The TGL’s first broadcast gave us a genius innovation … AND a sugar high

Hello folks, and welcome to an emergency edition of the Hot Mic Newsletter. Tonight we’re talking all things TGL, which launched on Tuesday evening in Palm Beach to a great deal of fanfare. We’ll have lots more to discuss as more information becomes available about the league’s TV ratings, and if you’d like to hear more about that subscribe here, but in the meantime, let’s talk about what we watched.

THE BIG NEWS

In the end, I thought the much-ballyhooed launch of the TGL on ESPN was … fine. The telecast ran for a shade more than two technically sound hours, featured an utter blowout, and did not leave a bitter taste in the mouth of most who tuned in. For a sports league in Season 1, Episode 1 — a league that was perfectly transparent about the fact that its broadcasts will only improve from here — fine feels like a … fine place to be. 

BREAKDOWN

Things were teetering in an odd direction a half-hour before the TGL went live at 9 p.m. ET, when the end of the Duke-Pitt basketball game appeared to be crashing into the TGL’s slotted schedule time, threatening to spoil the inaugural broadcast with the golfiest of TV banalities: a coverage delay. Mercifully the game turned into a blowout, they ran the clock and it snuck in under the wire, but the initial tremor of anxiety seemed to hang over the first part of the TGL’s broadcast.

The TGL didn’t show a shot for the first 15 full minutes of the action, electing for a series of player interviews and a brief league overview before launching into the action. Scott Van Pelt’s inclusion offered a legitimate dose of credibility and comfort to the production, but he gave a remote intro from his D.C. studio and the space-time gap was strange. The whole ordeal felt a bit like explaining the rules of a board game before you’ve played a turn — nobody seemed to retain the information, and everyone seemed a little antsy to just get going.

But then the action began with Shane Lowry’s opening tee shot, and the broadcast shot out of a cannon. The biggest lesson of the TGL’s opening broadcast — and perhaps the entire opening day — is that the league’s shot clock is a revelation. Gone is the boredom of incessant pre-shot tinkering and the inherent sleepiness of golf on television. If nothing else, the TGL moves, and that alone gives the format a real chance to survive.

The telecast was structured into three stanzas. The opening five holes, then a commercial break; the middle five holes, then a commercial break; then a brief “intermission” hosted by Van Pelt, another commercial break, and the final five holes. Sure, the speed ebbed a bit as the competition progressed, and the intrigue of the activities in the field of play dissipated as The Bay opened up a blowout lead over NYGC. But there was enough there to keep your attention until the match had been decided, which was around hole 8. 

The biggest question after week 1 is the TGL’s ongoing balance between flash and substance. Tuesday’s broadcast felt a bit like a hefty bowl of powdered sugar for dinner. I briefly felt the dopamine hit, I certainly rode an energy high, but by the end I felt a little empty. Is the competition supposed to be serious, funny, or some combination of the two? I’m not upset that I watched, but I still can’t answer that question. I suspect the TGL is still feeling out that comfort zone itself.

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GOLD STARS

The Shot Clock: The clock had been deployed for roughly 15 seconds before most golf fans started rethinking the PGA Tour’s approach to enforcing pace-of-play rules. It’s an awesome innovation, and it is the innovation that gives the TGL hope of surviving even as the concept grows less novel with time.

The Camera Setup: There are some 70 cameras bugged throughout SoFi Center like Secret Service Agents — lead producer Jeff Neubarth specifically designed the league’s camera outfit to be invisible from other TV cameras, and therefore invisible to folks at home. It felt like each camera angle was used in some way throughout the action, and spare for a few wildly oversaturated bunker-cam shots, it all whipped around pretty seamlessly. In a nod to the production team’s efforts, shots did not feel overly choreographed or boring to watch after the ball struck the simulator screen. 

Virtual golf holes: I can’t believe I’m saying this, but I really enjoyed the freakiness of some of the TGL’s virtual designs. The visual extremes play extra-well on TV. If I had a critique of the competition, it was that we needed more tricked-out holes. What a world.

The Microphones: No reasonable viewer expected ESPN host Matt Barrie to have communication with a group of golfers 85 yards away down to an exact science tonight, but the back-and-forthing will be important to the long-term entertainment value of the TGL’s telecasts. The functionality worked, providing a few personality slivers from golf’s stars without being overwrought. Xander Schauffele performed particularly well.

SVP: Van Pelt, ESPN’s voice for the PGA Championship and Masters, offered some considerable credibility to the TGL right off the bat. His pre-and-postgame interviews (the latter part of his midnight SportsCenter with SVP) were incisive and effortless. The players clearly have a rapport with him, and his decades of golf experience make him uniquely apt to thread the needle between golf’s traditional dialect and its new simulator slang. Even his touch of self-deprecation about the (slightly horrifying) caricature crafted by the TGL’s marketing team was deft. I was a fan of his inclusion all the way around.

ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

The live discussion: It was hard to parse through the noise on Tuesday night. What was player conversation? What was broadcaster banter? What was part of an interview with guests Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy? What was music blaring over the SoFi Center? To me, it felt like there was so much to say that it was hard to hear anything at all. Some personality shined through here, but the forthcoming weeks figure to feature a lot more.

The “Intermission”: The TGL’s decision to include a lengthy “intermission” segment with SVP — sort of like a halftime report — was a real rally-killer. The sequence of commercial-intermission-commercial lasted exactly 10 minutes just after the match had been decided, and when the competition returned again, the energy felt like it’d been sucked out. Maybe this will be better when the matches are closer, but I think it might be better to reimagine this format altogether.

DJ Khaled: Please, no more.

Live Interviews: Tiger and Rory are both big gets for any live golf telecast because their depth of experience and golf intellect are unparalleled. The problem with Tuesday’s interviews was that neither golfer had much more experience with the TGL than anyone watching at home and the broadcast got caught asking them questions even as the action sped on. Their presence was hardly a bad idea, but with all the other noise happening at the same time, I don’t think viewers came away with much.

THE NUMBERS

There is no “normal” for a product like the TGL, but I’d guess anything in the neighborhood of 700,000 average viewers would be acceptable for week 1 on ESPN.

The network’s weekly average has hovered in the neighborhood for months, and the TGL was buffeted by a Duke basketball lead-in on Tuesday night. The TGL’s hopes of ascribing to ESPN primetime averages (closer to 2 million, but aided by the NFL and NBA) remain a longshot, but beating LIV while staying safely clear of the PGA Tour seems reasonable.

WHAT IT TELLS US

We won’t know the numbers for a few days, but they won’t tell us much. Any outrageously bad or good numbers should (and will) be considered, but anything in the mushy middle should be considered a data point on a graph we’re going to fill in over these next few weeks. 

Hop aboard the simulator golf train, kids: We’re going for a ride!