The courses are virtual. The competition is real.
The sport is screen golf, and the world’s largest platform for it is the GTour, a South Korean circuit that has been in operation since 2012, staging more than 200 tournaments and handing out some $12 million in prize money.
Now, the company behind that professional simulator league is bringing the concept west.
On Tuesday, Golfzon America, the U.S. offshoot of the South Korean simulator giant, announced the launch of the Golfzon Tour, which will kick off its first tournament this fall.
The competition will feature 12 five-player teams from the United States (Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Louisville, Minneapolis, New York City, Orlando and Tulsa), Toronto, London and Monterrey, Mexico, with regional matches in October giving way to playoffs in November, and the Tour Finals contested in January at the 2025 PGA Show, in Orlando, where the winning team will share the $150,000 first-place prize. The playoffs and finals will be broadcast on Golfzon’s YouTube channel and the Golfzon Tour’s official website.
“The goal is to make it as competitive and engaging as we possibly can,” said Steve Brown, director of marketing for Golfzon America.
Though Golfzon isn’t new to the United States — it opened its first outlet here in 2016 and has grown to around 140 locations throughout the country — only recently did an American screen-golf circuit strike the company as a viable idea.
“There had always been a desire to bring the tour over here,” Brown said. “It was a matter of allowing the U.S. market to maturate to where we could actually make this thing happen. If we tried this two or three years ago, I don’t think we would have had the commercial footprint for this thing. And I’m not sure U.S. consumers were understanding of the concept.”
Any lingering doubts faded with the birth of TGL, the indoor televised golf league backed by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy, which, after a year delay, is slated to debut on ESPN in January.
“The whole bringing of TGL over here was a pretty strong indicator that we were ready to do our own version of this thing,” Brown said.
Unlike South Korea’s GTour, which revolves around individual competitions, the Golfzon Tour will rely on a cumulative score, team match-play format, and round-robin brackets inspired by the college football playoff system. Modifications of that kind, Brown said, are part of an attempt to “Americanize a Korean product” to make it more accessible to a western market.
“That was something we gave a lot of thought to,” Brown said. “How do we ‘culturalize’ this in the right way.”
The teams themselves will be a cross-section of regional talent, selected by Golfzon locations in each of the participating cities. Anyone 18 or over, male or female, is eligible. Preliminary matches will be organized by region, too, so that opposing teams are each competing on their home turf, but in similar time-zones.
For this inaugural tournament, Brown said, all 12 teams will be invited to the Tour Finals in Orlando, with Golfzon covering the travel costs for the top two seeds. As part of its tournament coverage, Brown said that Golfzon plans to “help people get to know the players” by spotlighting their personal and professional backgrounds, a promotional formula used in competitions ranging from the Summer Olympics to “Survivor.”
“We want to tap into their stories, and allow them to build their brands,” Brown said.
Though no tournaments have been scheduled beyond this first event, Brown guaranteed that the tour would continue, with the all but certain addition of a junior screen-golf tour.
“In no world are we going to go through all we have to get this off the ground, and then just dust our hands off and walk away,” he said. “There are so many ways you could take this concept. It’s going to grow and evolve. At this point, we’re thinking, Okay what do years two, three and four look like.”