An exclusive sneak peek at TGL, the new primetime golf league featuring Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy

It’s golf’s boldest new venture. And it likely would never have gotten out of the gate without a mighty shove from the man who upended the sport thirty years ago: Tiger Woods. Mike McCarley, CEO and Founder TMRW Sports [Photo: Courtesy TGL presented by SoFi] Mike McCarley was a sports television executive with impressive bona fides—he’d overseen marketing and communications for telecasts of the Olympics and the Kentucky Derby (for TV sports pioneer Dick Ebersol)—but his passion was golf, evidenced by his decade as president of golf and global strategy at NBC Sports, where he also ran the Golf Channel. In 2021 he founded a company called TMRW (pronounced “Tomorrow”) Sports, which he thought could revolutionize golf by combining three huge forces in popular culture: professional athletes, technology, and television. Enter Tiger. McCarley got a meeting with the golf legend to pitch his idea for a brand new kind of sports platform made for the 21st Century: TGL, where two teams comprised of four elite PGA players would compete in an indoor arena, going head-to-head for fifteen holes on an epic, high-tech simulator and stadium green. Forget Top Golf on steroids; this is more like Top Golf on gene doping. Woods, as is his custom, was thoughtful, inquisitive, and direct. “At the end of the 90 minutes,” McCarley recalls, “he looked at me and said, ‘I completely understand the technology. I think the game is ready for this. I know the players are ready for this.’” He then looked McCarley square in the eye. “If I commit to doing this,” he asked, “will you commit to doing it, too?” For McCarley, it was the equivalent of a putt dropping in to win a major. TGL was happening. [Photo: Courtesy TGL presented by SoFi] Re-inventing golf for primetime Even amid the muscular swagger of contemporary professional sports, TGL is an audacious idea: a new, made-for-television, six-team league where PGA golfers will compete live, in prime-time matches televised on ESPN and ESPN+ over 12 weeks until a winning team earns the SoFi Cup and pockets the $9 million in grand prize cash. (The total SoFi Cup Purse across all teams for the launch season is $21 million.) Comfy money for a couple of loose rounds with your buds, but it seems clear the purse is not what’s motivating players. A chance to chart the future of the sport very much is. The very idea of TGL may strike a certain kind of golf purist as sacrilege: here is a golf match played indoors, in front of 1,500 fans who will be encouraged to make noise, with swirling kleig lights and a bombastic, “let’s get ready to rumble” vibe. Players will face a 40-second shot clock, and each will be mic’d up, so fans in the arena and at home can hear some good old-fashioned (albeit PG-rated) trash talk. All players will also be able to hear, and respond to, the ESPN announcers in the booth. [Photo: Courtesy TGL presented by SoFi] Players hit tee shots into a five-story screen, with holes created by some of the country’s top course designers and translated digitally. Once players land a shot within 50 yards of the pin, a Skymark light from the ceiling marks the exact spot of the ball in the GreenZone. From there, players hit off synthetic turf, navigating bunkers with real sand until they land on the green. Set on a grass turntable about the size of an NBA court, the green contains nearly 600 actuators that allow for surface modifications. Every TGL hole has a unique design. Augusta, this is not. “The biggest part of our audience, I hope, are people who don’t watch golf, but they’re sports fans who love to root for a team, and their team beating the other team,” says Andrew Macaulay, TMRW Sports CTO. The former Topgolf CTO, he’s responsible for every bell and whistle aiming to turn the gentlemen’s game into a hybrid of NBA playoff and Metallica concert. “It’s all tied in to get that level of sports fan, and I think they’re going to bring their experience with other team sports that all work that way.” The ultra-traditionalists, he says, will “tune in just to hate it. We’ll still get them watching.” [Photo: Courtesy TGL presented by SoFi] Who’s playing, who’s not TGL had a lot of wind at its back in its launch, much of it provided by its partnership with the PGA Tour and, more specifically, Woods and Rory McIlroy, who signed on as co-founders. The six founding teams, each aligned with a major U.S. city, are comprised of 24 pros, including some of the game’s biggest draws: Woods and McIlroy, Justin Thomas, Collin Morikawa, Rickie Fowler, Xander Schauffle, to name just a few. But TGL failed to sign two of the biggest, world number-one Scottie Scheffler and three-time major winner Jordan Spieth, and its PGA deal meant players who defected to rival LIV Golf, including marquee names like Dustin Johnson, Jon Rahm, and Bryson DeChambeau, were not eligible to join. And wasn’t it the flashy LIV Tour that was supposed to “reinvent” the sport with brash br