When the oral history of TGL’s first broadcast is eventually written, perhaps we’ll get some honesty from Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy about their nerves. Because 20 minutes into ESPN’s presentation of the inaugural TGL match, there was no reason to think that this was the future of golf. Prolonged exposition about the format and rules, combined with remote interviews with genuinely nervous players created a truly unique and not particularly settling experience. Live sports rights are the white whale in an increasingly splintered entertainment ecosystem—and usually low-risk. But a viewer could be forgiven if they carried some skepticism and secondhand nervousness that despite being too big to fail, the TGL experiment could flop.
It’s hard to remember two hours of sports television that felt like TGL’s first foray. For a while it felt like an episode of Saturday Night Live where the possibility of things going off the rails was very real. It’s as though everyone involved in the night had an inner voice constantly asking, “Hey, how is this going?”
