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Justin Thomas put it best before the second match of Monday night’s double-header.
“It’s just a different form of golf,” he said.
In the year lead-up to its inaugural season, the league has paid painstaking attention to the details. The hitting areas have real turf, tended to by superintendents from the elite clubs of the area. The sand is, too, and the synthetic is a custom blend specifically for TGL.
Even so, the differences win out. It’s 15 holes of screen golf, played inside a stadium, with music blaring and orange hammers being thrown throughout. It requires different shots for players to master.
And almost two months in, players say they’re finally starting to get the hang of it.
TGL Tip #1: Where you aim on the screen matters
The TGL screen is huge. So big that, unlike standard simulators, they can hit into their virtual reality from different angles. Players have options on which portion of the screen they can hit into.
And it takes some getting used to.
Tony Finau, who likes to hit left-to-right fades, says his tendency was to aim too much into the left side of the screen—like he would on the golf course. It was only after a fellow chat from fellow faders Morikawa and Theegala that he made an adjustment.
“I noticed for my fade it’s easy to hit it up the left side of the screen, and I felt like it wasn’t coming back,” he says. “I watched Collin and Sahith hitting, and I realized I needed to aim a little bit more right than I was comfortable with.”
Megan Briggs/TGL
TGL Tip #2: Hit chips harder than you think you should
As I wrote about after my first visit to TGL, the ball sits higher in the turf than it would on ordinary grass. It effectively means the ball is sitting on a little tee: It can shave spin off chip shots, which makes them hard to stop. And with less resistance from the ground, it prompted Finau to make another change on the advice of his teammates.
“When you’re hitting off turf you think the club is going to bounce, but it comes off pretty clean,” Finau says. “Out of the sand and around the greens, both my teammates were like, ‘never decelerate.’ Make sure you accelerate through the shot. It’s not really going to bounce, so you can go ahead and give it some speed.”
Megan Briggs/TGL
TGL Tip #3: Beware chunks out of extra fluffy bunkers
TGL’s bunkers force pros out of their comfort zone the most. The lack of foot traffic and moisture running through the bunkers means the sand never has a chance to get compacted. It stays extremely fluffy—almost like beach sand—which makes chunking shots a very real possibility.
TGL Tip #4: Breaks aren’t as severe on putts
Anytime you roll a ball on synthetic turf, the ball rolls along with less friction. It means the ball often rolls along faster than the same putt on a real green. It also makes the green less susceptible to slopes. “I compare it to like a new build of a new golf course. The green almost hasn’t settled,” Fitzpatrick explains.
Megan Briggs/TGL
“There’s a lot of subtleties. There’s less break. You can see it one way, but it might just go a little bit that way. It’s not outside the hole. You’ve under-read it.”
Finau agrees:
“I trusted them a lot with the reads, more than kind of what I was feeling and seeing just because I hadn’t played on the greens,” he says. “There were a few times I had a crucial putt to make, and I trusted that they had the read down, and I made it.”
Main Image: Megan Briggs/TGL
