PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. – The first thing you notice when you walk into the SoFi Center, site of the soon-to-debut TGL indoor golf league, is that the screen covering one side of the arena enormous. As tall as five stories high. Big enough that even you could probably hit it with a huge tee shot.
The second thing you notice is that the green on the other side of the arena looks like it was cut directly from a PGA Tour stop and put here. Surrounded by bunkers, the greenery rises and falls, a challenging surface made all the more difficult by the hundreds of small, adjustable platforms just below the surface. In other words, this is not a piece of sporting goods.
TGL, the indoor team golf league headlined by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, begins its debut season on January 7. This week, TGL opened its doors to give golf media, including Yahoo Sports, a look inside the showplace arena. of the largest prime-time golf venture in the history of the sport.
TGL is heavy on technique and spectacle and is a variant of golf, in a sense the slam-dunk or the three-point contests are variants of basketball. If you’re looking for pure authenticity, that’s what weekly PGA Tour events are for. But if you want two hours of golf combined with arena music, a live DJ and some technological wizardry every Tuesday night, TGL has got you covered.
The screen zone: think big. No, bigger.
Players competing in the TGL, a group consisting of multiple major winners, top 10 players and Ryder Cup stalwarts, begin each hole facing the 65-foot-high, 55-foot-wide screen. On the screen they see a view of one of the 30 virtual holes from the tee box, and they wave away from a tee box 35 or 21 meters from the screen. Here’s Billy Horschel demonstrating a tee shot:
The real ball hits the screen with an audible sound thump!and a moment later a virtual ball flies through virtual space with exactly the same speed and trajectory, 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 further than approximately 50 yards from the virtual pin, players will shoot again from one of three tee boxes: one with fairway grass, one with 2-inch rough and one with sand. The two grass boxes are indeed real grass, while the sand is SB55 quartz, similar to the sand used at a certain club in Georgia in April.
When a player’s shot comes within about 50 yards of the pin, the virtual action switches back to reality and then it’s time to move to the Green Zone.
The Green Zone: Infinite options
Three bunkers and a small hill surround the vast green on the other side of the SoFi Center arena. There are seven possible pin placements on the green and 567 hydraulic jacks underneath. 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 shoot from the sand, and once they get there, they can read the putts just like they can outside… although this time they have a shot clock monitoring their every move.
The format: Team golf with a technical twist
Twenty-four players have signed up for TGL, including Woods and McIlroy, and they have been divided into six four-man teams. Each team represents a location – Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, New York and South Florida – that is closely associated with certain players or team franchise owners.
In each match, three players from each team compete against each other in a 15-hole match. The first nine holes are triples, with each team of three playing an alternate shot. The last six holes are singles, with each player playing two holes against another player. Each hole is worth one point, won by carding the lowest score on the hole, and the team with the most points after 15 holes wins the match. (Slots are settled by a closest-to-the-pin match.)
Players have 40 seconds to make each shot and are microphoned throughout the match. The TGL schedule runs from early January to late March, just before the Masters start.
We’ll have to wait a few weeks to see how the actual gameplay unfolds, but TGL’s technological elements make for an impressive start.
