USA Today via Reuters
Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, partnering with the PGA Tour, created a tech-based league to fuse the gameplay of golf. However, the league met with a brutal fate as the roof collapsed and the launch was postponed from January 2024 to January 2025. Since then, Mr. T’s dedication to sticking to the new launch date of TGL remains unbeatable! Not long ago, Woods unveiled the complete lineup of his team, Jupiter Link GC—Tom Kim, Max Homa, and Kevin Kisner.
The league with the mission of bringing golf from the greens to the screens will consist of six teams that represent different cities, going head-to-head in a season-long competition at the SoFi Center. The Bay Golf Club is the final team that officially has a name and members, with Wyndham Clark filling the last spot. However, Woods-McIlroy’s brainchild hasn’t been getting as warm a reception from the golf community as one might have expected.
The inception of The Bay Golf Club
The San Francisco-inspired team—the Bay Golf Club—has turned out to be a sort of international squad since no members belong to the same country. Kicking off the lineup is Shane Lowry, who recently won his seventh PGA Tour win with his fellow Irishman, Rory McIlroy, as his teammate at the Zurich Classic. Joining him are the rising star Min Woo Lee; and Sweden’s Ludvig Aberg. Lastly, 2024 AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am champion Wyndham Clark was announced to be a part of the team.
With less than nine months until the inaugural season, TGL’s second California-based club is a rather international team with no players from the same country. To add to that, all four players on the team are in the top 40 on the OWGR list, with top-10 world rankings. They surely have turned out to be a strong group for the league!
An X (formerly Twitter) page, Tour Golf, took to their account, shared a picture demonstrating all six groups in the league, and posed a question for the audience: “Do you guys have interest in @TGL?”
Do you guys have interest in @TGL ? pic.twitter.com/NPTBmrFGs2
— Tour Golf (@PGATUOR) May 6, 2024
Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy have gone far and beyond, be it in terms of budget or partnering up with efficient organizations to create a safe venue to make TGL a success. However, it looks like the big PGA Tour names have pretty much failed to reach the milestone and attract the audience!
The audience calls TGL a replica of LIV Golf
The LIV Golf has a rather unique team format. Apart from the Individual Competition that runs throughout the season. During the initial two rounds of each event, only the scores of the top three players from each team are considered. However, for the final round, the scores of all team members come into play. For many, the TGL almost has a similar concept, drawing comparisons between the formats. Some also believe the Tech League is a mini version of the format of the breakaway league. Taking to this, one of them wrote, “Is this a knock-off LIV golf in all honesty?”
While LIV Golf has team names of different terminologies that are used in the golf world, the names of the TGL groups are inspired by six different cities. Given that they both have their niche, it is pretty much different, yet again the same. Not to forget, players like Justin Thomas, Xander Schuaffele, and Billy Horschel disapproved of LIV Golf and cited its format as one of the primary reasons. One of them taking up this point commented, “Funny how much the team names look like LIV team names. And the player names look like LIV rejects 🤷🏻♂️”.
One of them cleverly took up the idea of where the format of TGL might be inspired and called it a simulator. For some in the golf community, the tech league is a mimicry of LIV Golf in a system. At least that’s what the fans believe. One of them even commented, “Team golf in a simulator? Pass.”
While a Scheffler fan came in and stated, “No Scottie, no thank you. He is the only true superstar in Golf today”, another simply rejecting it wrote, “If it’s on some night where no other sports are on and I’m bored at home, I’ll tune in!”
Well, whether the tech-based format will be a hit or not, only time will tell!
