Well, it depends on who you ask.
TGL is an upstart golf league founded by Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and sports executive Mike McCarley.
And while the “G” and the “L” seem intuitive enough — “golf” and “league,” respectively — the pesky “T” has drawn quite the confusion in the hours since the first drives were struck Tuesday night.
Anticlimactic though it might be, “T,” it seems, stands for nothing at all, as Golf.com discovered.
As McCarley, formerly the president of the Golf Channel, told The Palm Beach Post, it was the acronym, TGL, that came first.
“You go through a bunch of different branding exercises with different agencies, and at the end of it what you find is, if you’re creating a sports league, everyone uses the acronym anyway,” McCarley told the Palm Beach Post in December. “So start with the acronym because that’s what it’s eventually going to be called…”
Start with the acronym they did.
Find meaning, significance, a word to complete the abbreviation — it seems they have.
“Tomorrow’s Golf League” has picked up considerable traction across the internet — and for good reason. TGL, after all, was formed by parent company “TMRW Sports,” pronounced tomorrow sports.
As nice as Tomorrow’s Golf League may ring, as USA Today reports, the acronym is decorative, ceremonious, “unofficial.”
“Tech Golf League” and “Tiger’s Golf League” have been getting some play in this game, too, but semantics are another game and, frankly, less exciting than the one that launched Tuesday night.
Focus not on the “T” but on the 64-by-53-foot wide screen. The eight projectors. The digital caddy. The WrestleMania-style walkout music. The booing, jeering, leering crowd.
The TGL is a spectacle.
A spectacle made for television — sure.
A spectacle made for Gen-Zers prone to fall asleep to the whispers and polite claps of a PGA broadcast — fair, too.
But also, lastly and perhaps most importantly — a spectacle for golfers, the best in the world.
“That was the most fun I’ve had for two hours on a golf course,’’ 2019 British Open Champion Shane Lowry said after Tuesday’s inaugural competition.
Tomorrow’s Golf League might just be apt. Time will tell.
