Joel EngelhardtExecutives from the indoor golf center in Palm Beach Gardens spill on their favorite moments and the spirit of innovation that drove the first year of TGL, the professional golf league founded by Woods and Rory McIlroy.
It was a “season of learning,” said Andrew George, one of three TMRW Sports executives who offered unvarnished insights into the first season of the internationally televised, indoor tech-powered golf league, TGL, that started play in January at the SoFi Center at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Gardens.
George, senior vice president of live event experience, asked questions of Andrew Macaulay, TMRW’s chief technology officer, and Jeff Neubarth, vice president of content and media production, in front of about 160 people at a Palm Beach North Chamber of Commerce breakfast last week at PGA National Resort.
They touched on how the league’s 24 professional golfers, headed by co-founders Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, got along; how technology came together; and what it felt like when the original, air-inflated dome collapsed, delaying the first season by a year.
Macaulay told of how he began research for the project in 2022 in Sweden because that northern country is dark for such long periods that it has a proliferation of indoor driving ranges. He said he learned there, among other things, that they could replicate the difficulty of hitting a golf ball out of a sand trap indoors.
Testing continued in Orlando and the Palm Beach County village of Palm Springs.
“When you’re trying to build something that doesn’t exist, it’s pretty hard for you to find a location that had at least 30-foot ceilings, no poles in the middle holding the building up, because we’re shooting golf balls through it,” he said.
They had to create a plan on positioning cameras from scratch, Neubarth said.
“Literally, we have more cameras than an AFC (football) championship game, more than the NBA (basketball) Finals. And that’s not just because we want to have them. It’s because we didn’t know what this thing was, and we wanted to have cameras everywhere and bring people an experience like they’ve never seen before.”
That approach led to innovations in camera placement.
“One of the goals is take you where you’ve never been able to go before. So, how about inside the flag stick?” Neubarth asked. “(After) 18 months of work, a 360(-degree) camera on both sides of the flag stick that Andrew’s team helped connect to power and connectivity under the green in seven different hole locations, rotating throughout the night, gave you views like you’ve never seen before.”
More from the TMRW Sports executives
On the “it factor,” surrounding the Jupiter team, led by Tiger Woods, a co-founder of the league.
“They didn’t always win, often they lost, but when they were there, it was the most entertaining thing,” Neubarth said. “When the kids started hitting the flag stick, I mean, I’ve never seen Tiger Woods cry tears of joy just laughing so hard. And when he couldn’t figure out how far a shot was. I mean, he (thought he) was only 100 yards off and … Tiger figured out a way to hit a wedge 200 yards (the ball landed 79 yards short).
On the power failure and storm that wrecked the air-inflated dome in November 2023 and forced the first season to be delayed a year.
“We considered the extra year definitely a blessing,” Macaulay said.
“I was in the building at 11:30 pm the night before the dome came down, the projectors were just calibrated, it was the first time seeing the entire image up on the screen. We were flying a drone around to capture some video. And I was like, we have 60 days to go until the original launch date. I’m going to pull this off.
“And I woke up at 5 am to a whole bunch of phone calls, panicked, that the generator had failed. The backup generator had failed. The power was out on the system. … You needed two, three or four things to go wrong at the same time and that’s what happened. With all that it would have been fine if at 7 am a storm hadn’t come through and it (the dome) was already weakened.
“We had $2 million worth of projectors. Took two weeks to install, got them out in 45 minutes with a forklift because we didn’t want them to get wet. There were a lot of heroic actions.”
How they figured out how to make virtual holes end seamlessly in a single, real green.
“We had a defined area, and that is what led us to say, ‘You know what, we need to create our own courses,’ and therefore every hole ends in exactly the same green, which then led to, well, ‘that’s kind of boring. It’s the same green every time,’” Macaulay said. “And that’s where we dreamed of this rotating, undulating, changing green.
How the green works.
“The middle of the green area is a 41-yard-wide circular turntable. It’s 250 tons and it moves between every hole,” Macaulay said. “Every hole we had world-renowned golf course designers that built our holes for us, and they got to choose where they wanted, what degree of rotation they wanted the turntable to be at.
“As we finish one hole, the players walk off, we hit a button in our operating room and it turns to the right degree of rotation for the next hole. And then there’s 600 undulating jacks actuated underneath the putting surface that actually change the putting surface from one hole to the next.”
On planning behind-the-scenes to pull off a live, two-hour TV show.
“You had (singer) Celine Dion next to Josh Allen (Buffalo Bills quarterback). We had the governor there. Every one of these high-profile celebrities or officials had their own security detail that needed to kind of roll through the SoFi Center and talk about how we’re going to move this person from here to here to here safely,” George said. “This was not just a match-night experience for two hours. This was a three-day showcase of Palm Beach County in South Florida, in the middle of a great time of year to be down here.”
On how the players got along.
“These 24 players all came in and some of them were pretty close. Some of them, like the Atlanta team — JT (Justin Thomas) and Patrick Cantlay — they play golf together almost every day. But the Bay (Golf Club), Wyndham Clark says, ‘You know what happens when you take an American (Clark), an Irish (Shane Lowry), an Australian (Min Woo Lee) and a Swede (Ludvig Aberg) and put them in the room together and call them a team?’ And yet these guys became like, the best of friends by the end of the season. So that was kind of one of the really, really cool things,” Neubarth said.
“I’ve been lucky enough to work with (golfer Justin Thomas) for a number of years,” he said. “He sent me a text after we were done. He’s like, ‘I never thought I’d say this,’ because he was definitely on the more skeptical side, he goes, ‘I can’t wait for season 2.’”
How (and why) they changed a major rule in the middle of the season.
Players were allowed to up the stakes by throwing a hammer onto the green but in the first few weeks, the scores were so lopsided the hammer couldn’t help make the match more competitive. That surprised them because they had simulated the game with local golfers 100 times and came up with a blowout just twice, Macaulay said.
With professionals, four of the first five matches were blowouts. So they decided they needed to give the hammer more weight.
“We had lots of discussions,” Macaulay said. “We took a bunch of AI work and ran millions of simulations of what would happen in a match if the hammer always changed to this, or the hammer always changed to that. Again, that informed the decision, and then it was like, we can’t wait. We don’t need to wait. We are the league, and I think it’s part of our culture, and it’s part of being a brand-new league, but I think we had permission to do that kind of thing.”
Added Neubarth: “Yeah, could you imagine the NFL midway through the season, changing a rule? People would lose their minds.”
On why they didn’t use virtual holes from famous golf courses.
“These are elite players. They’re playing for pride, championships. So it needs to be accurate. And so if you think about all the different golf holes around the world — you’ve got the postage stamp, you’ve got St. Andrews with like nine greens, masses of different shapes and sizes. It’s just not possible to put that into an arena where you still want the crowd to be right next to it,” Macaulay said.
How locals can tee off into the five-story screen at the SoFi Center in Palm Beach Gardens.
“If you’ve got a large group coming through, they can’t all play a lot of regular golf balls, like you see on TGL (TMRW Golf League), but you can have closest-to-the-pin competition, long-drive competitions, where every person gets one, two, you decide how many shots they get,” Macaulay said. “You get hundreds of people through in an hour or two by just using these mini games.”
Joel is a founder, reporter and editor at Stet News. His award-winning newspaper career spanned more than 40 years, including 28 years at The Palm Beach Post, which he left in 2020. Joel lives with his wife in Palm Beach Gardens. He volunteers on the board of NAMI Palm Beach County and the Palm Beach Gardens Historical Society.
