TGL Set for Debut Tonight on ESPN With Nearly 70 Cameras Capturing a New Era for Golf After year-long delay, some of pro golfs best players will tee off at huge SoFi Center By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Tuesday, January 7, 2025 - 12:06 pm
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Tonight marks the debut of TGL (Tomorrow's Golf League) on ESPN, with some of the world's greatest golfers facing off in a two-hour competition in the league's SoFi Center in Palm Beach Gardens, FL, a 250,000-sq.-ft. venue offering a first for the world of professional golf: playing under a roof.
According to TMRW Sports CTO Andrew Macaulay, TGL aims to turn a sport that has previously required acres and acres of land into something that could fit inside an arena but also provides plenty of space for golf shots.
Rory McIlroy is one of the three co-founders of TGL golf, which tees off tonight.
The simulator screen is so far away from the tee boxes that you see the ball curve as it is carried into the computer-generated world, Macaulay explains. When the golfers get to the green end of things, it is all real life. It's an interesting hybrid, and I think the fan watching on TV will quickly forget about going back and forth between the real world and the digital world.
The venue houses a massive golf-simulator screen (64 ft. wide x 53 ft. tall) and an equally massive, 3,800-sq.-ft. Green Zone putting area on a 41-yard-wide rotating turntable. Under the putting area of the turntable are 600 actuators that can change the contours and slope of the green. Toss in an onsite crowd encouraged to make some noise and indoor lighting created by a former WWE lighting designer, and tonight is shaping up as a special one for TGL and the world of professional golf.
TGL has been a long time coming. It was set to debut last February, but a storm in West Palm Beach, FL, in November 2023 destroyed the membrane of the cloth dome covering SoFi Center, requiring a new facility and a new approach. The extra year, Macauley says, allowed the effort to take another step forward, tweaking the virtual side, figuring out all the best places to place cameras, and producing some unique angles with, for example, a live drone shot and super slo-mo on the tee boxes. EVS XtraMotion will also be available, allowing super slo-mo to be produced from any camera.
TGL has allowed some golf social-media influencers to step into the tee box at SoFi Center, but tonight the action begins for real with PGA TOUR professionals facing off.
We certainly didn't waste the gift of an extra year, he says. We made the screen bigger because the building around it changed and we could go bigger. The holes that we created were fine-tuned even more, and now some of them have cool parts of the digital world. For example, at least one hole has gone from being in the mountains to in the vineyards to the Scottish Highlands because we had a lot more time to have it played and then we decided to change it. I think we have been able to make about 20% of TGL visually better and cooler.
So, what, exactly, is TGL? Owned by TMRW Sports, TGL is a joint venture of legendary golfers Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy, and TMRW Sports Group CEO/co-founder Mike McCarley. The vision for TMRW Sports is to bring together sports, media, and entertainment in new ways (investors come from across the professional- sports landscape, including Derek Jeter, Shohei Ohtani, Shaquille O'Neal, Lewis Hamilton, and Serena Williams), and tonight's effort is the biggest to date: two of the six teams (each comprising four PGA TOUR stars) compete over 15 regular-season matches, a playoff, and a best-of-three finals on March 24 and 25 to determine the champion. TGL's matches will primarily be in primetime on Mondays and Tuesdays, each match scheduled for approximately two hours (the first competition is three-on-three alternate shot; the second competition of each event is one-on-one play).
TGL's technology mix will keep things moving. A 40-second clock will allow every shot to be broadcast, and there will be unprecedented audio access, with all players wearing microphones. The broadcast will also offer advanced shot data, and the production plan calls for more than 60 robotic and embedded cameras throughout the field of play.
Railcams will give director Jonathan Evans additional angles of coverage.
TMRW Sports VP, Content, jeff Neubarth says the broadcast will have 73 camera sources, of which 28 are robotic and 10 are virtual and within the simulator environment (the 10 have six pre-programmed behaviors/flight paths, such as following the ball to the green). Including all the vendor support teams, a crew of 150 will ensure that every broadcast is rock solid.
Our compound is driven by Game Creek Video with Moonshine A and B and Edit Truck 3 onsite, along with two B units, he says. That gives us five trucks for [match] support, but we expanded out as we are also doing an entertainment show inside the arena. We have had to build out a front-of-house system, and we also have Game Creek Patriot onsite as a data center.
Johnathan Evans will be directing the broadcast, which will be seen on ESPN in the U.S., on Sportsnet in Canada, and via Claro in Mexico, Latin America, and South America. Golf fans in 30 European countries, 50 African nations, and 12 Asian countries will also be able to tune in.
The competition will definitely have a different rhythm from traditional golf, in which the players hit a shot and need to walk hundreds of yards to their next shot. When you take out the walking, says Evans, the pace is so much faster, and it gets much more akin to other sports. Here we don't have any downtime. The players for both teams know what they're hitting, and, when they tee off, it's just bang, bang, bang. There's a littl
