PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. -- When the inaugural season of TGL launched at the SoFi Center last week, Ireland's Shane Lowry forgot to bring a tee to the hitting area to hit the first drive in the history of the tech-infused golf league.
It was one of the lighter moments in TGL's opening night, which for all intents and purposes delivered what had been promised: team golf being played on the largest simulator in the world in a state-of-the-art facility.
TGL figures to get even more eyeballs Tuesday night, when Tiger Woods and his Jupiter Links GC squad take on Collin Morikawa and the Los Angeles Golf Club (7 p.m. ET, ESPN/ESPN+).
The opening night was the culmination of more than eight years of work by TMRW Sports CEO Mike McCarley, Woods, Rory McIlroy and others in getting TGL off the ground.
McCarley spent more than two decades as an NBC Sports executive, first focusing on "Sunday Night Football" and the Olympics, and then was president of Golf Channel and head of the network's golf coverage from 2011 to 2021.
It was during the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, that McCarley first came up with the idea of launching golf as a team sport.
"What you found yourself doing in the four years in between Olympics is spending a lot of time with various sports because they want to find out how they could better present themselves on TV four years later," McCarley said. "You're helping them find little things that a sport can do better on TV."
While leading NBC's golf coverage, McCarley realized that U.S. Opens played on the West Coast -- in prime time on the East Coast -- were TV ratings bonanzas, and team events such as the Presidents Cup, Solheim Cup and Ryder Cup created more drama and tension than individual stroke-play tournaments.
"They're on a team, so they're having more conversations with each other," McCarley said. "They're having real reactions with each other that they wouldn't have in an individual event. The team nature of it and the prime-time piece of it intensifies the drama."
In 2020, McCarley set out to create a golf environment that "feels a little bit like gladiators walking into the Coliseum, and a little bit more of a pressure cooker because there's a shot clock."
McCarley's first TGL pitch was made to the Maximus of men's professional golf, 15-time major champion Woods, in December 2020. McCarley had tossed around the idea with Woods' agent, Mark Steinberg, and longtime business partner and friend, Rob McNamara.
McCarley knew that Woods used a golf simulator at his home to help prepare for tournaments throughout his PGA Tour career, so Woods was at least familiar with the technology.
Another factor in his favor: Tiger had played in the PGA Tour's Skins Game six times in his career, and he'd appeared in the first two versions of The Match, another made-for-TV competition.
"There was definitely an order to it," McCarley said. "First go to Tiger, then Rory, then the PGA Tour, and that was kind of always in my mind."
With Woods on board, McCarley had a phone call with McIlroy in January 2021. A few years earlier, they had worked together in launching GolfPass, a membership program that combined instruction, entertainment and digital media.
McCarley had talked often with McIlroy and his manager, Sean O'Flaherty, about "embracing technology to kind of create this digital future for golf."
"I knew that Rory was halfway there in his mind," McCarley said. "In the phone call, we weren't even very far into it, and he's like, 'I don't even know what this is yet, and I'm ready to say yes, because it's kind of hitting on so many themes.'"
McCarley's final hurdle was getting the PGA Tour's blessing to allow its members to compete in the TGL. He met with commissioner Jay Monahan in April 2021. At the time, there had been only speculation that two-time Open Championship winner Greg Norman was attempting to launch a rival breakaway circuit. It would be another 14 months until LIV Golf staged its first tournament in London, in which Phil Mickelson, Dustin Johnson and other former PGA Tour members competed.
McCarley assured Monahan that TGL events would be early-week events that wouldn't conflict with his circuit's tournaments. The PGA Tour signed off on releases for its members to compete in TGL, which it didn't do for LIV Golf, and became a TGL partner.
According to McCarley, the PGA Tour's help was instrumental in developing TGL's technology because it supplied his company with historical Shotlink data that helped "make sure that we're one standard deviation away from all the most common misses."
"Using a lot of the historical data helped us develop some of the very basic early renderings and schematics that we could hand off to architects and other technologists," McCarley said.
BY OCTOBER 2022, TMRW Sports had a full swing simulator and virtual green installed in a warehouse at its headquarters in Winter Park, Florida. A trip to Stockholm, Sweden, the next month would kick TGL into high gear.
Andrew Macaulay, the then-chief technology officer at Topgolf Entertainment Group, hung white material to act as temporary screen at an indoor golf range in Stockholm and rented a projector for the week. McCarley and other TGL employees watched on Zoom as a Swedish long-drive champion hit shots into the screen from 35 yards away. There were people from 16 different time zones from New Zealand to Hawai'i on the videoconference.
Then McCarley and Scott Armstrong, TMRW Sports' vice president for competition technology and operations, flew to Sweden to see the setup in person. Macaulay even arranged for sand to be dumped in the middle of the driving range so McCarley and Armstrong could see how bunker shots would be tracked on the simulator.
"There were a lot of discussions, PowerPoint slides, back-of-the-napkin [ideas] and all the usual stuff," Macaulay said. "But no one up to that point had actually created a really quick prototype in real life for him, which is what we did to try to convince him that our idea was the way to go."
Macaulay was hired as TMRW Sports' chief technology officer in December 2022. He and others went to work in developing the technology for the largest golf simulator in the world, and a state-of-the-art short game course to complement it.
There was plenty of trial and error in the beginning. Initially, TGL toyed with the idea of using natural grass on its GreenZone short game area. Their idea was ambitious: nearly 600 actuators would morph the green's topography between holes, ensuring that each putting surface would be unique. TGL brought in a truckload of Tahoma 31 Bermuda grass, which was first created by Oklahoma State University scientists, from a sod farm that also supplies playing fields to the Baltimore Ravens and Kansas City Chiefs.
"We were concerned about water penetration to the electronics," said Tanner Coffman, TGL's director of turf management. "The turf for a football field we were using was fine, but I think when we got down to a really closely mown putting green, it would have cracked over time."
Instead, TGL elected to use synthetic turf on the GreenZone, which was another technological challenge because it wanted to ensure that golf balls would still bounce and spin like they would on natural grass. TGL designers later decided to put the green on a moving turntable, which added another layer of variety for matches.
Armstrong spent time at short-game instructor Dave Pelz's backyard at his home in Austin, Texas, where two acres of synthetic grass cover his practice grounds that include reproductions of the 12th green at Augusta National Golf Club, Road Hole at St. Andrews in Scotland, No. 17 island hole at TPC Sawgrass and other iconic holes from around the world.
TGL developers went through hundreds of combinations of materials that would replace the dirt and organic matter found under actual putting greens, before finally settling on seven layers of foam, rubber and plexiglass. Macaulay declined to say exactly what's under the synthetic turf because TGL has a pending patent on it.
"We've created something that didn't exist before, which is a green that is both receptive to pitch and chip shots," Macaulay said. "When that ball bounces and rolls, it behaves very similarly to a real green and it putts true. If you were to want a putting green for your backyard, chances are you'd only get one or the other."
TGL broke ground on a stadium with a domed roof on the campus of Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, in February 2023.
WHILE THE STADIUM was being built, Armstrong and others went to work on developing how TGL matches would be played. They knew they wanted to use a shot clock to speed up play in a two-hour match, but they weren't sure exactly how it would work. The first competition test match took place at Fairway Social, a restaurant and sports bar with a simulator and putting green in Alpharetta, Georgia. The second test match came two months later at Interlachen Country Club in Winter Park.
"It was more going from the practice green to the range to just kind of see the flow," McCarley said. "When we introduced the shot clock on the practice green, we realized the shot clock was definitely going to have an impact."
In May 2023, TMRW Sports moved into the first TGL Innovation Lab at Stage 25 on a backlot of Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. Soon, the world's largest golf simulator screen, 60 feet by 30 feet, and a putting surface, 40 feet by 30 feet, were installed. A month later, competition test matches took place, using real grass for tee and fairway shots and sand for bunker shots.
Former PGA Tour pro Roberto Castro helped organize a group of highly skilled golfers to play test matches at the Innovation Lab. More than 100 golfers would participate in more than 200 matches.
"The good thing about South Florida is there's no shortage of really good golfers -- professionals, club professionals, college players and so on," Macaulay said. "Our testing has a lot of facets to it, and we needed some people who could approximate what the best players in the world could do and what lines they would take."
TGL hired three golf course design companies (Agustín Pizá, Beau Welling and Nicklaus Design) to create 30 original holes. TGL said they were "inspired by authentic golf landscapes such as links, canyons, coastal, deserts and tropical settings." Working in a virtual world allowed the designers to build holes that were out of the ordinary as well.
The par-4 "Flex" is nestled on an active volcano, and "The Spear" has a floating tee box, landing area and GreenZone.
"There's a certain geometry to golf," said Welling, whose firm designed the PGA Frisco course in Texas and Pelican Golf Club in Florida, among others. "There's a certain dispersion that these guys hit golf balls. You're trying to replicate risk and reward and the choices and all the golf architecture sort of concepts."
Designing golf holes for a virtual course was different from anything Welling had done before. He found that incorporating trees was more difficult than expected, but there was also more freedom to be creative because he didn't have to worry about building an actual bridge to get golfers over a large body of water, canyon or lava.
Another advantage in working in a virtual world: Welling didn't have to actually move dirt to make changes to the holes. It took only three or four keystrokes to make even dramatic alterations.
"I think what's cool is that you can go do whatever you want in many, many ways," Welling said. "There's parts that are the same, but then there's things that are radically different, in that you don't have constraints that you would have in the real world."
Because TGL's six teams represent cities or geographical areas, including Boston, Los Angeles and New York, Welling considered designing holes through Central Park, down Wall Street and over the Boston Harbor. He ended up shelving the idea for the first year but might bring it back in future seasons.
"Trying to accurately model and represent an urban landscape or skyscape turned out to be hard, or more than we wanted to bite off from a modeling standpoint," Welling said. "I think it's a cool mix of holes. But I'm also excited about where we will go from here. What else could be done? Just like anything that is technologically based, 2.0 has got an opportunity to do things that 1.0 didn't."
At the season-ending Tour Championship at East Lake Golf Club in Atlanta in August 2022, McCarley and McIlroy announced the formation of TMRW Sports and released renderings of what the TGL experience would look like. They said their first season would tee off in January 2024.
At the time of the announcement, the PGA Tour was in the middle of an all-out competition with LIV Golf for the best players in the world. In addition to Johnson and Mickelson, other major champions such as Brooks Koepka, Bryson DeChambeau, Cameron Smith and others had jumped to the Saudi Arabian-financed circuit. Monahan suspended the golfers from the PGA Tour when they competed in their first LIV Golf events without a conflicting-event media release.
Only three weeks earlier, 11 PGA Tour members sued the tour in federal court, challenging their suspensions and fines and claiming the PGA Tour was a monopoly. Three golfers -- Talor Gooch, Hudson Swafford and Matt Jones -- unsuccessfully sought a temporary restraining order to play in the FedEx Cup playoffs.
On Aug. 16, 2022, Woods and McIlroy led a players-only meeting at the BMW Championship in Wilmington, Delaware, where details were finalized for a new PGA Tour schedule that would include eight tournaments with increased prize money in an attempt to keep the best golfers on the tour.
AROUND 6 A.M. ET on Nov. 15, 2023, as construction of TGL's stadium had reached the back nine, McCarley was working out at a gym when he was told that a portion of the domed roof had deflated. A storm blew through later that day, tearing the heavy canvas roof from the system of cables that supported it. Everything inside was left susceptible to rain and wind.
TGL's inaugural season was supposed to start in 55 days on Jan. 9, 2024.
"It became obvious that the damage was going to be a lot worse than what I was originally told," McCarley said. "By the end of that day, we knew the date that we had picked was no longer reasonable."
After consulting with team owners, sponsors and ESPN executives, McCarley decided to push the first season back nearly a year. He considered a delayed start later that fall, but ultimately chose to stick to the original premise of "not just avoiding football, but using football as a way to promote golf in prime time."
TGL went back to the drawing board and decided to build a steel-structured arena with a traditional roof. About 1,500 fans would be wrapped around the playing area in the nearly 250,000-square-foot arena.
"The first time I heard the words 'blessing in disguise' was from Tiger Woods, and [the delay] allowed us to do a lot of things that may have had to wait until Season 2," McCarley said. "From a tech standpoint, it gave our teams more time to kind of build their community and market and promote having the lab in Palm Beach. It gave the players more time to come in and test and give us feedback.
"That blessing in disguise is probably an apt description because there are a lot of things that were improved with the benefit of time."
While TGL's core technology was already in place, the extra year allowed for refinement of the holes. At least one hole was completely redesigned, and others had significant alterations after test matches.
The new steel roof allowed for other improvements as well. A crane was added that allows Coffman to change out the 2,000-pound turf trays that are used for tee shots and shots out of the rough. The sod is grown on top of plastic, and every square foot weighs about 18 pounds.
Golfers warm up on the grass boxes before matches, and Coffman has about 15 minutes to replace the turf trays before the opening shots on live TV. TGL has a turf farm in the parking lot outside SoFi Center.
"The idea started out years ago as potentially a cart with a crane arm that could drive out there and pick them up," Coffman said. "As a grass guy, I don't like anything driving on the grass. I don't like heavy machinery going across the grass, moving things, and so the only other option was to kind of drop it from the ceiling."
THE BAY GOLF CLUB, led by Sweden's Ludvig Åberg and former U.S. Open winner Wyndham Clark, defeated New York Golf Club 9-2 in the inaugural match. The match was decided when Ireland's Shane Lowry took down Rickie Fowler in singles on the par-5 10th. The teams completed the final five holes because overall holes won and lost are among the tiebreakers for the seasonlong SoFi Cup points race.
"No sports fan ever wants to see a blowout and have it end early," McCarley said. "Everyone wants everything to go down to the wire. Golf is no different than a good football or basketball game. But I think the feedback that we've received, especially from the players, has been fantastic."
From Macaulay's viewpoint, the opening match was a success because the technology worked without a hitch. There are 73 camera sources capturing the action at SoFi Center, including 20 robotic ones. There are six Full Swing monitors at both the front and back tee boxes, and six additional ones below a slope closer to the screen. Drones are also flying overhead during the match.
"There were no technical issues at all," Macaulay said. "There were no operator issues. It's not just servers and computers running. There's a team of experts that we've trained through all these hundreds of practice matches to operate the simulator, the scoring system and the shot clock. I was very happy, but there's no resting on laurels."
The opening match drew nearly a million viewers, an average of 919,000, on ESPN, according to Nielsen numbers last week, per Front Office Sports. It had a larger audience than any LIV Golf broadcast on The CW in 2023 and 2024, and the PGA Tour's opener, The Sentry, in Hawai'i earlier this month.
With Woods playing for the first time Tuesday (7 p.m. ET, ESPN), the audience figures to spike. Maintaining interest over the course of the season will be the key for TGL.
TGL is already tossing around the idea of a virtual golf league involving players from the LPGA. There could be numerous iterations -- perhaps even a battle between golfers from the PGA Tour and LIV Golf if the sport's great divide ends.
"I think the competitive nature of this will tighten up as the season goes on," McCarley said. "I think the product for the players or the fans is going to improve and look a little bit different in January to when it ends in March. If we're doing our jobs right, we're making small changes along the way."