My hard hat was on, but it still hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. Then again, you try walking into a soaring hangar housing three six-story steel beams spaced 70 feet apart, being told that this apparatus will soon hold the biggest golf simulator screen on the planet, visualizing Tiger and Rory ripping drivers into it in five short months, and not come away feeling awestruck. Such is the scale of the activity going on in South Florida, where a small army is inventing what feels like a new version of golf.
At this point, most casual fans—and even a large number of people within golf—don’t have a complete understanding of TGL. Some know it for Woods’ and McIlroy’s involvement (true!), others think it’s golf played on a simulator like the one in their friend’s garage (decidedly untrue!) or for the collapse of its temporary facility in 2023 that pushed the launch of the league back to January 2025 (probably the best thing that happened to the league!). As TGL ramps up for its debut, the people running it know that educating people is paramount. And so, TGJ was invited to be the first outlet to come down to West Palm Beach and tour the TGL Performance Lab and the construction site of the SoFi Center, its new stadium facility.
What I found made me feel, well, small. The lab is a separate warehouse space where the league is testing all of the technology that will go into the stadium. The first thing I saw upon walking in was an enormous screen. At the very bottom middle, a sliver of the screen was lit up. My mind immediately went to some of the cartoons my kids watch where there is a tiny mouse hole at the bottom of a wall.
“That’s the size of a standard simulator screen,” said Scott Armstrong, TGL’s Vice President of Competition Technology & Operations, before I could even ask what I was looking at. Then, to complete the trick, Armstrong flipped on the full screen. My eyes widened to take in a golf hole that appeared to be built into the Grand Canyon. At some 30’x50’, the screen almost produced a vertigo effect, as if by walking too close, you might just tumble in and find yourself golfing among the pixels. Armstrong and his team explained that while the competition screen would be even bigger in the stadium, this was the largest space they could find to do their testing.
Over the course of several hours, we went through the minutiae of the new world they’re creating: The natural grass, grown outdoors, that players will hit from on their second shots; the bunker sand sourced from the same place as Augusta National; the machinery that powers the 25,000-square-foot rotating green complex; the beam of light that will arrow down from the ceiling to show players where their approach shots actually land on the green.
Whether it’s the golf course or a basketball court or wiffle ball in the street, we’ve all invented our own games, complete with house rules. Now, imagine being given dump trucks full of seed money from the biggest names in the sport to do it. When TGJ’s cameras were off, Armstrong and the team explained all the starts and stops over the last two years on their way to creating this entirely new way to play golf. How far should the players be from the screen when they tee off? (Thirty-five yards.) How many bunkers should be around the green? (Three.) How many actuators does it take to create a green that can shape shift from a left-to-right putt to a right-to-left putt in the time it takes players to walk back to the tee box? (Turns out nearly 600.) How long should the shot clock be? (40 seconds. I can already see the tweets imploring the PGA Tour to do the same.) Should we get professional refs to officiate? (An easy yes.) How can we get the artificial turf on the green to act as close to real as possible? (Armstrong and his team spent more than a year testing different surfaces and what goes underneath them to get a “perfect” bounce.)
Finally, they let me play a hole. I had a tee, a ball, and a driver, and yet I felt completely disoriented. There were people milling around all along the sides of the warehouse. I was about 30 yards from the screen and terrified about hitting someone or missing the screen entirely. All the usual strategy involved in playing a real golf hole was the last thing on my mind. And while I did manage to hit the screen—it really was too big to miss—my simulated ball soon began a long and ignominious tumble to the depths of the Grand Canyon. So many things about the experience were different from golf in the real world. Except one: All I wanted to do was hit another.
Fast forward to the following morning and my hard-hat tour of the SoFi Center, TGL’s stadium. While construction was still in its early stages, staples like the tee box area, the base of what will become the rotating green complex and the three towers for the screen were in place. They showed me how close the fans would be to the action. All I could think about was what it will be like in January when McIlroy steps up to the tee with 1,500 people, a sea of stadium lights, and ESPN’s cameras bearing down on him as he strategizes with his Boston Common teammates on how to navigate the Grand Canyon. And how much I wanted to see what would happen next.
