What does TGL stand for? An investigation (with a surprising twist)

Earlier this week, as I was trying to explain the inception of another new golf league to a non-golfing buddy, he asked a very reasonable question: What does TGL stand for?

He didn’t mean stand for existentially, like, what does TGL represent, who does it champion, what are its values. He just meant, very literally, what do the letters in the acronym TGL stand for? The NBA is the National Basketball Association. The NFL is the National Football League. The MLB is Major League Baseball. What’s the TGL?

And I realized that I did not have an answer. The G and the L were, I could safely assume, referencing a “Golf League.” But how ’bout the T?

I thought back to the first time we heard about this new golf thing, in a press conference at the 2022 Tour Championship. It was LIV’s debut summer, a turbulent time for the PGA Tour and for professional golf, but Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods had led a charge to stabilize the Tour and now, as added incentive, were introducing a new company and a new-look golf league. At East Lake, McIlroy brought up CEO and co-founder Mike McCarley to make the official introduction of two new entities: TMRW Sports (the company) and TGL (the league). I remember the uncertainty at the time: What on earth are these? But I didn’t remember much else.

Had McCarley explained ’em then? I pulled up the transcript to see if he’d gone deep on the acronyms, but no dice — he was intentionally and understandably vague. Forget TGL; it wasn’t even quite clear what TMRW was. Sure, they were were the initials of Tiger Woods (TW) and Rory McIlroy (RM) put together. We learned a little while later that it was pronounced “tomorrow.” But the rest we’d have to piece together ourselves.

There were multiple possibilities. McCarley kept calling it a “tech-infused” golf league. Was that the T in TGL? Hopefully not. Did the T refer to golf’s most famous T and we were witnessing the launch of the Tiger Golf League or Tiger’s Golf League or something along those lines? That would be a little on the nose. The most logical explanation was that it was the TMRW Golf League, abbreviating one vague acronym to squeeze it into another. But that would require multiple layers of explanation and, if it was the case, I’d never seen it written anywhere.

I pulled up the TGL website. Any explanation was conspicuously absent and the league was described only by its three letters. Actually, that’s not true. On its site and really in all press-release materials you’ll find “TGL presented by SoFi” which appears to be the official name. An easy dig to make at the league’s expense would be that, in classic golf fashion, they figured out the sponsor before they figured out the league. But it’s Week 1! We’re feeling warm and fuzzy about their creative golf innovation — no need for cheap shots.

Surely Google would know. Somebody else would have asked the question and found the answer. And they had — sort of. Several outlets had addressed it, but I saw multiple references to the TGL as “Tomorrow’s Golf League.” The New York Times described it that way. So did ESPN, which added that the inclusion of “Tomorrow” in the name “stems from” TMRW. Even Wikipedia added the “Tomorrow’s” reference. I get the imagery of tomorrow, which lends itself to a forward-thinking league focused on starting something new and different. But framing it as tomorrow’s league in perpetuity? That introduces a bit of a Dippin’ Dots problem. If you’re the ice cream of the future — or, in this case, the golf league of tomorrow — what happens when you want to be the golf league of today?

USA Today introduced more nuance in its explainer, writing that TGL “unofficially” stands for Tomorrow’s Golf League. That felt better. I’ve been on the receiving end of enough TGL media materials that I figure I would have seen some reference to “Tomorrow’s” if it’d been made official, but no.

Finally I found an interview with McCarley in the Palm Beach Post where he’d been confronted directly with the question and laid out the truth.

“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 said. “So start with the acronym because that’s what it’s eventually going to be called once people start to realize what it is and how they refer to it.”

In other words, McCarley and co. had settled on TGL before they’d even settled on T. He considered the same questions we did. Tiger Golf League? Tech golf league? Simply The Golf League? Ultimately perhaps he decided it didn’t much matter. He’s probably right that a full name is mostly pointless; only long-winded broadcasters ever reference the “National Football League,” after all. Still, it helps define the league. There’s something foundational about its existence. But when I finally got in touch with a league employee, that person confirmed the unsettling truth: TGL just stands for TGL.

I didn’t like that. Acronyms are by definition abbreviations, and it’s unnatural to skip the step of having something to abbreviate. Another league would never do this, I thought to myself. And then I realized, wait a minute — what if the PGA Tour already does?

You may or may not know that the current Tour was once part of the Professional Golfers’ Association of America. That’s where “PGA” originated. But somewhere after the entities split, things got murky. One sign of this murkiness: In 1981 the league even changed its name to the Tournament Players Association, to be known as the TPA Tour, to avoid confusion, but then changed it back a few months later. Perhaps that’s where the acronym lost its filling, I’m not sure — but I confirmed with multiple Tour employees that, to their knowledge, the PGA Tour at this point isn’t short for anything. That’s the complete thing.

For the first time in years, a scene popped into my head from the 2004 high-schoolers-steal-the-SAT-answers epic film The Perfect Score, which my family had owned on DVD and thus cycled through several times on road trips. At one point in the movie Kyle (played by Chris Evans) asks Matty (Bryan Greenberg) what he thinks SAT even stands for.

“[It used to be] Scholastic Aptitude Test,” Kyle says. “Then they got rid of that altogether. You know what it stands for now?”

“Hmph.“

“SAT.“

“What?“

“SAT stands for SAT. That’s it.”

“That’s f—- up!”

For the record, that’s true: the SAT no longer stands for anything. It’s just the SAT, full stop. But we already know, for better or worse, what the SAT is. With the TGL, we’re just starting to find out.

And once we do, the name won’t much matter anymore, anyway.

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