How virtual and real worlds collide in TGL: 'Biggest thing you've ever seen'

NEW YORK — Rory McIlroy brought in his own technology to check the other technology. This whole thing — calling TGL presented by SoFi simulator golf would be like calling a hurricane a passing shower — was net new, and McIlroy and Tiger Woods have stamped their names on it, are committed to the growth of the business, and have created something fresh, they hope, for both a younger generation and golf fanatics alike.

McIlroy was only in the SoFi Center for 10 minutes with his launch monitor before he packed it up, put it away, and told the technology team behind TGL that things were all good.  

“He trusted everything from our system,” Andrew Macaulay, TMRW Sports’ chief technology officer, told Sportsnet. “You’ve got to pinch yourself sometimes. It’s amazing what we’re doing.”

TGL, which features six teams of four golfers competing in a tech-infused virtual golf league starting on Jan. 7 (available to watch exclusively in Canada on Sportsnet, starting at 9 p.m. ET / 6 p.m. PT), has plenty of the game’s biggest names participating. But how TGL has managed to pull off such a technological miracle before the matches even get started is an impressive feat in itself.

“We still have sand, we still have rough, but in terms of the lights, the music, the screen being [the size of a] skyscraper — it’s a lot,” said world No. 2 Xander Schauffele, who is part of New York Golf Club. “You have to see it to believe it.”

TGL is the first project at the intersection of media, golf, and technology from TMRW Sports (whose CEO, Mike McCarley, was a TV executive with NBC for more than two decades). The season officially starts Jan. 7 after the initial construction of the league’s home, now called the SoFi Center, was delayed after a temporary power outage in November 2023 caused an air-sealed dome to deflate. That pushed the start of the new league by one year.

“Probably a blessing in disguise to have the extra year to make sure things are up to where everyone wants it to be,” said Rickie Fowler, also a member of the New York Golf Club.

So, what exactly is this?  

The first season of TGL will feature six teams of four golfers. Initial investors in TMRW Sports — the umbrella firm co-founded by McIlroy, Woods and McCarley, of which TGL is a project — include a who’s who of athletes like Josh Allen, Lewis Hamilton, Andy Murray, Chris Paul, Shohei Ohtani, Tony Romo, Alex Morgan and Serena Williams. A Series A investment round co-led by Dynasty Equity and Connect Ventures closed earlier this year valuing TMRW Sports at US$500 million.

McIlroy is part of the Boston Common squad, while Woods (who told Sports Illustrated in December at the Hero World Challenge that he would be ready for his first match on Jan. 14, despite having another back surgery in September) is part of Jupiter Links GC. Other notable PGA Tour stars who are set to tee it up in the initial TGL season include (beyond Schauffele and Fowler), Justin Thomas and Patrick Cantlay (Atlanta Drive GC), American Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley (Boston Common Golf), Max Homa (Jupiter), two-time major champ Collin Morikawa (Los Angeles Golf. Club), and Ludvig Aberg (The Bay Golf Club). Jon Rahm was initially part of the league but with his jump to LIV Golf, he was no longer eligible to participate.

Sportsnet has learned that Canadians Taylor Pendrith and Corey Conners, who both live in South Florida, are part of a bullpen squad that could be called on to play in case of injury or travel delay impacting a team’s roster.  

The teams will play a series of matches from January through March at the SoFi Center on the campus of Palm Beach State College, with room for 1,500 fans to watch in person. Every shot will be shown live, and the players will wear microphones. There’s a shot clock, a referee, no caddies, and each match, featuring two of the six teams, will be 15 holes. Three players will participate in each match starting with Triples (basically, a modified alternate-shot format). From there, they'll complete the match by playing Singles. Each hole, via a match-play scoring system, is worth one point and the team with the fewest shots on a hole wins the point. The team with the most points at the end of the night wins the match. The championship match will be over two days in March.  

In order to get the very best in the world to buy in, however, some of the brightest minds in golf technology needed to get together and figure out how the heck they were going to do this — and do it well.

Enter Macaulay, formerly of the tech-infused driving range behemoth TopGolf.

“The challenge was size and scale,” Macaulay told Sportsnet. “You can probably look at most of the tech and see it being used in a small way here and there, but none of it has been done at this size, which is the big challenge. When they called me, they said, ‘We’ve got this idea and we want to create this big stadium environment and everything was going to be just in a small sim. So, how do we scale?’

“To call it a simulator — it’s just not. It’s the biggest thing you’ve ever seen. Bringing multiple technologies together [was] the other challenge — and the speed in which we got it all done.”

TGL has one patent, awarded in October, and there are a “bunch more” in the works, according to Macaulay.

“This,” he says, “has not been done before.”

Here’s what they ended up with: A field of play that covers an area approximately 97x50 yards (about the size of an American football field), a screen that is 64 feet by 53 feet powered by Full Swing technology (about 24 times the size of your standard golf simulator) and players will hit from tee boxes with real grass, fairway, rough and sand (sand that is the same as what they use at Augusta National).

The grass for TGL, per Golf Digest, is the brainchild of Dr. Trey Rogers of Michigan State University, the lead scientist that created grass to grow indoors in Detroit for the 1994 FIFA World Cup, and Chad Price at Carolina Green in North Carolina, whose company specializes in growing grass on plastic. TGL is growing roughly 1,000 square yards of the turf, known as Tahoma 31 Bermuda, near its stadium.  

For shots that are 50 yards or less, players will transition from hitting into the screen to a custom-built “GreenZone” and hit shots in the real world. The GreenZone is about the size of four basketball courts, with a 3,800 square-foot tech infused green that sits on a 41-yard-wide rotating turntable, featuring nearly 600 actuators embedded under the putting surface to change the slope of the green.

Phew.

“The GreenZone was the product of trying to solve a problem,” explained Macauley. “[Golf-course designer Beau Welling] created the GreenZone and said if you’re going to put the bunkers too far away from the putting surface the best players in the world are never going to hit into them, so the bunkers had to, as well, be on the turntable. So, we had this 124-foot-wide turntable, and it weighs 500,000 pounds and next thing you know, oh my God, we’re really going to do this.”

There were three design teams that TGL tapped to help create the virtual holes the players will tee it up on including Welling (Beau Welling Design), Nicklaus Design and Pizá Golf, who collaborated with Full Swing, TGL’s technology partner. The trio of designers created a total of 30 holes to be played throughout the first season — a mix of par 3s, par 4s and par 5s that boast real-life features like canyons and deserts and links-style and ocean-side type holes.

When the design teams were announced (Welling has worked with Woods in a variety of capacities for more than 15 years and is now the Senior Design Consultant for TGR Design), Scott Armstrong, TGL’s vice president of competitions and technology, said the objective of the holes would be to “push the boundaries of what is possible” when fusing technology and live action golf.  

“When they first approached us, it was like, ‘what are you guys talking about. This seems nuts,’” Welling told Sportsnet with a laugh. “Deep down we’re creatives, so the challenge of it all is intriguing. Our involvement started really from the conception and the first part was really to try to figure out what they now call the GreenZone and how to do the in-real-life part.

“It was intriguing, but the fun stuff is the virtual world stuff. To figure out the real-world stuff was super challenging but super exciting because it has never been done before.”

At first, Welling said he wanted the virtual world environment to mimic real-world settings, so the New York team may have had a hole through Central Park and the Boston team through Boston Harbor. That may be something they do in the future, but Welling admits he was “slow to the dance” with respect to coming up with video-game-looking holes. There’s one hole (a long par-5 called ‘Quick Draw’) around a canyon where, for example, there is no bridge.

Because there doesn’t need to be one.

“Once you realize you have to take advantage of the opportunities the virtual world presented, we were super excited and all-in at that point,” Welling said. “What’s so cool about this is that it can all happen so fast — the virtual part. You have bulldozers shape a hole and you get some direction, and then you come back two weeks later (in the real world). This is almost real time. You want to get rid of the bunker and it’s like … delete. That part is super fun.”

Welling says that Woods (who has more than a half-dozen course projects under his TGR Design signature) has approached golf design with the main idea of having courses that are accessible. It’s a concept Welling has long believed in as well, with way more not-very-good golfers out there than good golfers.  

Welling says Woods has a big-tent objective of trying to bring golf to newer and younger audiences, and TGL — with it’s never-been-done-before technology — is set to hopefully do exactly that.

“That’s the thing I’m most curious about,” Welling said, “how the real world and the virtual world meet.”