The Week TGL Found Its Stride

Can Tiger, Rory, and Tom Kim play every week?

It’s no surprise that the most star-studded TGL matchup possible produced the best TGL match we’ve seen thus far. But it wasn’t just the personalities that carried the day; we had our first truly competitive matchup, with Jupiter Links eventually beating Boston Common GC in overtime. This was, more or less, what TMRW Sports envisioned when they announced this league way back in in the Pandemic Era. Prime-time, ESPN, a one-of-a-kind-arena, a golf-adjacent competition that Tiger can fully participate in without looking like his leg’s about to fall off.

We’re now four weeks into this novel golf league, a large enough sample size to draw some substantive takeaways. Let’s dive in.

Overall, TGL has surpassed expectations

There was powerful skepticism in the industry going into that first match. A pandemic-age idea, delayed a year after the original building collapsed—how would this thing even function? The answer: pretty similarly to how they told us it would. The league is operating, the broadcast is functioning. It’s a real thing, and that’s more than some feared.

The shot clock is the star of the show

The pace of TGL is a breath of fresh air in golf, and it’s been highlighted by glacially slow rounds on the PGA TOUR in January. The final threesomes in The American Express and the Farmers Insurance Open took roughly 5 hours and 30 minutes to play. TGL shows that if you enforce rules on pace, guys have no choice but to follow.

It’s banter-driven, and close matches bring out the better banter

There’s nothing better than a close match against your golf buddies. You’re talking trash, and the putts matter. The first three weeks the matches weren’t close enough for the trash talk to feel genuine. That changed tonight. We’re not asking these guys to entertain us by shooting 69 on a crispy Bay Hill layout. We’re asking them to entertain us by hitting good shots and, well, being entertaining. Some guys are much, much better than others.

They’re still figuring out the tech

Even for the best players on the planet, simulator golf is a different beast. You can tell guys are frustrated by some shots they hit inside SoFi Center that they just don’t hit outside. The more the technological aspect improves, the more the league will.