Rory McIlroy and Keegan Bradley headline TGL’s Boston Common Golf squad

Rory McIlroy, right, Keegan Bradley will play for the new Boston team in the TGL. (Keyur Khamar/PGA TOUR)

Add Boston Common Golf to the list of Boston’s professional sports teams. The TGL, a new high-tech indoor golf league, will launch on January 9 with teams from six different cities.

Ever so slowly, the league is dripping out news of players and teams that will compete in the 15-week season. Boston Common Golf, which is backed by Fenway Sports Group, was the first full roster announced this week, and it’s quite a collection of stars.

Keegan Bradley, the Woodstock, Vt., and Hopkinton, Mass.,  product will be the local representative for the squad. Bradley won the 2011 PGA Championship, and two of his teammates are also major winners. Rory McIlroy, a four-time major champion, and Adam Scott, the 2013 Masters champion, will join Bradley. The fourth player on the team is boisterous and outgoing Englishman Tyrrell Hatton, who was part of the winning Ryder Cup team in September in Rome.

The team’s mascot is a frog, invoking the Frog Pond in the center of Boston Common, a clever nod to a part of the city that hasn’t been represented in other local sports teams.

Paul Lukas, founder of Uni-Watch, has a deep dive for Fast Company about the process of creating Boston Common Golf’s branding from scratch.

While the team will represent Boston, they will not play any matches in Boston, as the high-tech venue for the matches is in Florida. However, the thought of this foursome rolling through Boston on Duck Boats for a championship parade is quite an image.

What is TGL?

TMRW Sports, founded by Tiger Woods and McIlroy, has spearheaded this new primetime golfing venue meant to tap into the growing demographic of golfers who do not play traditional “green-grass golf.”

TGL will hold matches in the SoFi Center at Palm Beach State College in Palm Beach Garden, Fla., on Monday nights starting January 9.

In addition to Boston Common Golf, other teams participating in the inaugural year will be:

• Atlanta Drive GC
• Los Angeles Golf Club
• TGL New York
• TGL San Francisco

The sixth team has yet to be named, and the New York and San Francisco teams have not had their team names announced yet.

Who is playing?

TGL is working in lockstep with the PGA Tour, which means that players from LIV Golf are not eligible to play.

In addition to the Boston Common Squad, there are 19 other players players who have signed up:

Woods, Patrick Cantlay, Xander Schauffele, Matt Fitzpatrick, Max Homa, Wyndham Clark, Tom Kim, Tommy Fleetwood, Cam Young, Collin Morikawa, Rickie Fowler, Justin Thomas, Sahith Theegala, Lucas Glover, Shane Lowry, Justin Rose, Min Woo Lee, Billy Horschel, and Kevin Kisner are included.

On Thursday, Jon Rahm announced he would not be playing in the TGL. The Arizona native cited a packed schedule. It seems for now SoFi Center’s Florida location will draw more interest from pros based in Florida. That leaves one roster spot open.

Three of the four players from the competing teams will participate in every match, Each team has four players to allow for an alternate player who can skip events due to scheduling issues, as the PGA Tour season kicks off in January also.

 

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Where are they playing?

The SoFi Center is a 250,000-square-foot venue with a screen 20 times the size of a normal simulator screen. Players will hit their drives and approach shots in the screen. However, once the shots are less than 100 yards away from the pin, the players will move to an open area with a 75-foot apex where they will hit their shots into an actual green that can be altered from hole to hole by hydraulics. Every shot will be hit off natural grass in front of a crowd of 1,600 people.

This isn’t your usual round of simulator golf.

How will scoring work?

TGL is calling the format, “modern match play.” The entire match will consist of 15 holes, and each hole is worth a point. If a hole is tied, each team is awarded a half-point. The team with the most points at the end of the 15 holes wins.

The first nine holes will be alternate shot involving all three players. TGL is calling this “triples” where players will hit every third shot for their team.

The final six holes will be head-to-head match play.

Here’s how the TGL website describes the final six holes:

“The 10th hole begins with head-to-head play as Tiger representing his team plays Rory on the opposing team. They play the entire hole and the winner (fewest shots) earns the point. The next hole, Lowry faces Cantlay. And then Fowler faces Morikawa. The cycle begins again for holes 13, 14 and 15, so in total 6 holes of singles will be played.”

If there is a tie at the end of the match, there is a closest-to-the-pin challenge. A team wins when they hit two shots closer than one player on the opposing team.

At the end of every match, the team earns points that go toward their standing, like hockey. If a team wins outright, they collect two points. If there is a tie, both teams earn one point, and the team that wins the tie-breaker earns a second point.

At the end of the season, the four teams with the highest point total reach the knockout stage.