Step into golf’s $110m ‘unknown’… how it can fill glaring void and beat LIV at its own game

Elite golfers standing before a stonking 20 x 16m screen, indoors, and in midweek prime time: It’s a never-before-seen sight that makes fish out of water look at home.

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But as jarring as it will be to the senses, there’s reason to believe that when TGL launches on Wednesday (1pm AEDT), so does golf’s biggest-ever push into the future.

Look out, LIV Golf.

This is the story of the PGA Tour’s big-money play to reimagine golf – and why it could ultimately see the game’s first disrupters beaten at their own game.

THE AUSSIE PLAYBOOK BEHIND SPORTING REVOLT

Sitting on an expensive lounge, sipping a diet coke, Greg Norman was absorbed by every word Kerry Packer had to say.

It’s little wonder that decades later, with the late media mogul’s words ringing through his ears, Norman moved to recognise golf’s full commercial potential through revolutionary measures.

Packer had written the playbook on disrupting a sport, ignoring its purists in the pursuit of a more lucrative end-product.

Packer’s millions in the 1970s launched World Series Cricket – introducing limited-overs, colour uniforms, and a higher concentration of star power to the game.

With colour televisions landing in Australian households, it was a product designed for the masses watching at home.

And it worked, ultimately earning Packer cricket’s TV rights, and cementing limited-overs cricket as an alternative product – one which is now king via the 20-over version.

Norman made no secret that, in becoming the frontman for LIV Golf – a Saudi-backed breakaway of three-round tournaments, shotgun starts, background music, and reduced fields littered with past major-winners – he was piggybacking off Packer’s vision.

“I can tell you this every day, with my hand on my heart, I know Kerry Packer has his hand on my right shoulder,” Norman told foxsports.com.au in 2022. “As a past friend — god rest his soul — (he’s) saying, ‘Greg, you’re on the right path. Stay the course. You’re doing the right thing for the sport, for the players, and for the fans.’”

LIV Golf has been a success, insofar as it still exists after three seasons, and has strongarmed the PGA Tour to the merger negotiation table.

But in terms of being a superior entertainment product to enthral global TV audiences, and champion team golf, LIV Golf remains desperately wanting in a way Packer never did.

The rebel circuit spent three seasons without lucrative TV deals in most markets, while widespread buy-in for its team championship remains elusive.

Now, the state of play for LIV Golf could be about to get even worse.

FILLING GOLF’S LONG-STANDING VOID

On Wednesday, two three-player teams of top-ranked golfers will rifle balls into a gargantuan simulator in a A$110m, made-for-television event.

The mega golf simulation will be called TGL — and will change the PGA Tour’s golfing week as we know it.

The tech-infused league is the brainchild of Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy who, backed by the PGA Tour, will bolster fans’ golf diets with a funky supplement to the meat-and-potato weekend tournaments.

It’s unclear how much Woods or McIlroy know about cricket’s own television revolution, let alone about former Australian tycoon Packer.

But it’s the realisation of their own vision – not Norman’s, via Packer- that could see golf wake up to its true television potential.

Like any revolution that’s come before it, this view will be heavily derided in traditionalist corners, mortified by the sight of fantasy holes and shapeshifting greens.

This isn’t a suggestion, however, that TGL can become golf’s lead product. It won’t hold a candle to the four majors.

Instead, this is recognition that golf has left much of the market wide open by only offering a Thursday-Sunday daytime product, and by restricting itself to traditional broadcast methods.

As such, TGL is well-placed to fill the longstanding void.

LIV Golf made the first fully-fledged play at exploiting PGA Tour shortcomings, poaching stars to launch a rebel tour aimed at being more accessible to players and fans.

Three-day tournaments for big money was to offer players a less chaotic schedule, and more bang for their buck. Meanwhile, shotgun starts were used with the view of dramatically reducing broadcasts from all-day affairs to four-five hour slots.

Norman deemed the PGA Tour’s biggest oversight, however, was its hesitancy to go global, and pledged to bring LIV Golf tournaments across the world.

The sight of rowdy, sold-out galleries at Adelaide’s Grange Golf Club is proof that there is massive potential outside of the United States that the PGA Tour has neglected.

Nonetheless, such successes are few and far between at LIV Golf. The league hosts most of its events in front of threadbare galleries, and has failed to garner excitement for its team championship – a point-of-difference that served as the cornerstone of its inception.

LIV Golf is, at most, a tweaked format to traditional golf, with its only meaningful embellishment being its mega money pots, which the PGA Tour has closed the gap on anyway.

Television audiences – where it is actually shown on television, anyway – are simply not offered a product that’s materially different enough to command attention. The fact LIV Golf events overlap those on the PGA Tour does little to aid its quest of disrupting the status quo either.

‘DIFFERENT, NEW, AND FAST’

Which brings us to Wednesday (AEDT), with golf’s door wide open – a free-hit for the PGA Tour to fill the void it had sustained for decades.

The fact TGL has already landed major television deals – it will be shown on Fox Sports and Kayo in Australia, Sky Sports in the UK, and ESPN in the US – is a massive vote of confidence for the innovation.

It’s more than LIV Golf could achieve in three fully-fledged seasons – and a club hasn’t even been swung in anger indoors yet.

A thinly-veiled response to LIV Golf TGL may be, but there’s no denying that it has all the ingredients to succeed: It’s innovative, short, has little competition, is backed by some of the US’ rich and powerful, and is tied to a brand that is already immensely successful.

If that’s not enough, it’s worth noting that TGL will reward its players handsomely, too. The winning team will share $9 million (A$14.5m) from a total purse of $21 million (A$34m). That’s not LIV money, but when you consider they only have to compete in two-hour windows on their Floridian doorsteps to earn it, it may as well be.

But the reason networks lined up to broadcast TGL is not the prize money, but because it’s actually made for television.

All the players are in one spot, they are mic’d up and interacting, there are eye-catching graphics, live audiences under one roof, and little dead time between shots.

It’s undoubtedly a big gamble – the arena alone cost a reported $50 million (A$80m) to build – but one with a sharp vision that could see it win big.

Above all, it’s materially different, not just a variation on a theme.

“This is supposed to be different,” said US recruit Billy Horschel. “It’s supposed to be new, it’s supposed to be fast.

“(It’s supposed to be) engaging in a two-hour window, where you’re going to be able to see every golf shot and you’re going to see guys more engaged than they would be out on a PGA Tour event.”

Horschel stressed there is much about the PGA Tour that doesn’t translate to television – a missing piece that TGL hopes to provide.

Often, the most intriguing moments are the rare times microphones pick up what players are saying to their caddies before they hit a shot. Think Jordan Spieth’s mad-scientist ramblings to Michael Greller.

Better yet, and rarer still, are interactions between players and their rivals on-course.

These are moments that have been dramatically undervalued to this point, but will be thrust into the spotlight in TGL with every player mic’d up.

“We’ve said (to the players), look, you’re mic’d up for 15 holes. You’re gonna be a TV star. This is a television show,” TGL play-by-play announcer Matt Barrie said.

“My job as the ringmaster of this entire broadcast is to let the players go into the viewers’ home. Because, for me, one of the most fascinating things about the best golfers in the world is their thought process of walking through a shot, their thought process of when they’re gonna throw the hammer…

“Every once in a while we’re near the caddie and the player, and you get that intimacy between the two of them for that brief moment. You’re gonna get that for two hours in the match (in TGL).”

He added: “We’ve got eyes and ears on every golfer. If we hear something live, we’ll put it all together, we’ll edit it, we’ll spin it back during the broadcast, because it’s just so fascinating to hear how some of the best players in the world walk themselves through golf shots, and you’re gonna see it out here in TGL.”

McIlroy later added that TGL will “take golf into the 21st century”, while Woods believes the competition can bring “a new demographic” to golf’s doorstep.

“As a showcase, it’s going to be unbelievable on TV,” Woods said.

“I hope that we can invigorate the game because it definitely needs it right now.”

‘DONE BETTER THAN LIV’

What’s also been undervalued is the potential of team golf outside of the Ryder Cup and, to a lesser extent, the Presidents Cup.

LIV Golf deserves credit in trying to address this shortcoming. But in running its team competition concurrently with the more-absorbing individual championship, LIV Golf is guilty of cannibalising itself.

The Saudi-backed circuit modelled its two-pronged competition off F1’s, which has a drivers’ and a constructors’ championship. Organisers would’ve done well to pay closer attention here, because not even F1 has cracked the code. Its individual championship also carries far greater importance in the eyes of the public.

What TGL does is go all-in on the team. It resists playing both sides to wind up with two diluted championships.

TGL still faces similar headwinds to LIV in that it’s creating new teams, meaning there is no fanbase, history, or prestige inherited.

How the circuit can generate buy-in and growth in this space will be a key indicator of its long-term success.

McIlroy says organisers hope to be one step ahead of LIV Golf – sorry Rangegoats and Majesticks GC – by aligning teams with US regions in a bid to create patriotic fan bases.

“I think what TGL has done a good job of is trying to locate in the different teams in cities or geographies where you can really plug into the wider sports fans of that city,” he said.

“We have got Keegan (Bradley) as well. Keegan is from that area so he is so proud to be playing for a Boston sports team. But I think that is what TGL has done maybe a little bit better – to connect with certain fan bases than let’s say LIV for example.”

On the overall TGL product, he added: “I see this all being complementary.

“Obviously there are only so many weeks in the year, there is only so much golf we can all play, but I see this as being complementary to everything else going on in the game of golf.”

INTO ‘THE GREAT UNKNOWN’

It would be remiss to not acknowledge at least some of the criticism aimed at TGL before its inaugural event.

Playing fantasy holes on a big screen, and putting on an artificial green, is a hard sell on paper.

Golfweek columnist Eamonn Lynch, while glowing in his praise of the technology involved, warned that the innovations will eventually “cease to awe”. TGL will eventually need to stand on the feet of the competition proper.

“The great unknown is whether there’s actually an audience for the TGL product,” he wrote.

“A demand for golf doesn’t presume a market for team golf. A market for team golf doesn’t presume an enthusiasm beyond the Ryder Cup every couple of years. Enthusiasm for a semi-regular team event doesn’t presume interest in a seasonal simulator simulacrum with nothing at stake. Interest in watching a match on a wet winter night doesn’t presume a willingness to follow the team standings week to week.

“It’s one thing to consume a product when it’s temporarily convenient, quite another to develop an eagerness for more of it.”

Meanwhile, some have made claims of hypocrisy, calling out the support of a new, team-based competition having been hypercritical of LIV Golf when it launched.

This Week in Golf radio host Chris McKee was scathing in his commentary of the situation, writing: “Golf ‘purists’ talked shit about LIV ‘ruining the game’ for two years because of a shotgun start and some Tiesto pumping in the background.

“At least they play golf outside on actual golf courses with grass and the elements unlike this complete farce we’re about to see.”

Such punditry will be largely water off a duck’s back. What’s potentially more damaging, however, are quotes from TGL recruit Ricky Fowler, who might’ve been guilty of a Freudian slip when referring to the competition as “not real golf”.

“In a way, we don’t fully know what to expect until it gets going. It is not real golf, but it’s not, you know, hitting balls in your bedroom simulator or office simulator,” Fowler said. “It’s somewhere kind of in between.”

The optics of having your own player speak this way about the competition is far from ideal.

And yet, viewed from a different angle, Fowler has inadvertently driven home a crucial fact about TGL: No, it’s not real golf – which is exactly the point.

This supplements “real golf”, takes a chance on a new version and, when the two are combined, the strength of the PGA Tour juggernaut could grow to a once-unfathomable level that dominates the entire week.

Furthermore, to downplay simulator golf as a novelty is to disregard the rapidly growing popularity of indoor golf centres, and shift away from traditional driving ranges.

And besides, the set-up of TGL’s SoFi centre is far more legitimate than what you may think.

“When someone hears about us playing simulator golf (they think) it is maybe a little gimmicky, and it’s not that,” Horschel said.

“We’re hitting off real grass, we’re hitting real golf shots.

“Yes, there will be some artificial surfaces, but there is a lot of technology that is going into this.

“It’s not just thrown together, ‘let’s do this.’ This is a lot of hi-tech stuff…”

Now, all that’s left is for the first six players – Matt Fitzpatrick, Ricky Fowler, Xander Schauffele, Wyndham Clark, Shane Lowry and Ludvig Aberg – to fire into that mega screen on Wednesday and let the public decide.

It is undoubtedly a great step into the big unknown that is competitive, indoor golf.

But in at least stepping forward into uncertainty, instead of sideways via a bottomless pit of Saudi money, it has a better shot at winning the public over than LIV Golf ever had.