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Tiger Woods, right, talks with The Bay Golf Club’s Wyndham Clark during warmups for the inaugural match of the Tomorrow’s Golf League, between New York Golf Club and The Bay Golf Club, on Jan. 7, in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla.Rebecca Blackwell/The Associated Press
After many centuries of existing pretty much the way it was invented, Tiger Woods and pals have figured out the problem with golf – too much exercise.
On Tuesday night, Woods’s attempt at rebranding the sport – Tomorrow’s Golf League – debuted on a Florida soundstage. Competitors hit their drives at enormous screens, sparing the audience a walk from the tee to green. The rules were new, and so was the moving putting surface and the vampy design.
The players – several major winners among them – were at pains to demonstrate how stupid they thought this was. The etiquette of the game was out the window, replaced with broad gags, romantic shoving and lots of giggles. The audience was so keyed up you wondered if they were also paid to be there.
The non-playing star of the show was Woods. He was on hand to bestow beneficent smiles and waves.
You have to give it to Woods. He’s too bashed up to withstand the rigours of 18-hole, 7,500-yard golf. So he paid someone to invent him an ersatz, 100-foot golf.
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Rickie Fowler hits into the massive simulator screen at the SoFi Center in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla, on Dec. 18, 2024. The 250,000-square-foot complex holds the new TMRW Golf League co-owned by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy.Doug Ferguson/The Associated Press
This would be more interesting if it was new. In the seventies, it was called Battle of the Network Stars. That’s where Farrah Fawcett would race Scott Baio on the obstacle course for the right to face off against Mr. T at the dunk tank. Go back and watch the clips of both events side by side. Aside from the haircuts and the short shorts, they’re the same.
The difference is that one thing understood that it was camp, while the other is under the misapprehension that it is serious business.
If sports has a current heading, it’s in the direction of camp. In Susan Sontag’s definitive formulation, camp is “a sensibility that, among other things, converts the serious into the frivolous.”
An example of something Sontag thought especially camp – “stag movies seen without lust.”
Could there be a better description of modern sports? It used to be a bloodsport one step removed from war. Now it’s a bunch of frat boys and sorority girls chucking the flagstick in front of putts for yuks. It’s sweaty and chummy and way too pleased with itself.
Not that anybody running sports gets this, or thinks it’s weird, or would concede that it’s happening. That’s what it makes it so camp.
Ahead of TGL’s debut, one of its co-founders, Rory McIlroy, twisted himself in knots trying to explain why a new golf was necessary, and how it was any different from the Saudi version, which he hates.
“We’re not pretending to be r …” McIlroy said.
He got the r-sound out – presumably, the beginning of “real golf” – but thought better of it and stopped. After some dithering, he settled on “not the traditional golf that you see week in and week out.”
Again, Sontag – “Camp sees everything in quotation marks. It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’”
The further the culture gets from Sontag – she published Notes on Camp in 1964 – the less clearly it can see that it is fulfilling her prophecies.
Western cultural institutions don’t fade away any more. There are too many stakeholders involved for that to happen. Instead, the growth slows and they turn cannibal. This is how your local museum becomes an engine for social change that charges admission, and when that stops working, it begins stripping itself for parts.
That’s how you go from golf to celebrity golf to rock ’n’ roll Middle Eastern golf to Woods’s bedazzled simulator golf. Each new golf is less golf and more ‘golf.’ It’s Shakespeare, but with dogs as actors, which is ‘Shakespeare.’
The traditional arts understand this process and have hierarchies in place to manage it. Stephen King is the money; Jenny Offill is the art. It’s pretentious, and often wrong, but it keeps the whole thing puttering along.
Sports doesn’t have those aesthetic boundaries. The NFL is sports, and so is WWE, because they all make a ton of money from grown-ups running around.
The more serious the ‘serious’ sports pretend to be, with their spandex and their stats and their self-help aphorisms, the more frivolous they become. The only difference these days from an American college bowl game and a 19th-century pantomime is the budget.
Tomorrow’s Golf League is the next phase of this project. It makes The Price is Right look like a lecture from Socrates. It is neither thoughtful, nor is it a genuine competition. It’s golf for people who find golf stuffy, but don’t like reading either.
It will thrive because corporations, broadcasters and governments will pay anything to get near sports stars. There are no bad sports ideas, which is another way of saying there are no ideas at all. It’s just the same thing run through whatever 20-second reel some money guy saw while he was on the treadmill.
‘Kids like Minecraft more than Major League Baseball?’ Boom – video-game golf.
If the NHL thought it could get away with putting Justin Bieber and Michael Buble on the Stanley Cup finalists, it would absolutely do that. But it isn’t golf. It only has permission to be so frivolous, which you can tell makes it wild with envy.
Its hot idea is to get Amazon to market the players by showing them behind the scenes driving to the arena saying banal things. In other words, decentre the hockey in order to sell hockey. It is the most profound sort of satire. It’s the sort that teaches you something.
Sports’ role in this is never admitting to itself that it’s in on the joke.
In fact, it doesn’t see that there’s a joke at all. And it absolutely would not understand what you were talking about if you suggested that it might eventually be in on it.
Per Sontag, “Pure camp is always naive.”
