BOSTON — Even Rory McIlroy struggled to wrap his head around this new golf “league” being pitched to him at first.
Fast-forward a few years, McIlroy was front and center Monday as the face of one of the first franchises in TGL history.
McIlroy, alongside TMRW Sports business partner Tiger Woods, unveiled the new indoor golf league a little over a year ago. The league is set to launch Monday nights in January, as TGL nears the conclusion of introducing teams and players. McIlroy on Monday was in Boston where he not only was introduced as a member of Boston Common Golf, but he also got a chance to further sell why he believes TGL is essential to the future of golf.
“If we can get more people watching golf and if that means they go out and try to play the game and increase participation,” McIlroy said Monday in a press conference at the MGM Music Hall in Boston. “I sometimes struggle with the ‘grow the game’ phrase, but it really is that. Trying to broaden the demographic as much as possible.”
It’s the latest attempt from the PGA Tour, which is a partner with the league, to innovate its sport and its league. The Tour saw success by allowing unprecedented access for the Netflix series “Full Swing” during the 2022 season, and that show will continue moving forward. Netflix cameras were in Boston on Monday, following the Boston team around as it got a look at Fenway Park and became the first team in the league to really speak as a team to new fans.
“I think more than any other time in my career, casual golf fans or people that you wouldn’t really classify as golf fans coming up to me in the street and saying ‘Hey, we loved you on full swing,’ and not saying ‘Hey I watched you win a golf tournament last week,'” McIlroy said. “It’s a cool thing, and we can somehow broaden that view, and I think as well give people a different perspective in terms of who we are and it humanizes us and gets people closer to us and we can tell stories around it, that’s important to us.”
McIlroy said 2022 was the first year in which more golf balls were hit on non-traditional golf spots than on actual golf courses. According to Top Golf alone, nearly 15 billion golf balls were hit. While McIlroy believes the sport can still exist in the way it always has, it’s imperative the game’s most important people are able to adapt to the evolving golf world around them.
“This is meant to be complementary,” he said. “We’re not trying to replace traditional golf here. I think there’s a place for everything. Whenever it was presented to me, two and a half, three years ago, it took me a while to wrap my head around it. It’s very different than what you conceive golf to be, but once we dug down into the nitty gritty details of it and tried to incorporate some themes from other sports — we just announced today a shot clock and timeout stuff like this — which I think is going to be really, really fun. Trying to tap into a casual sports fan who’s used to seeing these things in their respective sports.”
