A Double Edged Spear
The TGL Debut, competitive Tetris, and a step closer together.
Getting into the city differs from most of my travel. Usually, if I’m going someplace, I drive. I get in the car — my car — and I pilot my own self the whole way from A to B. Not the case getting into NYC. I stand on the platform in Darien, looking over an eye-level deciduous horizon, and then hop on the train, sit for an hour, walk through Grand Central to the subways, take the S to the 1 down to 23rd, go up the well, and I’m there in the thick of it. The buildings don’t grow taller and denser as I move along. I got in a box and it teleported me into the belly of the place. You just kind of wake up somewhere else.
I’d come to the city to see my friend Mike. Mike is the man. Mike and I met our junior year of college, sometime in March, the first evening warm enough to take dinner outside, splitting a sixer of Leinenkugel’s to manifest the coming of spring. We both overestimated our pool abilities and could count on a close, competitive pillow fight. We had related interests and complementary values and had sustained emotional bone contusions from similar girls, and we realized it ran deeper than mutual enthusiasm for sports and beer. I’m slow to trust, but I trust Mike.
Mike and I were in the same eating club, the primary hangout spots for upperclassmen, and most days we’d run into each other at a meal or playing Mario Kart or studying in the library. Mike’s an internationally ranked Tetris player, and we’d catch up on stuff in between coursework as he kicked the everliving shit out of some poor soul online. And in this way we’d keep up on most things happening in each other’s lives, a constant point of contact, the way college friends are in college.
Then, you graduate. You leave for the last time, and you catch up when you can. Your shooting percentage on phone tag falls as you start real jobs (in his case as a software engineer at Meta). You catch up for lunch when you’re in the same area until one of you moves south. Phone calls fill limited windows and end with the promise of a longer catch up later.
I saw Mike for the first time in a while. I was home and went into the city. And, in a lot of ways, it was like we never left. We grabbed dinner from a paper-bowl human-dog-food chain and went across the street to the barcade, and we talked about life lately. We found a Tetris cabinet, and Mike got to work on the high score. But he realized it’d take hours, and we didn’t have much time together. Might as well make the most of it and compete on something two-player. Who knows when we’d see each other again.
I haven’t written much about The State of Golf. This is mostly by design: just to state the facts is to sound more cynical than I usually care to. A foreign government with functionally unlimited resources to accomplish two objectives[1] spent over a billion dollars for <500k simultaneous viewers, and the Tour had to bump purses aggressively to retain top talent, and a bubble formed, and Chesson Hadley demanded a reward for his loyalty[2], and longtime sponsors started dropping, and the number of Tour cards got squeezed. These are the facts. As a player, the road just got a lot harder — which is fine. It’s the challenge at hand and I embrace that. It’s not meant to be easy. As a longtime golf fan, however, it’s given me less than a fuzzy feeling.
To suggest the world, generally, has stopped getting better is asinine[3],[4],[5]. But enough big institutions don’t make people feel good about them anymore, enough that the American Dialect Society declared a year-old word it’s Word of the Year for 2023: “enshittification.” Peacock jacked prices directly ahead of the Olympics and still crushes viewers with ads. It’s cheaper to aggregate news than to write it, especially if you can get AI to do it for you. I think the tech people know this best: you can make a lot of money by getting people to sit down and scroll for longer and longer portions of the day, regardless of how they feel about doing so. Mike, who works for Meta, has an app to limit Instagram scrolling.[6]
So when they, at the height of the PGA/LIV chaos, announced a simulator golf league, I didn’t have high expectations. It combined professional golf, technological integration, DJ Khaled, and making other people buckets of money. For the viewer, surely it would find a way to stink.
But the arena looked pretty cool. It would air in primetime on ESPN in a valuable TV slot. They got a good cast of guys and mic’d them up. Augustin Piza started releasing golf holes like Kendrick releases rap anthems.[7] And I found myself getting more and more excited.
On Tuesday, I had two friends over to my apartment, cracked a Guinness 0, and flipped on the golf. It took ten minutes to get ESPN+ working, which coincided with a ten-minute bite into the TV window for college basketball. But the first shots were hit, and we realized: it was working. It was actually doing it. It was fun as hell.
I’ve started writing this newsletter at a local coffee shop. I’d usually work at my desk: I’d make myself some breakfast and coffee and just sit down. Getting to the coffee shop took time, and it costs money to buy something. In the current WFH landscape, if you can do your job from home, you’re economically incentivized not to leave the house. But I asked myself: do I feel good staying inside? And I didn’t. And I realized that looking up from my desk and seeing other people, as insignificant as it sounds, was worth the daily $5, 15-minute price tag.
I remember DJ Piehowski talking about a Dead & Co. show at the Sphere a while back, and he called it the first unambiguously positive tech development in a long time. I’d like to nominate TGL as the same: a purely additive, 2 hour reason to watch a fun golf product on a Tuesday night.[8] I spun my wheels for a while trying to figure out why, what made these work when so much other tech stuff stunk.
I came up with a pretty simple answer. The tech that feels bad makes you sit on a screen by yourself. TikTok, VR headsets, social media — all claim to bring you closer to people in some ambiguous virtual destination, but your ass is sitting on your couch, by yourself. But, when tech can get a bunch of people in the same place, that’s when it shines. The Sphere gets 18,600 people in the same place to watch a show together. TGL brings six elite golfers into an 1800-seat arena, and it brought friends into my apartment. Next week, it’ll get me to a bar on a Tuesday night I’d ordinarily spend by myself. If I have a thesis here, it’s that most tech stuff feels shitty because it doesn’t feel good being alone. But, when that tech is tethered to a physical location that you share with real-life people, it can do a lot of good.
On Sunday afternoon, I got a text from Mike’s girlfriend: a photo of him, back at the barcade, pointing at his new high score on the Tetris cabinet. It took him two hours. His flag planted on a few bytes of memory, he’s conquered that small, sovereign corner of New York. I’ve seen the land myself. I hope to return soon.
[1] To diversify its economy away from fossil fuel reliance, and to move their brand association away from murdering journalists, executing gay people, and castrating women.
[2] Did you forget about this?
[6] I have it too — it’s called OneSec, and it’s fucking awesome.
[7] You heard it here first: this is a genuine paradigm-shift moment in golf course architecture.
[8] I understand that some people find TGL super offensive — fine. Then don’t watch. Let the rest of us have fun. You’re more than welcome to join us anytime you’d like.