Seven days until Opening Day at Park City Mountain Resort. Not to worry, I'm not rushing out there until there's actual snow to be found. They are blowing and will have something open by then, what we call the white ribbons of death.
Shall we pick up where we left off?
This was quite the shocker, no?
TGL announces Tiger Woods as owner and player for tech league's sixth team, Jupiter Links
Who coulda seen that one coming?
Tiger Woods is now the owner of a professional sports team for which he will compete in a league he helped create.TGL announced Tuesday that Woods’ TGR ventures has partnered with pro sports mega owner David Blitzer in the formation of Jupiter Links Golf Club, the sixth and final TGL team in the new tech-based golf league developed by Woods’ and Rory McIlroy’s TMRW Sports Group. Furthermore, Woods, a 15-time major winner who has not competed since withdrawing from the Masters and undergoing surgery on his lower right leg, is the first of four players to be assigned to the Jupiter Links roster.Terms of the investment and the ownership percentages in Jupiter Links were not disclosed, consistent with the announcements for the other five ownership groups.“Through its use of technology, TGL is a modern twist of traditional golf and ultimately will make the sport I love more accessible,” Woods, 47, said in a statement. “Having the opportunity to not only compete, but also own a team to represent Jupiter is an exciting next chapter for me. I expect Jupiter Links GC to showcase the golf culture of my hometown as we compete against the best players in the world.”
One question: Jupiter? It's like one of those standardize tests we took back in our school days, Boston, Atlanta, New York and Jupiter.... Which of the above does not belong?
We could have some fun with the list of players who WON'T be offered a spot on the JGC..... Start with Sergio, but also Stephen Ames, Phil and, well, the reader can add his own from Tiger's many little spats over the years.
Mike McCarley is the guy behind all this, and here he seems to be channeling his inner Stefan Schauffele:
Because, of course, we can't be interested unless these guys are making bank.
"They're playing for $21 million, the purse is $9 million to the winning team, so it's legit competition," McCarley said on the pod. "And these guys are some of the most competitive guys on the planet."With four players on each team, that comes out to $2.25 million per player on the winning team. That's a decent chunk of change for a handful of two-hour Monday night matches played in a gigantic simulator. Remember, these aren't four-day, 72-hole marathons like PGA Tour events.
Hats, Mike? Have you got the hat issue nailed down? Because you know our terrific peni....
What I'd love an enterprising reporter (yeah, who am I kidding?) is to accumulate the riches that have been thrown at an elite player over the last two years in the name of keeping us safe from Wahhabism, including:
- The PIP program
- The TGL
- The dramatic increase in purses to designated events, combined with the field-size limitation.
“My ankle is fine. Where they fused my ankle, I have absolutely zero issue whatsoever,” Woods said Tuesday in an interview with the Associated Press. “That pain is completely gone.“… But all the surrounding areas is where I had all my problems and I still do,” he said. “So, you fix one, others have to become more hypermobile to get around it, and it can lead to some issues.”Woods did not elaborate on the nature of those other issues.
There's lots of silly speculation about when he might peg it, including this:
If Woods isn’t ready to play in the Hero World Challenge, set for Nov. 30-Dec. 3 in the Bahamas with a star-packed field of 20, the PNC Challenge (Dec. 14-17) is a distinct possibility for him. Despite his physical limitations and helped by the use of a cart, the event has been a circle-on-the-calendar occasion for Tiger and Charlie Woods. They have competed in the Orlando event three times, making their debut in 2020, when Charlie was 11. They finished seventh that year, were second in '21 and and last year Team Woods tied for eighth.
Distinct possibility? Is that anything like a mortal lock, which is more likely the case....
I saw another piece speculating about the Hero, then wondering whether he might have his eye on Augusta.... That's some next-gen analysis there, Augusta being pretty much all he cares about....
I get the speculation on The Hero, which is more about taking care of a sponsor than about the golf. It's just that I see no discernable value in him absorbing the pain this far out from any meaningful golf. His biggest issue is competitive reps, but getting them in December is pretty worthless methinks. Riviera, on the other hand,, seems more promising..... Not that I really care.
This Wired.com piece has lots of interesting background on the endeavor's origin, including this Cameron Young demo:
CAMERON YOUNG SLIDES a driver from his bag. He stares at a hole referred to as Texas Hill Country. It’s new to him—a par 4 with sand hazards and rough to avoid. The 26-year-old is in thetop 20 in the Official World Golf Ranking, but he’s not sure how to proceed. He turns to his companion, former pro Roberto Castro. “What’s going on here?” Young asks.Young makes clean contact. The ball lofts skyward.But there’s no sky above him. On this steamy day in late October, Young is in an air-conditioned soundstage on the back lot of Universal Studios in Orlando, Florida. The building once hosted Nickelodeon TV shows. The “caddie” Castro consulted is virtual—it lives on a 15-inch tablet. The tee is on a patch of natural grass the width of a large mattress. It sits atop wooden pallets on a concrete floor.
As someone said earlier in the week, they'll have to avoid this being tagged as merely simulator golf, at least if they want to be take seriously:
Young’s golf ball hits a billboard-sized screen 35 yards away. The dimpled sphere falls meekly tothe ground, while up on the giant display its virtual successor continues its flight. A phalanx of supersensitive radar trackers and hi-res cameras sends data to a bank of computer servers that calculate velocity and spin to show how the ball will bounce and where it will ultimately settle on the vista of the screen.Young’s ball lands in the digital rough. He walks over to a tray of 2-inch-high Bermuda grass mixed with rye. The screen now shows him closer to his goal, an 8-iron away. He swings, the ball thuds against the display again, and seconds later his virtual ball lands just outside the green. For his next shot, Young ambles to the back of the soundstage, where an artificial putting surface and fringe awaits him. An official places a ball precisely on the ground. Young successfully chips over a rise to land within 5 feet of the cup. Not good enough. Castro has already sunk his third shot and wins the hole.
The difficulty is that is simulator golf, admittedly with some intriguing bells and whistles, not least that they'll play off real grass, including rough as per the picture above.
As for the technology:
McCarley was still pondering how to condense a course’s 200 acres and 18 holes down to a single arena when, in January 2020, he attended a big golf industry trade event. One evening he sat down with Ryan Dotters, CEO of Full Swing, a maker of golf simulators. Full Swing had bought a company that made interactive, customizable indoor putting greens. “We were the only ones who had a green that could come alive,” Dotters says. On an old-school cocktail napkin, they sketched out plans to make a hybrid game of golf—one foot each in the digital and physical worlds.
The green. TGL teams will play the short game in a space about half the length of a soccer pitch, with a round—and rotating—green. Underneath the putting surface, Macaulay explains, three concentric circles of steel are held up by more than 500 beams and 49 steel supports bolted to the concrete floor. “Stonehenge comes to mind,” he says. When nothing’s happening, the turntable just sits there. When it’s time to change the green setup to conform to the course architect’s plan, a commercial compressor blows into airbags in the support structure, lifting and rotating the turntable. When Cameron Young tested the system in Orlando, the TGL team demonstrated how to tilt the green surface—changing the direction that a putt breaks—with the push of a button.
Stonehenge? Worst reference ever? I mean, you're trying to appeal to today's attention-span-deprived kids, and your touchstone is Stonehenge? Let me know how that works out...
But without doubt, this is my favorite item on the TGL, because......well, you'll get it:
Not to mention the WGCs... But do tell:
It’s billed as a tech-infused league, which is a fancy way of saying futuristic. The dilemma with TGL is it feels like something we’ve seen before.For all the hype surrounding the mixed-reality circuit headlined by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, there’s an undercurrent of worry that gains power with every drip from the league’s prolonged rollout: TGL, which has a number of influential entities involved and a sneaky amount of importance riding on it might miss ... and miss big. Might is the operative word. It is unfair to bury what has not lived, and TGL will ultimately be judged by its product rather than the promotion surrounding it. Yet less than two months away from its launch on Jan. 9, what we know about TGL—and just as importantly, what we don’t know—seems to be following a blueprint that we know doesn't work.
Of course, an irony alert is required, because I suspect the very same thing could be said about the PGA Tour itself.
His first concern is valid, though probably unavoidable:
Let’s start with the players in question, for that is arguably the foundation from which TGL is trying to build. It has Woods, who continues to be the fulcrum of the sport despite (we gesture wildly to the past three years). It has McIlroy, the biggest draw in the game, and popular stars in Rickie Fowler, Justin Thomas and Max Homa. But it’s missing three of the top four players in the world in Scottie Scheffler, Viktor Hovland and Jon Rahm (who pulled out of TGL last week), along with Jordan Spieth, who is arguably the most entertaining player in the sport.To fill out this made-for-TV spectacle, roughly a third of TGL’s roster does not classify as household names, begging the question of why fans would tune in to watch players they normally would not pay to see. There’s also the not-insignificant notion that personality is a big sell with this format, with the need for its competitors to engage in trash talk and banter to give this juice. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen with other exhibitions, most professional golfers tend to default to tepid and boring interviews. That includes Woods, who has too much to lose to be as colorful on camera as he is off.
One of their mistakes might have been making the schedule too ambitious, but it's hard to expect the guys in Scottsdale and Texas to be in Florida for fifteen consecutive Mondays, when the Tour is in its West Coast Swing.
But here's where he approaches the crux of the matter:
Which transitions into the tone of TGL. It should be low stakes and loose and ridiculous. What it’s been is very much not that, judging by its marketing and publicization. There was a cringe-inducing hype video for Team Atlanta (more on this in a second), along with a very staged clip of Collin Morikawa finding out he was part of the Los Angeles club. Boston Common Golf’s introduction was straightforward and professional and mirrored a press conference you would see from any other sports league. In a vacuum these pieces are not thorny, except there is no indication or winks that fun is at the forefront of what this is supposed to be. Again, this is simulator golf, which is not far removed from being a video game.
Tiger doesn't do loose and ridiculous....
There’s no need to relitigate the many missteps of LIV Golf over the past two years. However, one of the central reasons LIV has not gained traction with the golf populace is a failure to understand its audience, both in who that audience is and what that audience wants. LIV Golf insisted it was the hip alternative to the PGA Tour, that it could offer a fresh perspective on a product that had fallen into stasis. After all, the tour alone has 40-something tournaments a year, and the golf played each week looks mostly the same, with a self-importance that often seems unnecessary.But instead of a reimagination of what the professional game could be, LIV presented the same house with the same structural issues with a fresh coat of paint. Maybe a bigger problem: For all the things golf does well, cool is not one of them. And there’s nothing inherently cool about has-beens and never-wases dressed in clipart demanding to be treated like competitors instead of what they are, which is barnstormers. LIV Golf is a dad in a midlife crisis, desperately trying to be something it’s not.
It always amuses that a game that has adapted sufficiently to survive hundreds of years, suddenly has to get "cool". Joel might be correct that LIV misunderstood the audience, although I rather think the bigger issue is that they created a product of no interest to ANYONE.
But here's his existential musing:
Which brings us to the biggest question facing TGL: Who exactly is this for?Ostensibly it’s not for the fan who’s watching the tour week in, and week out. That’s fine, and probably good. In that same breath, what you’re presenting should likewise not turn off the base golf already owns, because that group will help spread the word. If TGL is an ambition to be something more than what the game offers, it could be falling into the same trap LIV fell into, which is not accepting golf is a niche sport. At times the game seems infatuated with growing its reach rather than appreciating and attending to the passion it already has. As for that untapped market, what about TGL will draw new potential fans in? The format is not radically different from the existing product of professional golf, and the players involved—while very good—simply do not own crossover appeal. As is, TGL seems like it’s caught in between two worlds without being a part of either.The reason this is worrisome is TGL, in its most actualized version, could be additive to the sport. Disney is putting its weight behind the project, agreeing to air the competition on ESPN. That is a platform that can beget success to all invested in the game, from the professional level to the grassroots. One network source told Golf Digest that TGL has the chance to do for golf what the “Moneymaker Effect” did for poker. That comes across as hyperbolic, yet golf doesn’t get many chances to go mainstream and this could be one of those swings. It partially explains why power brokers such as Steve Cohen, David Blizter and the Fenway Group are a part of the financial backing, as well as celebrities such as Steph Curry and the Williams sisters: They think this thing could be big and want a part of the action. For golf, hopefully that’s true. However, a rebuke of TGL from general sports fans could deter future opportunities for golf-related endeavors, to say nothing of potential media deals coming down the pipeline.
I certainly haver trouble understanding who will tune into ESPN, once we get past the curiosity factor.
There's also the issue of how much golf the Tour's core audience can take, and whether this will cannibalize those who might otherwise watch the traditional PGA tourneys. It might also keep some of these guys from playing events, which is quite the weird incentive structure.
This final 'graph to me is quite the point-misser:
Golf enjoyed a revival from the pandemic and renewed curiosity from Netflix’s “Full Swing” docuseries, yet TGL could be the vessel that proves if that interest has staying power. That is a sober assessment of a supposedly frivolous thing, which, it bears repeating, is golf played on a simulator. But despite its unserious construct TGL is treating itself seriously and it appears others have followed suit, and that could be a serious problem.
Joel seems to make the error that our pampered Tour players often exhibit, to wit, confusing professional golf with the actual game of golf. Did the pandemic help professional golf? Even with Full Swing and the ever-present LIV nonsense, ratings are as bad as ever. People don't love golf on TV, so good luck trying to force-feed it to them.
I was planning to get into the LIV changes announced, but that will hjave to keep for now. Have a great weekend and we'll pick this up next week.
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