TGL had a problem. Then came a strange, chaotic new hole

“Gimme one more.”

It was four hours past sunset inside the strangest arena in sports and Billy Horschel was holding out his hand.

A staffer tossed him another Titleist, Horschel teed it up and then he stepped back, cocking his head slightly as he sized up the massive red rocks projected onto the screen in front of him. And then he started laughing.

Horschel had wrapped up his final tournament of the season the previous day. He’d driven down to Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., to check out the latest developments inside the SoFi Center, home to the golf-adjacent experiment that is TGL. He’d shot a couple promos for his team, the defending-champ Atlanta Drive. He’d practiced on the new, expanded green, hitting a variety of chip shots alongside new teammate Chris Gotterup. And then he’d turned from the short-game area to the big screen to test out the league’s most exciting changes: its new holes. And when he and Gotterup were still stuck on one of ’em a half-hour later, something became immediately clear.

TGL had a new, unexpected star: Stinger.

Horschel pulled out driver and aimed far right this time, setting up to hit a high hook over and around a large red overhanging slab. He and Gotterup had already spent a dozen swings each testing different club choices for a low-flighted line drive down the hole’s left side. They’d joined an unofficial competition as pros chased the lowest possible launch angle, measured by the bank of Full Swing monitors behind the teeing area. (Some pros were launching the ball at less than one degree.) But now Horschel was going high, chasing an alternate route. He swung out of his shoes. He gazed up hopefully towards the screen. His ball soared on a promising line, drawing right to left. And then it collided with the enormous sandstone arch framing golf’s most chaotic new par 4 and fell into the water.

He reached his hand out for another ball.

“>

STINGER ROCKS. That’s not a geological pun. Not just a geological pun, I should say. Instead it’s a near-universally held opinion among those of us in the strange subset of sports fans who have decided mixed-reality arena golf might be for us.

If TGL had a Season 1 problem it was that its holes, though breathtaking if they’d existed in real life, were still conventional enough that they had a tendency to blend together. Its architects admitted they weren’t quite sure where to land in a world without constraints. Did golfers and golf fans and this new golf league want real-life-style golf holes — or did they want to get weird?

As someone who has played an unhealthy amount of Golden Tee — we have one in our New York office and it became something of a happy-hour habit in the four-plus years I spent there — I knew what I wanted. Bring on the weird.

And no, I don’t think the league took its queues directly from the arcade game. But I do think they adopted some of the same creative ethos.

And so, when TGL teased its new hole in a social-media announcement in December, it was fascinating to watch the reactions pour in. Social media seems mostly made for mocking, skepticism or both — but the general sentiment this time was something different. Mostly it was hell yeah. That’s how a TGL tweet scored nearly two million impressions. And the real thing is just as quirky and delightful as advertised.

What’s different about Stinger? The tee shot asks a question we’ve never seen in outdoor, green-grass “real” professional golf: Can you hit it under this rock? That doesn’t mean it would work everywhere. If you put it on a PGA Tour course it’s possible players would walk off in protest. The beauty of the hole is that if you hit it too high, if you don’t pull off the shot, your ball will ricochet to a watery grave or directly back towards you on the tee. As a professional golfer you will look and feel very stupid. But in this format that’s all good. TGL isn’t outdoor, green-grass “real” golf. Stinger takes full advantage of that.

I GRINNED THE ENTIRE TIME I read this Q&A between the PGA Tour’s Paul Hodowanic and inspired course architect Agustin Pizá, the man behind this hole and several other TGL designs that’ll make you sit up and pay attention. It’s easy to chuckle at whatever pops up on the TGL mega-screen, but Pizá is both artist and scientist. (Alchemist, in his words.) He studied for five years to get his architectural degree. He does everything by hand, obsessively crafting in his notebook. He’s chasing “maximum artistic expression” through minimalist design. And he says things like this:

“Let’s take Le Corbusier and that movement of ‘less is more.’ What you’re looking at is how can we create a very great feature of, let’s say, risk and reward with a minimalist approach? Architecture is playing with forms.”

Pizá was the man behind Spear, the triangular risk-reward brain-buster from Season 1. But he felt that he could push boundaries further, telling Hodowanic that “this season I wanted to play with verticality.” His take on Cenote, the other biggest new hole? “I like to question everything. Why can’t we play a hole from back to front?” But Stinger came from another calling, too: “One of the first things that I wrote down in my notebook was, ‘Let’s create an ode to Tiger Woods,’” he said.

Thus was borne Stinger. It’s a monument to the greatest player of the generation and his signature shot. Woods saw the hole in competition for the first time on Tuesday, when he tried to talk his Jupiter Links teammate Max Homa through successful stinger strategy. (It didn’t work; Homa hit the rock. I believe more than half of Stinger players have now hit the rock or hit that tee shot into the water. And ultimately Jup Links lost the hole.)