The new TGL golf league made its debut last night on ESPN.
If you’re not aware, it’s an indoor team golf format (created by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy) played in a purpose built arena with players hitting shots into a truly massive screen.
It’s an attempt to open up golf to a wider sports/entertainment audience and from what I’ve seen of week 1, I think it’ll do pretty well.
The physical set and the tech looks really impressive – this is the closest you could possibly get to playing ‘real’ golf indoors – and a 40 second shot clock keeps things moving along quickly.
The players seemed to enjoy it and everyone was mic’d up to capture some bantz between the teams (this will inevitably be better with some characters than others).
The crowd seemed pretty into it, even though the match itself was very one-sided.
For the US audience, it has a nice evening time slot on ESPN, so it’ll naturally pick up that general sports audience sticking around after watching something else. Not so good for us here in Europe, though.
So as a piece of light entertainment and a way of maybe getting some more people interested in golf, it looks fine.
The sport vs entertainment question…
The question for me with something like this is always “is it just a bit of fun or am I meant to care who wins?” because the essence and value of sport (for me) always comes from caring about the result.
Whether that’s because I support a certain team or individual, the historical context of the event, or just the drama of watching someone win something meaningful, that jeopardy is what separates sport from being “just” entertainment.
The hardest challenge of all, I think, is getting people to really care about teams or events that have been created from scratch.
That’s not to say it shouldn’t be attempted, and innovation like this (especially in golf) is definitely a good thing, but the reality is that it’ll take a long time to build up that genuine interest in the teams and the outcome of the games.
