Halfway through the incessant noise of the first match of the new TGL — actually, it may have been after just five minutes — I felt a twinge of nostalgia for the “Quiet Please” paddles that stony-faced marshals from St Andrews’ Royal and Ancient or Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club hold up to calm spectators ahead of a crucial putt at The Open or The Masters.
There is no place for hushers at golf’s latest, loudest, tech-heaviest effort to win the future. TGL is theoretically short for Tomorrow’s Golf League, but the abbreviation is the brand. In fact, it is the entire mission.
Professional golfers can take well over four hours to complete a round and four days to finish a tournament. Slow play is a perennial concern for golf’s backers, as is the fear of losing the next generation of players and fans to faster, more frantic entertainment.
TGL squeezes two teams of three players into an indoor arena, under the relentless discipline of a “shot clock” countdown, for a two-hour, TV-friendly hybrid of live play, video game visuals, DJ-ed music, branding, betting and on-mic “banter”. So much banter.
Also, golf. You can just glimpse, through the digital sorcery, the original simplicity of a game of stick, ball and field. Real players drive a real ball from a real tee with real grass (cultivated in sections outside TGL’s Palm Beach home) towards a screen, which tracks the shot to a computerised fantasy landscape. One hole is played across molten lava flowing from a live volcano.
When the players get close enough to the hole, they switch back to an artificially turfed green in the arena, ringed with bunkers containing real sand (from Augusta, no less). The contours of the green can be adjusted remotely so each of the 15 holes played is different.
Golf haters will always hate it. Golf lovers are likely to split. Those with an insatiable appetite for the game will happily snack on a primetime mini-contest featuring known names, such as Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, TGL’s co-founders.
Dabblers like me will need much more convincing. I come from a long line of golfers. From my father and grandfather, I’ve inherited a tendency to laugh explosively at televised displays of golfing excellence. But nothing in this week’s first broadcast came close to triggering the Hill guffaw.
In part, that is because TGL is so fast and the stakes seem so low. Max Homa, a US professional whose team plays next week, told the No Laying Up golf podcast after the first match that he loved how the pace of the TGL meant “it felt a lot more like a normal sport”, meaning bursts of action followed by a commercial break. Yet the gradual build-up to the climax of a classic golf tournament, played outdoors against the elements, is part of its appeal.
Indoor golf is different, and always will be. In 1914, Harrods installed practice nets and invited leading players to show off their skills. “The man who confesses to practising his golf indoors is always the object of a certain number of mild jokes,” commented The Times, but “if it be not indulged in to excess . . . [indoor golf] can be very beneficial.”
Excess is TGL’s middle name. But if it takes off, the initiative might entice young novices to the game, the hope of every conference or report on the future of golf since the Royal and Ancient laid down its first challenge in 1754.
And perhaps, in due course, TGL’s giant simulator could be opened to non-professionals. The Florida venue is only 15 minutes’ drive from Mar-a-Lago, should the world’s best known amateur golfer wish to pit himself against the big screen. Newbies could practise in comfort inside, before being invited to a windswept Scottish seaside course, handed a stick and a ball and told to try the real thing. Someone could televise it. I would watch.
