In rare gaps between Mrs Brown’s Boys on RTÉ’s Christmas schedule there was a breakfast screening of Around The World In 80 Days. The Oscar winning 1950s movie is based on the 19th century novel by Jules Verne, who is commonly regarded as a pioneer of science fiction, even though he rejected the label.
“Anything one man can imagine, other men can make real,” he wrote in Around the World in 80 Days.
Verne’s imagination might not have stretched to the future of golf on TV in the 21st century, or he might have had better things to do with his waking dreams. In any case, a version of it has landed, refined in a gaming studio to produce a game stripped of interfering weather and unaccountable bounces.
On Tuesday night the TGL Golf League will make its debut in a 250,000 square foot arena in Florida. The idea was conceived by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, and brought to market by TMRW Sports, the company Woods and McIlroy set up with Mike McCarley, a former NBC golf executive.
The basic concept is stadium golf in a playing area about the size of an NFL pitch. The tee box and the zone for hitting approach shots will have grass, but everything else will be virtual or synthetic or “tech-infused,” the buzzword tattooed all over the pre-publicity.
The key to the pageant is a 3,400 square-foot screen which is roughly 24 times the size of a standard golf simulator. Anybody who has bought a new club at a golf superstore in recent years will be familiar with the experience of thrashing a ball into a screen before your pocket is picked.
This is the same technology but stretched far beyond the scale of an IMAX cinema screen. One of the spectacular holes shown in practice was an island green at the top of a rock formation in the middle of the Grand Canyon. The ball hits the screen and travels through this other dimension, where it either hits the target or falls into oblivion. Gaming is full of those binary outcomes.
The competition is made up of six teams, or “franchises” – a term beloved of American sport, with its cavalier attitude towards teams having roots in one place. The “franchises” don’t have the kind of juiced-up names that you’ll find on LIV Golf (Fireballs, Iron Heads, Ripper, Slasher) but it is a karaoke version of the same idea.
There is no shortage of familiar names. Twenty-four PGA Tour players have signed up, including 13 Major winners and seven players who are currently in the top 10 on the world rankings. The exceptions are Scottie Scheffler, the best player the world, Viktor Hovland and Bryson De Chambeau, who is on the other side of golf’s ongoing civil war.
Rickie Fowler, who is the 74th ranked player in the world and has won just one tournament in the last five years, is also on the roster essentially because he is the only PGA Tour player who looks like a skateboarder and dresses in candy colours. They must be thinking that he might connect with the “kids” – a demographic where golf has been shut out.
A cartoon manifestation of Fowler, explaining the rules of the modified game, has been rolled out on their social media channels, including X where young people, apparently, don’t hang out any more.
Inside the arena the emphasis will be on speed and noise and ruffling the hair of golf’s stuffiness. There will be music, just like there is on LIV Golf, and the players will be mic’d up, in the hope of banter, or heaven forbid, sledging. There will also be a 40-second shot clock, scrupulously policed by a referee, and no caddies to elasticate the shot-making process. Patrick Cantlay, golf’s most notorious tortoise, will be in danger of whiplash.
No player can expect silence when they’re standing over a shot. It will not be as raucous as the famous 16th hole at the WM Phoenix Open, where up to 20,000 fans fill the stands and tank up on booze, but the 1,500 spectators inside the arena will have license to let off some steam.
“The fans having a good time will be a big part of the energy,” said Fowler.
It might be too much like darts at the Ally Pally for your taste. Or that might be a good thing. It might be fun.
And because the walking involved is no more than a stroll in the park, Tiger Woods will be able to play a full part. Nearly six years after he won The Masters for the last time and a dozen years since he was able to pursue a regular schedule on the PGA Tour, Woods is still one of the biggest draws in golf. That is part of the problem.
The decline in golf’s television audience has gone far beyond erosion. In the United States, the average viewership for the final round of a regular PGA Tour event was just 2.8 million last season, which represented a precipitous drop of 20 per cent on the year before. The first event of the Fall Series, which follows the FedEx Cup play-offs, attracted a pathetic audience of just 69,000 on Sunday.
As a TV sport, golf has an image problem. There are too many beige events and not enough charismatic players. Most of the ones we loved to heckle defected to LIV. We underestimated the role of pantomime villains. But that tour doesn’t have a TV audience either. On the same week that just 69,000 watched the final round of the Sanderson Farms tournament on the PGA Tour, only 89,000 people tuned into the flagship event on LIV’s schedule.
Golf needs something different and this Tuesday night knees-up might be the catalyst for something. It might be too much like darts at the Ally Pally for your taste. Or that might be a good thing. It might be fun.
“It’s not real golf,” says Fowler, “and it’s not simulator golf.”
But there is more than enough “real” golf in our tellies, and too much of it leaves us in a catatonic trance. Try this.
