QUINIX Sport News: TGL’s success will ride on its players, not its technology

​

PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — The talk of the SoFi Centre, home venue for the new TGL indoor golf league, is the massive five-story-high screen. It’s so vast you can almost lose yourself in its picturesque views of virtual verdant hillsides, fairways along virtual oceans, and drive-swallowing virtual canyons. You step into the SoFi Centre, and all you want to do is stare at that screen … and maybe take a few cuts at it, too.

The putting green complex is equally impressive, a real-world application of synthetic grass, Augusta National-level bunker sand, and hydraulic technology that collectively looks and feels like it was carved right off of a country club’s tournament course.

It’s all fascinating to the point of almost uncanny reality. The tee boxes are actual grass, the green complex feels like an undulating fringe. From a technology standpoint, TGL has already won the match. The tech underpinnings of TGL are as impressive as anything ever seen in golf history.

But here’s a little secret about technology: Tech alone will draw curious eyeballs, but there has to be a human component to keep you coming back. And that’s where TGL’s challenge lies: not in building a hyper-realistic golf arena, but in ensuring that the pros who play it can connect with the fans who are watching it all happen.

Billy Horschel, the 2014 Tour Championship winner and member of TGL’s Atlanta Drive GC, understands the assignment. “If the players are not entertaining and the players are not engaging, if they’re not talking and dissecting stuff … it’s not going to be successful,” he said last month at a TGL media day. “We have to be entertainers. We have to take ourselves away a little bit from what we are at PGA Tour tournaments inside the ropes and we have to be different.”

(If you want to take a deeper dive into what exactly TGL is and how it will work, we got you covered right here.)

That’s the key, and that’s the challenge of TGL: to get players to do something that’s normally foreign to them, stepping outside their own skulls. Golf is a sport played between the ears, and every instinct of every great player is to narrow their focus down to the tiny ball in front of them. That focus is what helps them win majors and millions. But that focus also shuts out the fans … and fans are what TGL (and golf in general) desperately need right now.

Fans crave authenticity, or at least relatability. To bring up a couple of examples the PGA Tour probably would prefer you not consider: Phil Mickelson is always relatable on the golf course, even though he’s a multi-major winner and you’re not. Phil always seems like he’s one shot away from the “eff it, let’s see what happens if I try this” approach that the rest of us call our golf game. Bryson DeChambeau may not be relatable, what with his U.S. Open trophy and his ability to blast balls into orbit, but he’s absolutely authentic in his pursuit of whatever he’s attempting, be it breaking 50 or hitting a hole-in-one over his house.

TGL players have to figure a way to make those kinds of connections with fans, to be authentic in their conversations and relatable in the fact that, dammit, this is a fun game they’re playing here. Sure, some are going to be better than others, just like some of your golf playing partners have outgoing personalities and some are blander than a dry BLT at the turn. But there’s a camaraderie on the golf course that we aren’t often privy to, and if the TGL players can harness a bit of that, this league will be on to something.

“We have to show more of ourselves in here than we would out on the PGA Tour course or a tournament,” Horschel said, “but we’re still going to be competitive, because like I said, the last thing you want to do is give Tiger any more bragging rights.”

Bang. That’s it right there. If you can get Tiger Woods to start ripping his fellow players on camera for not, you know, winning 15 majors — and if you can get them yapping back at him, too — then you’ve got yourself a winning formula. Give the people a reason to care, TGL, and they absolutely will.

Speaking of Woods, it’s curious why he and Rory McIlroy aren’t playing in the event’s debut night, though they apparently will be in attendance. But one of these days, golf will need to stand on its own two feet without Woods propping it up, and the next generation of players — or characters — will need to step up.

Early betting favorite for TGL’s engaging personality: The Bay GC’s always-down-for-a-party Shane Lowry, who reported Monday that he will be hitting the first official TGL shot on Tuesday night.

“I’m going to have to really watch my cussing, but on our team, Shane Lowry [has the biggest mouth],” U.S. Open champion and fellow Bay GC member Wyndham Clark said last month. “He has some cuss words on trigger pretty quick, so he’s going to have to really watch himself.” Or not!

Every one of the six four-man teams already has at least one player who can definitively move the needle with golf fans; the key is figuring out which of the other three will elbow their way into the spotlight, and which of the teams will show the most fight and personality.

“We have some lively guys either on social media or guys you’d want to go have a beer with, and then you’ve got the assassin in Ludvig [Åberg],” Clark said. “We’ve got a whole gamut. Our team is pretty fun.”

Promotion is easy. Authenticity is tougher, and authenticity when things aren’t going your way … that’s a challenge, to put it mildly, for image-obsessed pros.

“Last thing we want to do is make ourselves look like idiots on live TV in primetime, duffing a chip or skulling something, which is going to happen,” Horschel said. “Someone is going to skull a bunker shot into the crowd and it’s going to be awesome, but you don’t want to be that guy that does it the first time.”

TGL is golf, yes, but it’s golf with a different, fan-oriented approach. This is the sport’s equivalent of a slam-dunk contest, showmanship without the risk of compromising one’s place in the game. And if everyone approaches it the right way, it could make for a fine bridge from New Year’s Day to the Masters.

“We’re competitors. We want to win. But we also have to be entertainers at the same time,” Horschel said. “I think everyone who has signed up to be a part of this is aware of that, and they’re going to do their part to make sure this is successful.”

Everyone’s going to want a look at TGL’s massive screen. The key to its future success is making us care about who’s smacking drives into it.