As I write this (Tuesday, 1/7), ESPN is about to broadcast the first episode of The Golf League, which as best as I can tell is some sort of hybrid of real golf and Golden Tee. Even reading about it on the TGL website, and their Wikipedia page, I'm pretty confused.
On one hand, I do like innovation in sports, new sports, and I write about them a lot. On the other hand, I don't understand (as I've written in many of my anti-LIV screeds) the need to turn golf on its ear. That includes concepts like team golf (both LIV and TGL), shotgun starts (LIV), and "the hammer" (TGL), wherein one team can propose the hole be count for double; if the other team declines, they lose the hole. Only one team has "the hammer" at a time.
You can just hear the brainstorming meetings where the ideas like this come from. "Curling has a 'hammer,' what if golf did, too?" "Yeah! And I just played backgammon with my nephew last night ... could we make the hammer like the doubling cube, somehow?"
The host here is Scott Van Pelt, who is by far my favorite ESPN personality and I'm not thrilled he has to — or is voluntarily — dignifying this ridiculousness.
Okay, deep breath, I am clearly beyond skeptical over this, but give it a chance I must.
It's being held in an arena in Florida, and the players are being introduced Bruce Buffer-style. I don't know if I can take the full two hours of this.
This initial contest pits the New York Golf Club (Rickie Fowler, Scott Schauffele, and Matt Fitzpatrick) against The Bay (as in San Francisco Bay) Golf Club (Shane Lowry, Wyndham Clark, and Ludvig Aberg). It's doubtful the teams have any actual connection to their locales, nor will play any matches there as part of this.
Okay, so players will hit shots off of grass into a five-story-high simulated screen, and where it lands in the simulator is where they have to hit their second shot from; by the grass area they tee off from also has sand and rough bays in it, for their second shot if their ball lands there. Once a player/team is with 25 yards of the pin, they place their ball on or near a real green with bunkers and rough around it. The green/rough/fringe/bunkers area can be rotated, and also has like these hydraulic plates underneath them that can raise and lower the undulations of the green and angles of the rough and bunkers.
They just showed DJ Khaled in the stands. Okay, in that case I now respect this more than any other sport on earth. Now they cut to Ronaldinho. They really want to sell this as a celeb-intensive product.
Okay, here's my first sincerely nice thing I can say about this: because they are using simulated, video-game vistas, the holes apparently can be pretty crazy in a good way: hole 2 is a par 5 with not only an island green, but a center island fairway, with additional left and right island fairways. That's neat.
We have our first technical glitch of the night: Schauffele hit a ball into a virtual bunker, which then produced a trail that the ball never made in its virtual rolling.
Okay, I have not written anything in probably about 20 minutes of action now; I get the gist. Apparently, Tiger Woods (Rory McIlroy, as well) have been involved from the get-go. They interviewed Tiger and he clearly takes this quite seriously. This makes it a tad more respectable to me. Yes, it's still a money-grab, but there are so many other ways Tiger could grab cash. The players are hanging loose and being jokey, which I think is about right for this.
All in all, I probably enjoyed this about 5% more than I expected. Will I check it out again? Possibly, but it will most likely be either for betting purposes (yes, there are lines for this on Bovada, at least) or as an ironic superfan of one of the teams. In the meantime, I will be cherishing traditional, PGA tour golf a bit more than I did before.
Leave a Comment