still get them watching.”
Who’s playing, who’s not
TGL had a lot of wind at its back in its launch, much of it provided by its partnership with the PGA Tour and, more specifically, Woods and Rory McIlroy, who signed on as co-founders. The six founding teams, each aligned with a major U.S. city, are comprised of 24 pros, including some of the game’s biggest draws: Woods and McIlroy, Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa, Rickie Fowler, Xander Schauffle, to name just a few. But TGL failed to sign two of the biggest, world number-one Scottie Scheffler and three-time major winner Jordan Spieth, and its PGA Tour deal meant players who defected to rival LIV Golf, including marquee names like Dustin Johnson, Jon Rahm, and Bryson DeChambeau, were not eligible to join.
And wasn’t it the flashy LIV Tour that was supposed to “reinvent” the sport with brash braggadocio? Three years later, it still hasn’t. As Joel Beall warned in a column for Golf Digest skeptically previewing TGL, “For all the things that golf does well, cool is not one of them.”
Au contraire, argue the players. “I’m a fan of golf too, right?” says McIlroy. “Like I’m a player, but I grew up being a fan of the game, and I want the game to continue to do well and try to bring new people into it. For the golfers, you could argue that this has been a great time for us because we’ve never played for more money. But for the fans, it’s been a pretty frustrating and confusing time. I think hopefully what TGL will do is give fans another way to watch their favorite players, but also, give them a up close and personal experience.”
High-profile partners
Successfully launching a new sports league takes a bold idea (check) and the right talent (check), but it also takes the right television partner and deep pockets. TGL signed a deal with ESPN; its primary sponsor is SoFi, the financial services firm that anted up $625 million for naming rights to its glittering NFL stadium in Los Angeles. SoFi CEO Anthony Noto was on the hunt for sports exposure in prime time in winter, when the NFL was out of season; the company had a deal with U.S. Open winner Wyndham Clark, but with sponsorships already snapped up for golf’s majors, finding the right opportunity proved elusive. Until TGL.
“It’s not entirely brand new: it’s leveraging a platform of familiarity,” Noto says of the new league. The SoFi Center is an almost 250,000-square foot arena in Palm Beach Gardens, a site selected to make it easy for PGA Tour players—70 percent of whom live in the sunshine state—to participate during the tour’s Florida swing. “So then it’s really a bet on the technology and the authenticity of it, which we’ve done a significant amount of diligence on.”
High-profile investors
TGL has attracted a starry roster of team investors and owners, a list that includes Jimmy Fallon, Derek Jeter, and Steph Curry as well as Shohei Otani, Josh Allen, Alex Ohanian, and Serena Williams. It’s clearly banking on lots of Instagram shares and Tik Toks from these investors, whose total social media followers exceed one billion. Its team ownership groups are similarly high-profile, and include sports tycoons like Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank and New York Mets owner Steve Cohen.
But while TGL principals are happy to relay any number of data points about why the new league will succeed, what they will not relay is any information about its finances, which remains as elusive as McIlroy’s next major win. How much did it cost to build its new stadium? What are TGL’s operating costs? How much did ESPN, which will begin airing the matches January 7th, pay for television rights, and for how long? Ask these questions and you get silence. McCarley will only reveal that the initial investment is in “the hundreds of millions of dollars.”
In the end, it will come down to whether TGL can turn the polite, country club sport of golf into a raucous good time that Gen Z can’t wait to watch. Time will tell. But at least this much we know: They’re coming out swinging.
