by If you have even a tangential association with or glancing interest in golf – and judging by the fact that you’re reading this website, you probably do – then you’re aware that the TGL is starting tonight in South Florida. A six-pack smattering of thoughts on that launch:
1. It’s almost impossible to be unaware of its arrival. There has been so much buildup, PR, content, and notice. Media has bought into the curiosity of it, if not the overall product already. There are ads everywhere, explainers for every detail, team previews, hole preview videos, brick-and-mortar merch and activations (our colleague Beau saw a roving trailer around San Francisco this weekend), power rankings, odds, and of course gambling picks for this thing we’ve never seen. I got four separate push notifications from various sports and news apps this morning about it, and now I am hitting you with more on this! It’s not entirely clear if people will make the next leap to care about TGL, but they will be aware of it. So the promotional push has done its job.
2. The massive push behind it provokes two thoughts: they are very fortunate, either by accident or something more conspiratorial I would never indulge ;), that the little circus tent they had planned for last year went poof and caused a one-year delay. They’ve used the year for increased fine-tuning and to flood the zone with further promotion. The other thought is that this almost feels too big to fail. The billionaire sports owners and many major celebrity investors behind it, the most famous golfers in the game included, the major TV network in ESPN, many legacy golf and TV execs, some very smart tech minds, a stamp of approval from the PGA Tour, the expenditures to get this far – this is the opposite of a start-up experiment. The money spent to get to this point has to be mind-boggling. I’m not even sure what metric will be used to determine success or failure – TV ratings could be ugly but those seem harsh for many these days. For the big-money owners, success may be just using the losses for a tax write-off for awhile and then hopefully selling for a profit down the line. Whatever the metric, it feels like too much money and too many “important” people are involved for this to flop spectacularly and go away in a year or two.
One of the TGL holes.
3. So who asked for this? No one in particular, really. It was an idea, maybe a brilliant one, or maybe just another one to try and find a nice take-home cut from the industrial complex around this recreational game. That’s fine – some ideas that led to products we depend on or love now we didn’t ask for either. But at an over-saturated moment this summer, those moments in the calendar when there is simply too much golf that is not major championships, I was despondent and wrote a bit about golf’s current obsession with innovation for the sake of innovation. I’d just been hammered in succession with LIV’s announcement that they were going to a laughably unprofessional and random golf course in Bolingbrook, Illinois, for millions in its team championship, that the Tour was hosting this hideous bits-and-pieces Frankenstein of an event called the CJ Cup Byron Nelson at TPC Craig Ranch, and the rollout of the oxymoronic named Jupiter Links franchise in the TGL. I was frustrated. There’s too much money, we’re out over our skis, and there’s no demand for any of this GMO-concocted shit. And yet … that was the summer and man, there’s not a lot of sports going on tonight, is there?
MORE: An Amusing Note Emerges Ahead of TGL Debut
4. I am still skeptical of the demand for this actual league – not the content, coverage, and promotion we’ve all gotten so far – but the actual game. I am wary the demand will come to match all the money and effort put into it. But they are slotting themselves into a spot where they could capture something beyond the initial curiosity. There is no football, but they’re using ESPN football properties to draft off and further promote it. An old might go to the newspaper to check the sports TV listings for today and see a mix of meh regular season hoops, then this weird GOLF — 9 p.m. ET, TGL: Bay vs. New York — ESPN listing. There’s no football. There’s no other golf. Of course, there are many other things you could do with your time, but it’s not the worst place for something new to slot. They’ve bombarded you with the awareness campaign and now have less sportsball competition for your time.
5. This scheduling point demonstrates how nimble it can be vs. other pro golf products. TGL needs to be with its players committed to other tours and traveling, but it can slot in easier, lean on ESPN, and go up against less competition. The PGA Tour on the other hand? There’s a lot of that in supply, every week at the same time. That’s a Thursday to Sunday endeavor and this week’s Sony Open goes up against a College Football Playoff semifinal on Thursday, another CFP game on Friday, and the NFL playoffs on both Saturday and Sunday. Woof. It will always have its network legacy advantages for many events but that’s also a cruise ship that can’t be steered into smaller and more varied appealing time slots. Which brings me to …
6. Could the TGL cannibalize the PGA Tour in some respect, taking an increased piece of the limited pie that is our attention for golf? I know we’re all friends now and official partners working together. But there’s going to be a lot more coverage, reaction, and discussion around TGL this week as opposed to a Mule beach walk during a bunch of high-interest playoff football games. Based on curiosity and interest alone, TGL is a fundamentally more appealing product this week compared to the PGA Tour. If I were a rank-and-file PGA Tour member, already not included in the money that comes with being a TGL player, I might be frustrated by that. As is often the case, they will just have to deal with it this week and probably for the foreseeable future as their more star power-blessed colleagues play screen golf earlier in the weeks before the “real” tournaments. There is a finite group of people able to spend a finite amount of time on pro golf and its characters. If they – the ones who might like pro golf and actually watch and preach about it to those who might not – spend more time consuming and then chatting about the most famous golfers doing the screen golf thing, well, that further cuts into the already many savorless PGA Tour events. There’s only so much juice, and TGL might be taking some here. So we can say we’re all friends and this could be good for all in the long run, but that’s rarely how these things work out with so many people involved and ready to gripe. If this brings more power to the stars, but further bites into the PGA Tour – the larger disembodied organization with weekly tournaments – that disembodied organization might start to become unsettled.
7. A bonus to the six-pack: I have no involvement in this thing but I think we should probably give it some grace on the first run, and maybe the first few runs. When we launched the Shotgun Start Podcast, with a slightly smaller budget and professionalism, I framed the first episode as “ideally, this is the worst it will ever be.” TBD and maybe a few episodes recorded from moving vehicles on that one. But you get the point – this is the case for most products: the first one will probably be the most bumpy. There will be some laughable mishaps and people will draw hasty final conclusions about the entire idea from those. They’re not even rolling out their most notable teams, including founders Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, to make the biggest first splash. It may not pop for you. I think we can be critical and realistic, but I am just going to reserve a conclusive judgment for a while based off the first launch or two.
As you may have noticed, I wrote very little about the actual game, which, despite all the coverage of this league, we have yet to actually see and will be the most important part of this. It’s The Bay Golf Club vs. New York Golf Club. Find any other golf site for an explainer or preview or pick on something we’ve never been able to watch. Now we get something to actually digest and react to, further engage, or dismiss.
Fried Egg Golf TGL Preview
