PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. – The wait is over.

A year after its scheduled premiere date, TGL – the upstart indoor golf league comprising six billionaire-backed four-man teams of PGA Tour stars – took its first steps into the deep waters of pro sports on Tuesday night and managed to stay afloat for its first two-hour swim as The Bay Golf Club (as in San Francisco) blew out the New York Golf Club squad by a score of 9-2.

The show began and ended on time, no one turned an ankle on a wrinkle in the artificial turf and I will forever cherish my very own orange chamois Hammer as a souvenir of the evening.

New entertainment concepts require enormous advanced hype, and TGL’s deep-pocketed backers – Steve Cohen, Arthur Blank, Fenway Sports Group and more – have seen to it that their league is no exception. And while any suggestions that TGL is some sort of savior of or legitimate counterpoint to the entrenched tradition of professional golf are overstated, I came away with some hope that it can settle into a role of winter-evening-golf thrist-quencher moving forward, especially if it leans into various opportunities surrounding its format and resists the urge to diverge too much from the things that people enjoy about in-person and on-TV golf.

Where did the TGL premiere succeed and where did it falter? Given its location on a college campus, it feels appropriate to break out the red pen and give some grades.

The SoFi Center is no Madison Square Garden or Fenway Park, but the plainness of the exterior concourse helps the live-action parts of the TGL “course” make quite a first impression. The 60-foot hitting screen seemed to dwarf every player, especially from my perch at the far side of the stadium oval: Section 111, Row A, Seat 3. This meant I was right next to the green complex, which rotated like a huge Lazy Susan to accommodate the short-game shots on each of the match’s 15 holes. The downside? I was far away from the full shots. I came away thinking the best seats in the house are closer to the screen, preferably to the right of the screen to grant more of a face-on view of the players, considering all of them are right-handed. If you’re interested in attending a TGL match, target sections 101 through 106 if possible, although the intimacy of the stadium – there are only 1,500 seats – makes for good viewing from anywhere.

Team golf is great, and TGL handles it in an interesting way with 15-hole matches between squads of three of each franchise’s four players. Only one ball is in play per team at a time. The first 9-hole session is three-man alternate-shot, and the final six holes are single match play where, once again, each team sets a rotation such that each player plays two of those holes. The inclusion of “The Hammer,” which can increase the point value of a specific hole, added an intriguing wrinkle, although there was periodic confusion in the crowd over who had it and when it might be used.

This is a good baseline, but TGL would be wise to lean into the potential for all sorts of variations, including a simplified one-on-one 6- or 9-hole tussle between, say, league co-founders Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy (along with former Golf Channel chief Mike McCarley). Future involvement of LPGA Tour players should be seen as inevitable, too.

The heart and soul of many of the world’s greatest golf courses is their diversely challenging green complexes. Unfortunately, physical space constraints handicap the TGL setup in that regard. As wild and creative as many of the holes’ tee and fairway designs are (more on this below), they all end up at the same green complex: a bean-shaped 3,800-square-foot putting surface guarded by three bunkers and a collar of fairway-length artificial turf. The only available variation is achieved by approaching that green complex from different angles. The green’s contours were locked in for all 15 holes, too: an abrupt upper shelf in the middle and two lower tiers made for some awkward long putts and chips. Matt Fitzpatrick used a gathering slope on part of the green to exciting effect once, and his New York Golf Club teammate Xander Schauffele had to chip from one part of the green to another towards the end of the night.

Another limitation: flatness of full-shot lies. The pallets of real fairway and rough turf are a nice touch, but they are dead flat. Being able to adjust to uphill, downhill and sidehill lies is a crucial skill in high-level golf, and the absence of that aspect of shotmaking made things feel a little sterile.

Reps may help certain pros adjust to the differences between screen golf and the real thing, but it might take a while. A lot of players missed full shots to the left. And chipping and putting on artificial turf – even the high-quality stuff TGL uses – can be a bit of a guess. Pitch shots would grab or run out seemingly at random, leading to very mediocre-looking results.

The only player who made putts of significant length was The Bay Golf Club’s Ludvig Åberg, whose upbringing in Sweden likely gives him a leg up indoors, since he had to have spent winters beating balls and putting on artificial turf. This is not news to many, but Åberg is a no-doubt superstar in the making in any golf format. His teammates Shane Lowry and Wyndham Clark contributed well, too. The other side of the coin belonged to New York’s Rickie Fowler, who struggled mightily throughout the evening.

Once the golf finally began – a full 15 minutes into the time window and about 10 minutes too late – it unfolded at a refreshingly brisk clip. The 40-second time limit imposed on each shot made for snappy decision-making and moved things along, confirming what millions of golfers already know about PGA Tour and other pro golf: it takes too long. Mainstream professional golf is in desperate need of speeding up, and TGL’s audience will likely call even louder for green-grass pace of play to be addressed.

The pre-match build-up and early frames were solidly energetic, festive on the level of a home game for a solid mid-major college basketball team. But as The Bay started building an insurmountable lead over the New York squad, the mood became less rowdy, with a noticeable number of people heading for the exits during the last two holes. A close contest is going to hold people’s attention to the end, and a blowout isn’t. That’s a fact the TGL and NFL alike cannot escape.

While TGL’s two-hour format cuts the time of a normal round in half, I found myself thinking that 12 holes in 90 minutes could make for a better overall experience than 15 holes in two hours.

There were significant pros and cons here. Roger Steele, a golf social media influencer who served as emcee of the evening, did a great job pumping up the crowd pre-match and chiming in with important announcements along the way. He’s not Michael Buffer but he fits perfectly into TGL and 2025 sports media. During one commercial break, he led a sprint around the stadium, tossing t-shirts into the crowd along with a couple of helpers. He is one of relatively few influencers who seems to be capable of crossover success.

TGL’s whole vibe is clearly aimed at cultivating younger golf fans, which is understandable. But as is often the case, that vibe grates against some of the sensibilities of hardcore fans like me. I didn’t like the constant thrum of pop and club music throughout the evening, including during almost every shot with occasional volume decreases. Silence, broken by the sound of the perfect contact that the best players in the world make, is one of the joys of attending professional golf events outdoors. The periods of quiet make the periods of noise matter. I would like to see TGL embrace dynamics a bit more; it would help increase the feeling of tension. Finally, whatever banter went on between the players could not be heard in the arena.

The happiest accident of the evening came when I found myself seated next to Agustin Pizá, whose design firm was one of three – along with Nicklaus Design and Beau Welling – to contribute 30 original hole designs to TGL. Pizá is responsible for some of TGL’s strangest-looking creations, including “The Spear,” a par 5 with triangular fairway sections that served as the 9th hole of the evening. A native of Mexico, Pizá came to golf course design from building architecture. He cited visionary architects like Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Walter Gropius, who often used repeated simple forms in their works, as chief influences. Whether or not Pizá’s more iconoclastic hole designs will work as compelling challenges for TGL will be determined in time, but his embrace of the freedom the digital medium grants is admirable, and his pride at seeing those works tackled by world-class golfers was palpable.

The other holes sat somewhere between fine and good. Beau Welling’s Grand Canyon-inspired 728-yard par-5 with a daring island fairway was the match’s finishing hole and will serve up some drama in a similar role in a closer match.

Tuesday night was the second time I have been present for the very beginning of a team golf event. The first came a decade ago, when my friend Adam and I teed it up in the first-ever qualifier for the USGA’s inaugural Four-Ball championship. But for the team element, it could not possibly have been more different. That golf can provide such wildly different settings bodes well for the future of the game – a future in which I think TGL can find a niche as long as it doesn’t take itself too seriously.