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TGL’s second regular season finished with flair this week.
The clip is everywhere: With Tiger Woods looking on, 23-year-old Tom Kim flicked a wedge that sent his golf ball sky high—nearly over the top of the 64-foot-tall simulator screen at the SoFi Center—and into the virtual 138-yard, par-3 green, landing just past the pin before spinning back.
Hole-in-one.
“You’ve probably never seen Tiger celebrate that much for another person,” said Kim after Tuesday’s match against The Bay GC, as his miracle shot on the penultimate hole sent Jupiter Links GC, of which Woods is captain and a co-owner, to the playoffs.
Woods launched TGL in 2025 with cofounder Rory McIlroy. The indoor team golf league plays all of its matches at the 1,500-seat SoFi Center in South Florida. Players hit tee and approach shots into a giant simulator screen, and then chip and putt at the 22,000-square-foot short-game area and putting green, which can rotate 360 degrees to offer different challenges.
Jupiter Links and McIlroy’s Boston Common Golf missed the postseason in TGL’s inaugural campaign, but the teams with the league’s two most popular players will face off in the Season 2 semifinals on March 17.
“There’s always a little bit of extra energy in the building when Tiger is here,” McIlroy said Sunday after Boston beat Jupiter to clinch the No. 1 seed.
The winner of the Boston–Jupiter playoff matchup will face the winner of the Atlanta Drive GC–Los Angeles GC semifinal in a best-of-three match championship series.
While Woods hasn’t played this season as he rehabs from back surgery, the 15-time major champion still attended all five Jupiter Links matches, playing coach and offering mic’d-up insights on the ESPN broadcasts.
“I think this is what we set out to do with TGL—we tried to grow the game, tried to do it differently,” Woods said after Tuesday’s match. “We don’t normally play golf at 9 to 11 at night, so to be able to do this out here and to have this showcase, to have this group of guys, to be able to do what we did at the end, to have a hole-in-one, to have everything that happened at the very end, that’s what it was all about.”
Final viewership numbers for TGL’s 15-match regular season have not been released, but they are trending slightly down from the 513,000 viewers per match during the 2025 regular season. ESPN platforms aired all matches—nine on the flagship network, five on ESPN 2, and one on ABC. Matches mostly started at 7 p.m. or 9 p.m. ET on Mondays or Tuesdays; four started at 5 p.m., and the season opener was at 3 p.m. on a Sunday at the end of the NFL’s regular season.
Some of the ratings dip is likely due to record numbers at the start of Season 1—including an audience of more than 1 million for Woods’s debut—that haven’t been reached since. In 2025, playoff viewership dipped slightly from the regular season, so it will be interesting to see whether TGL can reverse that trend this year.
ESPN, which relies on veteran anchor Matt Barrie and versatile fan-favorite Marty Smith for most TGL matches, sent more star power to the final regular-season TGL matches of Season 2—NFL analyst Jason Kelce and content creator Katie Feeney, who juiced up various broadcast segments and social media hits.
The network’s two-year TGL media-rights deal is expiring, but ESPN is expected to seek an extension and bid for rights to the upcoming WTGL women’s league.
Season 3 in 2027 will bring TGL’s seventh team and first expansion franchise since launching, Motor City Golf Club, owned by members of the Hamp family, including Sheila Ford Hamp, who is the principal owner and chair of the NFL’s Lions.
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