PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla.—There are plenty of questions surrounding the launch of TGL Tuesday night, but one thing is for sure: Golf has never felt this much like WWE.
Rickie Fowler, Xander Schauffele and Wyndham Clark will come out of a custom-built entrance tunnel to their own pieces of theme music, surrounded by fluorescent beams and smoke on ESPN shortly after 9 p.m. ET. The wrestling connections continue behind the scenes, where multiple employees with WWE experience were hired, including one tasked with using lighting to bring some theatricality to the typically staid sport.
TGL founder Mike McCarley lightheartedly explained the choices: “I grew up a professional wrestling fan.” But truthfully, the inspirations stretch beyond the squared circle.
Seeing UFC’s LEDs around its octagon led to the boards surrounding TGL play. As the arena plans came together, McCarley——then NBC Sports’ president of golf and global strategy—and other executives visited Overtime Elite’s internet-age venue in Atlanta, esports centers and even Cirque du Soleil productions in addition to more traditional golf settings.
There won’t be anything staged about TGL’s debut, but the company still spent plenty of time—and more than $50 million—on its stage, a futuristic blend of greenery and screenery inside a new arena in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.
Asked about the concept’s origins, McCarley stepped back to 2013, when The Players Championship was updating its tiebreaker format, expanding from a single-hole sudden death challenge to a three-hole playoff. McCarley suggested putting lights up across the 18th’s tee box, fairway and green to allow for primetime competition.
“You would dome the whole place if you could,” former PGA Tour commissioner Tim Finchem responded.
“I was like, ‘That’s a great idea,’” McCarley said. That one question—what if golf could be played inside?—spawned thousands more. If you could play golf in a coliseum-like environment, what else might be possible?
Obviously, TGL would need to use simulation technology to let competitors play full rounds of golf without leaving the spotlight. That meant finding the right combination of ball-tracing and virtualization tools, as well as deciding just how far away players would be from the screen, how large that display would be, and so on.
Around the playing area, camera placements took precedence as TGL’s SoFi Center was designed. “This was built, really, for kind of a prime-time television experience,” McCarley said.
In that way, TGL is also a throwback. SoFi CEO Anthony Noto was one of the first to buy into the concept on paper as the company looked for a Q1 sports property to sponsor, and notably wanted a primetime TV presence, even as so many competitions and viewers move online.
“My view is, when you put the best golfers in the world on a Full Swing simulator game, it’s going to really work,” Noto said. “People will forget that it’s a simulation.”
The grass players hit their drives off will be 100% real. Massive sod pallets have been growing outside of the venue. Smaller slices are delivered via chains hanging from the ceiling before each game.
Prepping the grass for indoor play was itself a challenge. TGL will use Tahoma 31 Bermuda grass designed specifically for golf and football turf. Thin layers of surface are grown on plastic, allowing it to live mostly outside before being brought indoors for a short period of stress—cool temperatures, harsh lighting and metal thrashings. A few days before each match, grass is brought in to adjust to the indoor climate, further managed with the help of LED grow lights.
There’s also real sand, the maintenance of which is even more precise. TGL director of turf management Tanner Coffman’s job includes watering SoFi Center’s bunker areas to maintain an 11% moisture level. White turf has been installed below TGL’s sand trays in case anyone happens to see what’s underneath the grains.
In many ways, Coffman is tasked with maintaining a Bonsai golf course—a miniature version of the real thing. “I’m finding other ways of doing what groundskeepers have been doing for years,” he said.
All shots beyond 50 yards of the hole are played from one of three Coffman-maintained trays—sand, fairway grass or thick rough—lined up next to each other facing a 64-foot jumbo screen.
Closer attempts are marked on TGL’s flexible green area, which spins and lifts various spots to present new challenges to golfers. Based on where their shot wound up in virtual space, a light beamed from the ceiling, named Skymark, shows them where to place the ball. Artificial surfaces are used for the green area after testing found that the advanced carpet performed more like traditional grass than natural fibers would when placed atop all the machinery.
And just because it’s fake doesn’t mean it’ll be easy. Golfers have said the lack of imperfections on the surface makes lining up putts tougher, as does the perfectly even overhead lighting above them.
While one team of TGL staffers spent years making arena golf possible, another group focused on how the game would actually work.
Consultants at CapTech were brought in to develop TGL’s scoring format, competition rules and season structure, as well as a system that could integrate digital measurements and real-world actions in a single stats platform. The new game needed to be competitive, it needed to be fast-paced and it needed to feel like golf. During each match, teams of three golfers will first alternate shots on each hole before going head-to-head with an opponent on later holes.
Some newly designed holes resemble tracks a golfer might see at a prestigious course, but others feature massive bunkers, fairway chokepoints or active volcanoes designed to test players. Yes, volcano.
There has also been talk about how fans could engage with the sport in new ways, possibly by submitting hole designs for future contests or playing the virtual course alongside the pros from anywhere in the world.
“What TGL will be in February and March and 2026, we’ll look back at night one or month one, and it will be like if you go to Amazon.com in 1999,” said CapTech director Roberto Castro, who previously spent nine seasons on the PGA Tour. “It will look that much different.”
In year one, $21 million is up for grabs, including a $9 million prize for the winning team.
After TGL built a new venue for golf, and a new version of the game, it was time to figure out how to show it on all TV. That was the whole point, anyway, right?
TGL is attempting something new with its broadcast booth, bringing in Matt Barrie to handle play-by-play duties but leaving color commentary up to the active competitors on the course, who will all be mic’d up.
“There’s always been this dream and idea of, like, wouldn’t it be cool to ask Rory [McIlroy] what he’s going to do, as opposed to ask someone next to you who’s going to say what Rory should do or might do or could do,” TGL lead producer Jeff Neubarth said. “We’re going to be among the first to really ask the players, ‘What are you going to do?’ Or to ask them, ‘What did you just do?’”
An experienced audio team recorded new golf sounds as well—balls splashing into water or caroming off trees—to sync with actions taking place in the virtual world.
One of the biggest challenges will be marrying the real with the digital, showing golfers in SoFi Center as well as the unreal holes they’re playing. Neubarth has studied hours of video game clips to see how developers handle views, recording moments on his phone and sending them to his team to replicate in their broadcasts. For example, TGL will use a virtual camera that follows the ball through the air like a drone might if it was possible within today’s physical world. In the venue, there are also overhead cameras offering unique views of the players lining up their shots, part of a mix of 70 visual sources producers can choose from throughout the night.
“I want people to say, ‘I’ve never seen golf covered like that before,’” director Johnathan Evans said.
TGL has put on numerous rehearsals ahead of Tuesday’s debut. But there are still many questions that remain unanswerable until New York Golf Club and The Bay Golf Club walk through smoke and light before the league’s first match.
Has TGL truly remade high-level golf indoors? Or has it created something else entirely?