Golf's Wax Statue Maze

It wasn’t Michael Jackson, but it looked enough like Michael Jackson to take a picture with. I was 10-years-old and on a field trip to Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, and the wax Michael Jackson was the main attraction. The kids lined up and took their disposable camera photos, and when we got back to school, we pretended that we’d met “The King of Pop” himself. Leaving TGL’s fifth match at SoFi stadium on Tuesday night – a blowout of crowd-favorite Boston Common by LAGC –  I wasn’t sure what I’d seen there, but I was certain it was closer to a wax figure of what I’d expected than to the real thing.

TGL (Tomorrow’s Golf League? Tiger’s Great Leap forward? Tommy Fleetwood’s Grandma’s Lob wedge?) over the last few months, has swerved across a handful of lanes to try to find an identity. Strategically nested into the ESPN Monday-Tuesday doldrums of the post-NFL regular season, the league is something at the three-way intersection of an MBA-pilled shareholder-value fever dream, a terminal golf sicko’s back-of-a-napkin pitch for casuals, and the event horizon for the black hole of pro sports itself. Armed with nothing but a Ballfrogs visor and a poorly-calibrated barometer for what constitutes “a smart way to spend a couple hundred bucks,” I succumbed to peer pressure and decided that Tuesday night was the time to find out what exactly we’re dealing with.

At first blush, the stadium exterior is strangely unimpressive. It’s jammed awkwardly into a community college campus, and the $40 parking is far enough away that you can’t see the facility from the lot. Am I at the right place? Only the throng of mid-20s barstool bros walking in herds toward the entrance were a clue. Once you find the stadium, the walk up is simultaneously underwhelming and bombastic; the feeling of arriving at an expensive high school basketball game hosted, for some reason, inside of a software sales conference.

Inside, with only a $12 Michelob Ultra and a vow to hit the official TGL merch store on the way out, I found my front row seat in the back of the arena near the rotating green, a last-minute ticket that set me back $138 after fees. The green is legitimately impressive, and watching the staff spin it, set the cups, and rake the bunkers between every hole was a highlight of the night. They change the flag after every hole too, so the hole number on the flag is correct. The minor details haven’t been overlooked. The screen too is immense, and even from the back of the arena, the scale of it genuinely stuns. I’d love to hit golf shots there, and I have to imagine part of the goal of having this permanent structure is to host corporate outings, or other events in the arena. 

With the production delayed by a late college basketball finish, I got to know my seat neighbors: Michigan natives on vacation and legitimate golf fans who hadn’t watched TGL on TV, but wanted to see it up close. I explained the format, the hammer, and some of the iconic hole layouts we’d probably see that night. I got through “Pick Your Plunder” and onto “The Spear” before realizing that seeing a psychiatrist might have been a better use of my money. And then, as if on cue from the golf gods themselves, possibly worried they were going to lose me to the pursuit of mental health, Roger Steele’s voice hit the speakers.

Roger Steele, the popular Instagram golf-fluencer and vibes king of the golf internet, is the resident master of ceremonies at TGL. I love Roger Steele, and thought he was an inspired hire for this particular job. And he would have been, if the job itself was possible to do, which it isn’t. Roger, for all his personality and charisma, has the unenviable task of trying to talk a not-drunk-enough-to-get-loud-yet crowd into leaping out of their seats to root for golf they barely understand, armed only with the phrase “maaaake some noooooiiiiiiise!” It’s an impossible task, and when he ended the rules explanation with a reminder to download the SoFi app via the QR code on the jumbotron, the veneer of genuine enthusiasm was gone. No noise would be made at Roger’s urging tonight.

As the matches got underway, the chatter between players that punctuates the TV broadcast was shatteringly absent in the arena. Instead, a periodic “Advantage, LAGC,” by Roger, was the only narrative given to the audience between shots. The audience felt, at this point, like an afterthought, mainly because the audience at a TGL match isn’t exactly the audience, per se, but rather 1500 or so props for the TV broadcast. You’re at a TV taping, not a sporting event, which crystallizes the first time the cameras whir by on the track that runs just outside the edge of the golf course, marking a physical and conceptual boundary between fans and the action.

The action moves quickly at TGL, thanks to the much-celebrated shot clock that drives the pace for the TV broadcast, which becomes a curiously counterproductive element to the live experience. With 40 seconds between shots, and no player commentary or play-by-play to outline the stakes, it’s up to the live audience to monitor the score, which player is up next, and other details that matter to the shot-by-shot aspect of the match itself. It’s a lot to ask of the live audience, and the audience around me was mostly failing at the task (“What shot is this? Who’s up next?” Answering all the questions feels a little like watching a sci-fi movie with your grandma). The detail that matters most though, which evades the live audience and the viewing audience alike, is whether the players involved actually care about the outcome.

It seemed like they were having fun, for sure. For Collin Morikawa, any opportunity to reference his KPMG-branded yardage book is a welcome use of camera time, but I’m not certain any of the six players on the pitch this Tuesday truly cared if they won or lost their match. Maybe they did, but I’m still looking for evidence of that somewhere. If there’s any evidence at all, it might lie in LAGC’s refusal to throw the hammer, a move that, while probably the right strategy for the gameplay, infuriated the crowd to the point of chants, and underlines a serious opportunity for TGL to improve its format going forward (a humble plea: the hammer should change hands after going unused for two holes, no matter what. Don’t let the leading team hoard it).

And therein lies the crux of the issue around TGL: everyone’s got an idea for how to fix it. Use the hammer more! Change up the teams! Add amateurs! Throw Justin Thomas into a lake! It’d be easy to get lost in the myriad of good ideas out there around how TGL could improve the product for both TV viewer and live viewer alike, but all of those ideas have to pin themselves to the belief that there’s something real at the center of TGL – that the product is, at its core, actual golf and not simply a wax statue of the game.

I’m not sure what’s at the center of TGL, I only know that it looks a lot like golf, but it isn't. You can take a picture next to it, maybe a convincing enough one to dupe your buddies into believing it’s golf, but in your heart you know it isn’t. There’s a ball, there’s a green (look, it rotates!), and your favorite player is just a few yards away. And then, there it is. You look in its eyes, and nothing – not even the hammer – looks back.

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