The Toronto Blue Jays are making changes in hopes to grab there first win of the 2025 season on their first City Connect night of the year.
PALM BEACH GARDENS, Fla. — Mike McCarley is sitting in the TGL owners’ box, sport coat off, about two hours before what would turn out to be the final match of the stadium golf league’s inaugural season, and he’s talking about the fruit he had eaten the afternoon before — eight kinds.
He had just watched a documentary where a woman drinks a 60-ingredient smoothie every morning. There’s something, he explains, about eating as many food items as possible in a day to help promote the biodiversity in your gut. He tried dragon fruit the night before. Looked good, tasted weird.
“Oh,” McCarley says, as he picks away at that night’s offering, “they have figs tonight.”
You could say TGL was its own fruit plate through its inaugural season — the combination of the game’s top-ranked players (11 of the top 15 in the world) and team owners from other sports — all successful in their own right — coming together for something the same, but different.
It was always supposed to be additive to the professional golf calendar (it’s a line repeated by the players, McCarley, and one of the other co-founders, Rory McIlroy, frequently — a not-so-subtle dig at LIV Golf, which has long been considered a disruptive addition to men’s golf), and two years ago McCarley was invited by the then-chief executive of the Royal & Ancient, Martin Slumbers, to make a presentation at the famed St. Andrews to the other R&A heavy hitters about what his plan was going to be for a golf league played on a simulator in south Florida.
By most of the key metrics, McCarley tells Sportsnet, the first season was a success. It was something fun, something different, and frankly — it was cool.
“We set out to do something,” McCarley says. “To create a new version of golf that would attract a younger audience, and when we hear back from them that ‘This is working,’ then that was very rewarding.”
The final series wrapped Tuesday night with, perhaps, the moment of the season, with Billy Horschel rolling in a double-breaking 17-footer for birdie on the penultimate hole of the match and celebrating like he had just won the lottery (his expletive-laced, fist-pumping effort would not be appropriate if he won, say, the Masters) to put Atlanta Drive GC (Justin Thomas, Patrick Cantlay and, sitting for the finale but also part of the team, Lucas Glover) ahead for good against New York Golf Club.
Atlanta defeated New York, 4-3, in the second match and captured the SoFi Cup in a clean sweep in the best-of-three finale.
McCarley, who had spent two decades as a television executive, most recently with NBC, worked with McIlroy and Tiger Woods to develop the concept for this simulator league that boasts a 50-foot-high screen and a rotating, half-a-million-pound green.
The team owners for the first season included Atlanta’s Arthur Blank (who also owns the Atlanta Falcons) and New York’s Steve Cohen (who also owns the Mets). It was broadcast on ESPN in the U.S. and the players included world No. 3 Xander Schauffele, up-and-coming superstar Ludvig Aberg, two-time major champion Collin Morikawa, Netflix fan favourites Sahith Theegala, Min Woo Lee and Rickie Fowler, American Ryder Cup captain Keegan Bradley and, of course, McIlroy and Woods themselves.