In Montreal this week, temperatures lingered in the single digits.
Bertrand Quentin would like to keep his handicap that low. But that’s tough to do in the Canadian city where he resides.
Montreal winters are long. The golf season is short.
“It’s a cycle,” Quentin told GOLF by email. “I’ll fight my way down to a single-digit handicap by October, only to wake up as a 12-handicap when the season finally opens in May. That six-month layoff is a real momentum killer.”
How do you keep the mojo going when you live in a cold climate? Some golfers install simulators in their homes. Others fly south for winter.
Quentin has come up with a different solution.
Enter: Megalodome.
Not to be confused with a megalodon, Megalodome Golf is indoor golf at an outsize scale, housed within a series of connected domes, on an actual course with artificial turf designed to bounce and roll like real grass. Plans call for it to open outside Chicago in late 2027.
Word of the project went viral on social media this week, complete with renderings and details that seemed plucked from a sci-fi future: an Arizona-style design, ornamented with palm trees, cacti, water hazards and sandy wastes, nestled in the village of Oswego, roughly an hour west of downtown Chicago, at a site that Quentin said he can’t yet disclose.
Indoor golf already exists, of course, most famously at the SoFi Center in Florida, which hosts TGL, the tech-forward league backed by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy. But TGL is simulator golf.
Quentin describes Megalodome as something entirely different.
“Put simply, there is nothing else like this in the world,” he said.
The design calls for four massive interconnected domes. Three will house a 9-hole executive course — six par-3s and three par-4s, playing to a par of 30 — designed by Montreal-based Huxham Golf Design. The fourth dome will contain a practice facility. There will also be a clubhouse, with views that Quentin said will extend “900 feet into the Megalodome Golf course on one side, and another 900 feet into the practice facility on the other.” The practice facility will include a short-game area and 50 stalls, with a range extending more than 275 yards.
“The scale is truly unprecedented,” Quentin said.
Quentin, a 65-year-old forest engineer, said the seed for his Megalodome dream was planted by a friend seven years ago. “Since then, it’s been an intense journey,” he said.
If the plans sound ambitious, so does the timeline. All of this completed by the fall of 2027? But Quentin said that he and his partner, Alain Desrochers, are “in a very healthy position to execute our current roadmap.” They are set to launch a $50 million investment fund and, Quentin said, are in “advanced discussions with major financial groups.”
They chose the Chicago area, he said, for its large market and its golf-shortened season. But they also have their eyes out for other locations down the line.
First things first, though: an eye-popping indoor project in a chilly city, modeled on golf in Arizona, a warm-weather state where, it turns out, Quentin has never played.
“I would like to play there,” he said, “but it’s very expensive I’ve heard.”
