Palm Beach Gardens
CNN
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When Michelle Wie West was barely a teenager, she dreamed not just of being a professional golfer, but of playing professionally against the men full-time.
She went on to become the Women’s US Open champion, but her specific dream never quite materialized; however, more than 20 years later, she has seen with her own eyes that it may now be possible for male and female golfers to regularly compete against each other on a level playing field.
Attending a recent TGL (TMRW Golf League) event with the Los Angeles Golf Club team that she co-owns, Wie West told CNN Sports that she was blown away by the technology that has helped revolutionize one of the world’s most traditional games.
“It’s crazy,” she exclaimed. “It’s like watching ‘Back to the Future,’ like watching flying cars and that kind of stuff!”
In January, Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy partnered with NBC Sports’ former president of golf, Mike McCarley, to launch TGL. It’s a fast-paced 3-on-3 team competition that plays out in a high-tech, purpose-built arena. The finals of the event are being held at 9 p.m. ET on Monday on ESPN.
Players launch their tee shots towards a towering screen that’s as tall as a five-story building, their balls becoming digitally represented in a virtual hole. The players then wander over to chip and putt around an animatronic green, which can be rotated through 360 degrees and its topography manipulated by hundreds of hydraulic jacks beneath the surface.
Many of the PGA Tour’s biggest stars have played in TGL’s first season, which the organizers are claiming as a success. Viewing figures for the matches have been impressive for a startup league and better than the college basketball games that ESPN broadcast in the same slot 12 months previously.
TGL is claiming one of the youngest television audiences in sports, second only to the NBA, and crucially for a professional sport that had been stagnating, 42% of that audience can be found in the desirable 18-49 demographic, tied with the NBA and higher than the Premier League, NHL, NFL, MLB and LIV Golf.
The engineers and designers behind the concept are already cooking up ideas to further enhance the product, and it seems likely that other golfers will soon be invited to participate at the impressive SoFi Center in South Florida.
“Truthfully, I wish the women had been involved from the get-go,” said Wie West. “But it’s great to hear they’re in the conversation. This would be really great for mixed team events; I think the fans are yearning for it.”
Another of the LA Golf Club’s owners is Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Married to tennis legend Serena Williams, he’s a prominent champion of women’s sports.
Ohanian told CNN that he expects TGL will soon be featuring the top female stars as well.
“It shouldn’t surprise you that when I first took this pitch, my first question to the Tiger team was, ‘When are you doing it with the LPGA?’ I was like, ‘Girl dad of two, I know these athletes are undervalued right now, they’re under exposed,’” he said.
“I’m not making any news here, but I’ll just say that when I invested, it was on the condition that I get a women’s team as well. I’m very bullish on women.”
Ohanian, who along with Williams also owns NWSL soccer team Angel City, is using his tech-fuelled entrepreneurial spirit to imagine the evolution of sports in a digital age.
“The golf clips that go viral are often the short game,” he said. “When you look at the differences in men’s and women’s golf, a lot of the biological differences disappear on the green.”
Ohanian says he can imagine entertaining sports clips that will circulate virally online, then reverse engineer an event that would create them.
“I work backwards from the viral clip,” he said. “We can show people things they’ve literally never seen before, stop them in their feet. They’re like, ‘Wait a minute. That’s Tiger Woods high fiving Nelly Korda!’ Golf is a sport that’s been a certain way for a very long time and (TGL) gives it free rein to experiment.”
Andrew Macaulay is TGL’s chief technology officer, a computer science major who worked in the telecommunications industry before cutting his teeth in the sports space as Top Golf’s CTO. He teamed up with Woods, McIlroy and McCarley at the end of 2022 and immediately started turning their vision into a reality.
Standing on the green as it rotated and oscillated, he described the thrill of his work to CNN Sports. “It was super exciting,” he said. “Lots of conversations, lots of drawings thrown on the floor until we got to this concept.”
Macaulay’s team has been learning on the job over the last couple of months, and now that the inaugural season is coming to an end, they are already innovating enhancements for the next one.
“Oh my gosh,” he smiled. “We’ve got a long list of season two items that probably started six months ago, I think we’ll throw out half of those and create a new list now that we’ve got real experience.”
He declined to share what those innovations might be, but he’s confident upgrades are coming: “Be reassured, there’s a long list. We’re only limited by imagination here.”
McIlroy gave CNN a sense of what might be to come, “The sky’s the limit. We could design a hole on Fifth Avenue, New York!”
If there is any disappointment in TGL’s opening season, it had nothing to do with the concept or the technology. Instead, it’s that neither of the founding members were able to star in the playoffs. Both Woods’ Jupiter Links and McIlroy’s Boston Common teams were eliminated at the end of the regular season.
However, the comedy of their shortcomings often provided some of the best entertainment. When Woods’ teammate Tom Kim turned his back on a chip-in, tossing his club in celebration, oblivious to the fact that his ball had lipped out, Woods was convulsed with laughter. His unguarded reaction was infectious, and he was still giggling about it more than an hour later when he spoke with CNN.
“We didn’t have a lot of great shots or anything that was any good,” the 15-time major winner chuckled, “but God, we had some fun! All the guys have bought into the concept and we’re showcasing our sport in ways that we thought was never even possible.”
Nobody at TGL is trying to argue that this quickfire, high-tech genre of the game is going to replace the established 72-hole, four-day format, but they do see it as an energizing compliment.
“The more golf that’s on people’s TV screens, the better,” stated LAGC’s Sahith Theegala and, following the PGA Tour’s protracted feud with the breakaway LIV tour, The Bay Golf Club’s Shane Lowry added: “It’s nice to hear people talking positively about golf.”
The players say that the experience of TGL and its immediate success have exceeded their expectations, and despite the inherent jocularity between them, it’s not something they’re treating as a trivial sideshow.
“Honestly, I don’t think I ever looked at it like that,” said LA’s Collin Morikawa. “I knew we were going to have a lot more fun because you can be entertaining in this scenario, but we came to compete. At least, I did.”
If the TGL brand is successful, though, everybody wins. Atlanta Drive Golf Club player Lucas Glover uttered a line that he couldn’t have imagined saying even just a few years ago: “We’ve captured the video game demographic, which is going to grow the game for us, because our future is, you know, the Metaverse.”
There was never anything Doc Brown or Marty McFly said in “Back to the Future” about that.
