Collin Morikawa is here too, and he knows what he’s up against. The 28-year-old phenom made his first 22 consecutive cuts on the PGA Tour, second only to Woods’s 25-cut record—and he’s ready to release the same competitive energy tonight. Morikawa stands to the side as Woods positions himself on a tee box 35 yards from a holy-shit-size simulator screen 64 feet wide and 53 feet high, big enough to stack seven gray whales with room to spare. Mark Morrison’s “Return of the Mack” suddenly blares over the arena’s loudspeakers. Then Woods makes contact, sending his golf ball 270 yards down the fairway, through a digital landscape, as shouts of “In the hole!” and “Attaboy!” ring out from snapback-capped dudes in the crowd.
Woods walks off to his right. Morikawa readies his team. The match is on. Welcome to TGL.
Golf, one might say, is a sport that has long managed to alienate swaths of society without even trying. It’s the quiet activity of country clubs that takes hours to complete. (Though the origin of the line is disputed, many writers, the cheeky bunch we are, have described golf as being of such considerable length that it’s enough to “spoil a good walk.”) For many, it’s maddening to follow, let alone learn. Whiff opportunities abound, the sort of stuff that can turn middle-aged men apoplectic right after unironically uttering the phrase “There he is!” Now, a bankable list of top-flight players, television veterans from NBC and ESPN, A-list celebrities—including Justin Timberlake, Justin Bieber, Shaquille O’Neal, Stephen Curry, and Jimmy Fallon—and a madcap group of visionaries from the PGA Tour and other sports leagues are betting hundreds of millions of dollars that golf can be something more.
The TGL, which kicked off its inaugural season in January, is unlike anything the game has ever seen. (The abbreviation stands for TMRW Golf League, a nod to the founding organization.) An effort almost five years in the making, TGL is a made-for-TV revision of the sport that plans to become the mecca of sports simulations by turning golf into a freewheeling video game: 40-second shot clocks to keep matches short and fast-paced, and 15-hole courses to keep play to two hours. Golfers don’t compete individually but rather on teams—six in all, spread across the US—in three-on-three-style contests with a rotating fourth player who sits out. Through the first nine holes they play alternating shots, while holes 10 through 15 are played one on one, each teammate squaring off on their own for two holes apiece.
All 24 players—who, in addition to Woods and Morikawa, include the likes of Rickie Fowler and eventual 2025 Masters Tournament champion Rory McIlroy—are top pros from the PGA. They’re mic’d up at every match, much the same way the NFL uses hot mics to catch candid commentary—although it’s not optional in TGL. The point is to hear players talking tactics and trash to one another. And every single match airs live on ESPN from the SoFi Center, a nearly 250,000-square-foot enclosed arena that cost $50 million, with general admission seating on the first floor and club boxes for VIPs just above.
“It’s dramatic for the game,” Woods said from the broadcast booth during the very first televised match, a week before he got his introduction to TGL. “Here’s something that’s going to change the game, how it’s perceived, how it’s looked at.”
Picture being courtside at an NBA game, and you have the gist of what a TGL match is like on the ground. At times, you’re no farther than 10 feet from some of the best golfers in the world. Cheering is encouraged, beers and mixed drinks flow freely, and golf balls zip to the sound of Avicii and Kanye West. (DJ Irie, the man who formerly spun tracks for the Miami Heat, handles the music.)
“The atmosphere’s so different for us. When you get 1,500 eyeballs looking directly at you, things change,” says Morikawa, captain of the Los Angeles Golf Club. “You got to be there for two hours, and you don’t want to let the team down.”
Matches begin on two tee boxes, one behind the other, facing the massive screen. Golfers start on the box farther back to drive. Once they’re within 70 yards of the pin, they move to the box in front. Courses are immense. (How’s a 720-yard par 5 sound to you? Over a freaking canyon, by the way.) Ball-tracing technology projects the flight of each ball, based on its spin, speed, angle of attack, and even the number of dimples it contains, as it impacts the screen and continues to soar through virtual environments.
Play shifts to the back of the arena at around 45 yards away. An overhead spotlight highlights where golfers’ balls land, and they finish each hole on a short-game complex of more than 22,000 square feet, complete with sand bunkers and a synthetic putting green with seven pin placements. The green is positioned on a 41-yard-wide rotating turntable, like a revolving stage, and kitted out with nearly 600 underground actuators, morphing the physical terrain golfers navigate based on which of the league’s 30 bespoke holes they’re playing. Taken together, all of these simulations allow golf to skirt around the sport’s typical constraints by blending digital and physical reality.
“It’s a cool new idea, something that’s not been done before, and I think an opportunity that you wouldn’t want to miss,” says LA club member Tommy Fleetwood, a Brit with a full beard, a mop of brown hair, and the nickname Fairway Jesus, not only for his looks, but also for his knack for hitting the fairway on a golf course. “We could all be part of the growth of something that’s unbelievable.”
Win a hole and you win a point. That is, unless you play the hammer, an orange golf towel that teams can chuck onto the field to double a hole’s point value. Each team gets three per match. (The team that doesn’t throw the hammer has to accept the challenge or concede the hole.) The team with the most points at the end of 15 holes wins. The top four teams go to the playoffs in mid-March—mere weeks before the Masters—and the champion takes home $9 million. (In 2025, Atlanta Drive GC won the money and the inaugural SoFi Cup, beating New York Golf Club in a best-of-three series.)
Perhaps the closest analogue in the pro game is the Ryder Cup, where 12-man teams from the US and Europe go head-to-head, but TGL’s idiosyncrasies surely won’t be for everyone. The league’s fourth match featured the highly anticipated Tiger vs. Rory contest, which ended in a tie and therefore went into overtime, in which Woods’s team emerged victorious after winning a closest-to-the-pin chip-off. Michael Wilbon of Pardon the Interruption fame was not impressed, comparing the event to a TV studio. He took it further the following week just after McIlroy won at Pebble Beach, extolling the physical beauty of the course and the joy one presumably feels as great players step up to tee off at hole 18, staring down the legendary cypress tree on the fairway. “This is why you don’t give a damn, or I don’t, about golf in a studio,” said Wilbon. “This is why I’m not watching TGL.”
Other criticism has focused on TGL’s stylistic elements, specifically when it comes to putting hot mics on traditionally reserved and impassive athletes. An article in the Washington Post that appeared just before the season began quoted golf analyst Geoff Fienberg, who said listening to player commentary mid-match “will either be really cool or end up being like a cringe karaoke sort of vibe.”