The medium has major limits, though, because of the nature of simulation golf. The digital courses create fresh dilemmas for players, but they are still swinging the club in a perfectly manicured, state-of-the-art, indoor facility. Nothing on Tuesday was as fraught as the time Jordan Spieth almost killed himself hitting a shot from a cliffside or the time he almost launched himself into a Great Lake so he could hit a flop shot at the Ryder Cup. The virtual world of TGL is imaginative, but the physical one is as sterile as golf gets. There are no live alligators roaming the arena to mimic a proper Floridian course.

Elsewhere, TGL suffers from some of the same problems that have flummoxed other golf leagues. Team golf is an alluring idea, one that has most recently caught on at LIV Golf, the Saudi geopolitical project and Donald Trump bribery effort that also hosts golf tournaments. But the only team events that have ever really caught on are international ones like the Ryder Cup and Solheim Cup. Teams derive meaning from history and community. TGL’s couldn’t possibly have history yet, but hoo boy are they stretching it in their efforts to engender community. The teams all have U.S. cities’ names on them, but they have either sparse connections to those cities or no discernible ties at all. My favorite team Tuesday was “The Bay Golf Club” featuring Ludvig Åberg (from Sweden), Min Woo Lee (from Australia), Shane Lowry (Ireland), and Wyndham Clark (Denver). Maybe they all have a favorite burrito spot in the Mission District.

Silly teams aside, TGL fails to posit a reason why you should care about the action. Matt Fitzpatrick, the 2022 U.S. Open champion, hit the first bad shot in TGL history a few minutes into Tuesday’s broadcast. He was giggling as he walked away. Players on opposing teams bantered a bit and talked some trash, but not convincingly, because most male professional golfers have the personality of wax paper.

Inauthenticity is a common problem in a sport where every player is selling something at all times, and it reigned in this format. ESPN sideline reporter Marty Smith came out of one commercial break to interview Xander Schauffele, who won both the PGA Championship and British Open last year. Smith noted that ESPN had already discussed Schauffele’s career year, then asked him just one question: Why was it important for Schauffele to make equipment alterations this year? Schauffele took the chance to record a brief infomercial for his equipment sponsor, Callaway, before we all got back to the action.

Players do not pretend that TGL is that serious, and if all you are after is to watch golfers having a nice time, then you were already in luck: You could go to Topgolf, or you could watch the par-3 competition on Wednesday at the Masters, or you could just start scrolling. Thousands of YouTubers and Instagrammers could give you that every day. You will have more fun watching the British guy who is currently playing golf every single day until he makes 18 pars in a row. His quest has passed 330 days and should outlive TGL.

The new league realizes these challenges, which is why it goes to great pains to present itself as something other than, well, golf. ESPN’s broadcast showed DJ Khaled before it showed anyone playing golf. Scott Van Pelt opened the night by pointing out that the crowd was something more like what you would see courtside at an NBA game than in a typical golf gallery. Golf leagues will still be attempting to look “cool” 100 years from now, and they will have made as much progress then as they have made now.

That doesn’t mean TGL is a useless endeavor. For one thing, the arena is an innovation, and it would be nice if recreational golf facilities with its level of functionality opened up all over the country. The more ways to give people a chance to play golf in smaller doses than a typical round, the better.

This thing doesn’t have to be the U.S. Open to live a useful life. If it gives casual fans a longer horizon to watch Tiger Woods play some version of competitive golf, then it will have a use case. It lives in a barren moment on the golf calendar, and efforts to do new things are commendable. A sporting format with no discernible stakes is just not a durable form of entertainment, and the sport’s incredible gadgetry does not add enough to outweigh in the long term how little the whole thing matters. Watching players hit a golf ball into a screen when they don’t care is less fun than watching them hit one into the wind when they do. Amazing tech that offers no revolutionary function is a hallmark of our time. TGL, as a spectator sport, meets the moment.