The Tiger Woods–Backed Virtual Golf League Reinventing the Game

Inside a cavernous arena in Palm Beach Gardens on a chilly-for-Florida Tuesday night in January, about 1,500 of us pile into our seats. We all know why we’re here. Governor Ron DeSantis, flanked by a chiseled-chinned bodyguard, knows. DJ Khaled, with his luxuriantly coiffed beard on full display, knows. Serena Williams, the women’s tennis icon and widely regarded GOAT of the sport, also knows. Alexis Ohanian, her husband, cofounder of Reddit, and this evening’s Sonny Crockett cosplayer thanks to his white sport coat, knows as well. So does showrunner and streaming hitmaker Shonda Rhimes. So does world champion soccer player Alex Morgan. So does every single ticket holder, some of whom spent close to $1,000 just to get through the doors. Celebrities and civilians, all eagerly anticipating the arrival of the man of the evening.

First we see the smoke, a billowing cloud of red that engulfs him from head to toe, a picture we’re watching on two large high-definition monitors at the front of the arena. Then the opening chords of Survivor’s “Eye of the Tiger” kick in as the smoke clears, and we see him in the flesh. It’s Tiger Woods, striding down a tunnel and into the arena, sporting a boyish grin and his signature red polo. When Woods spots his teenage son, Charlie, in the stands, he delivers an emphatic high five punctuated by a full belly laugh, walks onto the field of play, and acknowledges the crowd, pointing both index fingers skyward. A deafening roar floods the air.

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.

“This is insane,” Morikawa told me. “It’s what I want my backyard to look like.”

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.”

Damn kids and their rock music. Still, golf traditionalists need not worry much, it seems.

“No one’s out here saying this is a replacement for golf,” says Ohanian, who, along with Serena Williams and her sister Venus, owns the LA Golf Club. “This is a complement to it. And this is a way to elevate the stars of the sport in a different format.”

Success for TGL depends on just that: an abridged, wacky, more in your face, and, it could be, more fun version of golf resonating with arena goers and viewers at home. Breaking down the barriers, in other words, between spectators and generational golf talent. The league’s backers, investors and players alike, talk about demystifying the game by marrying tradition with a digital future. Do that, and you make golf more accessible to new audiences as well as longtime followers, who probably want to know what’s going on inside the mind of a PGA golfer as they’re lining up a shot.

All that’s left to do now is get tons of viewers to take TGL seriously.

Shrinking the game of golf is something Mike McCarley, founder and CEO of TMRW Sports, began thinking about long before he came up with the concept for TGL. He cut his teeth at NBC Sports starting in 2000, working on broadcasts for Sunday Night Football and the Olympics and making big sporting events even bigger for a more appealing television presentation. The challenge, always, was doing the same for obscure sports with rules that large audiences probably don’t understand well. That was especially true with the Olympics, when activities like curling come under the spotlight. By the time McCarley had taken over the Golf Channel in 2011, he began wondering if there was a better TV experience for a sport played on yawning courses over several days.

“I always talked about keeping one foot in the tradition of the game and the other foot trying to take the sport into the future,” says McCarley.

Three things happened that brought his vision to life. The first occurred about 10 years ago, when McCarley linked up with Ryan Dotters, the CEO of Full Swing, a top designer of golf simulators. McCarley picked the company to set up its simulator inside a studio at the channel, a place that could be used for instruction. The next happened during the pandemic, when he was able to follow Woods around a largely abandoned golf course, something that had never happened in tournaments unthreatened by the specter of an airborne virus. People usually just staked out one spot on the course and only saw snippets of their favorite golfers. Put the game inside, though, and golfers don’t have to walk, which means fans get to see every shot, from the tee to the final putt.

“I always talked about keeping one foot in the tradition of the game and the other foot trying to take the sport into the future,” says McCarley.

What he required, however, was the screen. And in the middle of 2022, he found his answer. Through Dotters he met Andrew Macaulay, then the chief technology officer of Topgolf. The pair convened in Sweden—incidentally, an ideal test facility for indoor golf, because who plays in subzero temperatures? There Macaulay set up a large hanging canvas, roughly the size of a movie-theater screen, onto which a projector displayed one of Full Swing’s simulated courses. Then they started hitting golf balls from 35 yards away. The number was special: As Macaulay had learned during his tenure at Topgolf, that’s the exact distance necessary to get enough data from a golf ball’s flight path to accurately predict where it will land in a virtual environment. It also benefits golfers.

“They could actually start to see the shape of the ball before it hit the screen,” McCarley says.

Even before this early proof of concept, McCarley already had buy-in from the sport’s biggest ambassadors: Woods, McIlroy, and the PGA Tour itself. He took his first meeting with Woods in January 2021. At the end of 90 minutes, he and Woods were on the same page about leaning into a technology that could grow the game. “I think this is going to work,” McCarley recalls him saying. He told McCarley he would help develop the league and be one of the players—as long as McCarley threw all his weight behind it. He already had. He quit his job and founded TMRW Sports. (Pronounce it “tomorrow.”) TGL is its first project; Woods and McIlroy are cofounders.

In late November, I flew to Palm Beach Gardens to get an early look at how a TGL match would play out. SoFi Center was still in the middle of construction, but the playing area—with the field, the green, and the screen—was set up. Seeing the screen was enough to know why PGA golfers could be convinced to try arena golf. It’s five stories tall, 24 times bigger than the standard 16-by-9 version. I watched Fleetwood, McIlroy, and Morikawa launch tee shots at the thing over several days, and each player was more in awe than the last.

“This is insane,” Morikawa told me. “It’s what I want my backyard to look like.”

Driving practice brought into stark focus one of the biggest changes in TGL: no caddies. Players use TV monitors by their benches that run simulator software. It allows them to drag and drop where they’d like to aim their ball. As they get closer to the hole, the course image displayed on the large screen shifts correspondingly.

This is where the mics on the players gets interesting. They talk strategy with one another instead of with a caddy. The three-on-three nature of every contest means that each player has to leave a ball where their teammate can get it closer to the green. Players who can’t drive the ball the farthest tend to avoid teeing off on holes that are much longer than anything they’d encounter in the real world. When teams finally make it over to the rotating, undulating green, all three players go. Guys who would normally compete against each other on the PGA Tour are suddenly working together to decipher the curves and dips that might befall their ball en route to the cup.

“The triples format, from what I saw, was really cool because everyone’s involved,” Morikawa told me a little over a month later, once the season began and he had an opportunity to watch the opening match and see theory become practice.

As for the screen itself, Macaulay says they first tried bullet-resistant Kevlar, but golf balls zooming at close to 200 mph tore right through it. The screen they have instead is multilayered material. The front layer, which displays the course image, is produced by a company called Dazian out of South Hackensack, New Jersey. It’s like what you’d see on a rinky-dink simulator screen in the rec room of a city condo complex, except these unpixelated images are generated by nine state-of-the-art projectors. The middle layer provides elasticity. Behind both layers is a vinyl backing that almost resembles the sail of an old wooden frigate. This layer not only ensures that golf balls don’t leave unsightly dents all over the front screen; it also makes it so that balls drop straight to the ground instead of ricocheting back into a golfer’s face.

“The scale is the thing for me that blows my mind,” McIlroy said during a TGL preview show on ABC just after the new year. “Every time I step in here, I’m just blown away by the size of the screen.”

Big, big names own these TGL teams. Fenway Sports Group, which owns the Boston Red Sox, is the primary proprietor of TGL’s Boston Common Golf team, which counts McIlroy as one of its foursome. Meanwhile, Arthur Blank—billionaire cofounder of Home Depot and owner of the Atlanta Falcons—threw his monetary muscle into starting TGL’s Atlanta team. Yet the Los Angeles Golf Club won the initial bid to become the league’s first franchise, largely because that’s the way Ohanian wanted it. (In addition to being insanely tall, Ohanian is very competitive.) And he had something of a leg up: He sat on the board of directors for Woods’s nonprofit and fielded the golf legend’s call just as TGL was getting off the ground. What would a guy from the world of tech start-ups and venture capital think of a digital golf league?

“He said to me, ‘I want this to exist in the world because I know what it’s going to do for the sport,’” Ohanian recalls. “Tiger Woods tells you that, and you’re like, let’s fucking go to war.”

Ohanian won’t share the exact amount he shelled out in the end, but he admits it was somewhere between $25 million and $100 million. Lest one doubt his aptitude or passion, one should know that Ohanian, who grew up in Maryland, spent his childhood as a fan of the Washington you-know-whos. “I suffered under the cruel hands of Dan Snyder for decades,” he tells me. “And most of my decisions as a team owner, I often think, What would Dan do? And then I do the opposite.” His all-black Cybertruck, the third one off the lot, is emblazoned in the rear with the LAGC logo. (In a serendipitous turn, the LA squad also became the first team to make the playoffs, in a come-from-behind overtime victory on February 24. Morikawa sunk the decisive putt to tie the match, executed a rather Woods-like fist pump, and then chucked his golf ball to a fan in the stands. Their outcome in the playoffs, however, was surely less than desirable, as they lost their match to finish third in the standings on the year.)

At five in the evening on the second Tuesday of January, I returned to the now completed SoFi Center for the second contest of the 2025 season. It would be Woods’s Jupiter Links Golf Club, with Max Homa and Kevin Kisner in tow, against Morikawa and his boys from LAGC, Justin Rose and Sahith Theegala. (Alas, Fairway Jesus was sitting out.) Since November, when I first met Morikawa and Fleetwood, I had been intermittently checking in with the LA team as they prepped for their season opener.

When I walked into the arena, its composition reminded me of the Wells Fargo Center, where I go to see the Philadelphia 76ers rip my heart out every year. There’s a store for fan gear, a small copy of the same arena green for attendees to try out, concession stands, a “clubhouse” bar for people with fat wallets, and a seating arrangement in the shape of a horseshoe—one that gives anyone, anywhere lines of sight to both the simulator screen and the putting green that bookend the playing field.

“You can see every single shot from every single player, all happening live right in front of you,” says McCarley.

Maybe one of the coolest features is at the top of the arena. The two tee boxes have three fields of play, with real grass for the fairway and the rough, and a square of the same sand used at Augusta National for long bunker shots. Chew up enough divots, and golfers need fresh grass—which is grown just outside the arena. From the ceiling hang two monorail tracks. Before every match, maintenance crews haul in and drop new squares of fairway and rough, especially useful as the inaugural season proceeded. (On Presidents Day, TGL put on a triple-header, with matches at 1, 4, and 7 p.m. Squares were swapped before each one. No one wants to tee off on hand-me-down grass.)

Not long after I showed up, the first fans started walking in. Quickly it transformed into a land of quarter-zips and khakis, polo shirts and white New Balance sneakers. A mix of bros and business class began filing into their seats. I took a breath and swore I smelled the aroma of new money—and Olipop prebiotic soda. It occurred to me that the Manning brothers might rejoice in such a paradise, and then I remembered that Eli Manning is a minority owner of the New York Golf Club.

President Donald Trump’s challenger in the primaries, DeSantis, came in shortly after 6 p.m. to watch warm-ups. He was soon hobnobbing with Woods right on the field. When DJ Khaled walked in, a TGL employee snapped a photo of us as I suppressed a rabid urge to dap him up while smooth-talking “another one” right in his face.

Before Woods took the field of play for the opening tee, I got a look inside the production truck, where Jeff Neubarth—formerly of ESPN, Turner Sports, and Calloway Sports—takes command not only of what people in the arena see on the high-def monitors, but also of all the action that viewers see back home. There are 73 different cameras at his disposal: a sky cam like you’d see at an NFL game, multiple cameras embedded on the field itself, a robot cam on wheels, and even a camera that sits directly at the top of the simulator screen. By the Presidents Day triple-header, there were rotating cameras inside the flagsticks on the green. “You want to take people where they haven’t been,” he says.

I realized, though, that being at the match itself meant I would miss the dialogue between players, as their live-mic conversations are not streamed over loudspeakers during the match. Sure, it’s a thrill seeing some of golf’s best players live in front of you. But I wouldn’t hear what they were saying to one another. Whatever tactics they were discussing on the field I had to try to infer based on their body language. (A buddy who watched TGL told me that it’s “made for TV,” an observation that probably doesn’t bug TGL’s leadership.)

Shortly after 7 p.m., we break away from Scott Van Pelt, the host of all these TGL broadcasts, and go directly to the picture on the field. Roger Steele, the in-venue emcee for the league, stands mid-arena to make the player introductions. The LA players walk on to the Tupac classic “California Love.” Homa and Kisner make their way in. And then in walks Woods. On his way to the playing field, he low-fives Will Lowery, podcast host of Beyond the Fairway and team ambassador for Jupiter Links. “You ready for this?!” Woods calls out.

I split from the truck to make my way back into the arena, and it’s pure pandemonium. The field of play is awash in red light. Fans are hollering and whistling from their seats. Neon strobes are going crazy, which I had expected once I was told the guy who does TGL’s lighting is the former lighting director of the WWE. Finally, Woods walks out to the tee box to lead off the match with a 376-yard par 4.

Right at the start, the game’s greatest throws a curveball. Woods looks back at his teammates with a small smile on his face and then whips the hammer towel out of his back pocket. Like an NFL coach throwing the red challenge flag, he holds it at arm’s length and drops it on the field.

Because he threw it before his tee shot, it’s enforced automatically. It’s not hard to deduce the savvy reasons for chucking a hammer. Maybe you’ve been hitting great from the tee all night. Maybe you’re walking to the green going for birdie—you might as well drop the orange towel, hope the other team accepts, and then putt like your life depended on it in order to win the hole and get the points.

Then, of course, there’s the other reason for deploying the hammer: The instant it hit the arena green, the crowd cheered almost as loudly as when they saw Woods emerge from the tunnel. Soon DJ Irie was spinning the favorite song of people who favor obnoxiously large pants. Slices of “U Can’t Touch This” began mixing with the cacophony of the arena environment: shouts, applause, the twisting of tops of aluminum-bottled Dasani, the sweet, sweet clinking sound that emerges when a titanium driver impacts a golf ball, the looks of disapproval from Charlie Woods whenever Dad misses a putt.

By the time the two teams made it onto the green for the first hole, LA didn’t even bother making Woods putt because they knew the ball was going in. The team conceded the putt instead. Although the points didn’t go to Jupiter Links. The hole ended in a tie, because even if Woods had sunk the putt, both teams would’ve hit the same number of shots. Tied holes are still a thing. Golf traditionalists, breathe easy.

As the match progressed, I could tell the vibe I got from inside the arena was undoubtedly different from the at-home viewing experience. Fans mugged for the in-arena cameras (like people do during NBA games) and cheered wildly. “This is siiick” seemed to be spectators’ unofficial motto of the evening. (I heard it dozens of times.) And, unlike what golf stereotypes might suggest, no one I saw was slowly being lulled into a state of somnolence. Taking a nap would’ve been hard anyway: During one commercial break, the music kicked up loud and Steele ran onto the field and got the crowd moving in a wave back and forth to a mash-up of techno and “Seven Nation Army.” At one point I was taken upstairs to the TGL owners’ box and spotted DJ Khaled watching from the front row. To my chagrin, the better angels of my nature won out, and I refrained from belting out an a cappella version of “All I Do Is Win.”

Still, regardless of all the excitement inside the arena, I did wonder how TV ratings were faring. When I met up with Ohanian in his owners’ box, where I politely declined the cake pop hors d’oeuvre offered to me, the match was 8 to 1 in favor of LAGC, who would end up winning 12 to 1. I had heard from some TGL folks that viewership dropped off during the opening match of the season, where the final score was 9 to 2, with people tuning out once the outcome had become a foregone conclusion. Would the same thing happen as the season went on, or would more people along the way discover the league and start watching? (Later I learned that viewership hovers, on average, around 610,000. Of the 10 matches that aired in prime time on ESPN, viewership eclipsed 800,000.)

“There is a scenario where no one watches,” Ohanian had told me before tonight. “But Tiger Woods alone is worthy of a pilgrimage multiple times a year. And you never bet against Tiger Woods.”

Even, so it seems, in a losing contest. Because if you tuned out early, you missed one of the most exciting plays of the evening: At the 14th hole, with Los Angeles leading 10 to 1, it was Kisner’s turn to try to sink a putt. His ball had landed in a bunker and so was placed in one of the three located on the rotating green. He stepped into the sand with his wedge, sized up his shot, and then made contact. The ball flew straight at the pin, bounced off, and launched through the air.

Kisner looked up, smiling, almost unable to believe what he did. Morikawa fell down from laughing so hard. And even through the ruckus erupting from the arena crowd, which hadn’t thinned out at all, I heard Woods giggling uncontrollably and realized that’s why I was here. I was getting something I would never see: one of the greatest to ever play, just out with his boys, having a good time, entertaining thousands and thousands of people who will never watch him the way they did tonight.