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

Earlier this week, as I used to be making an attempt to clarify the inception of one other new golf league to a non-golfing buddy, he requested a really affordable query: What does TGL stand for?

He didn’t imply stand for existentially, like, what does TGL characterize, who does it champion, what are its values. He simply meant, very actually, what do the letters within the acronym TGL stand for? The NBA is the Nationwide Basketball Affiliation. The NFL is the Nationwide Soccer League. The MLB is Main League Baseball. What’s the TGL?

And I noticed that I didn’t have a solution. The G and the L have been, I may safely assume, referencing a “Golf League.” However how ’bout the T?

I believed again to the primary time we heard about this new golf factor, in a press convention on the 2022 Tour Championship. It was LIV’s debut summer time, a turbulent time for the PGA Tour and for skilled golf, however Rory McIlroy and Tiger Woods had led a cost to stabilize the Tour and now, as added incentive, have been introducing a brand new firm and a new-look golf league. At East Lake, McIlroy introduced up CEO and co-founder Mike McCarley to make the official introduction of two new entities: TMRW Sports activities (the corporate) and TGL (the league). I keep in mind the uncertainty on the time: What on earth are these? However I didn’t keep in mind a lot else.

Had McCarley defined ’em then? I pulled up the transcript to see if he’d gone deep on the acronyms, however no cube — he was deliberately and understandably imprecise. Neglect TGL; it wasn’t even fairly clear what TMRW was. Certain, they have been have been the initials of Tiger Woods (TW) and Rory McIlroy (RM) put collectively. We realized a short while later that it was pronounced “tomorrow.” However the remaining we’d must piece collectively ourselves.

There have been a number of potentialities. McCarley saved calling it a “tech-infused” golf league. Was that the T in TGL? Hopefully not. Did the T seek advice from golf’s most well-known T and we have been witnessing the launch of the Tiger Golf League or Tiger’s Golf League or one thing alongside these traces? That may be a bit on the nostril. Essentially the most logical clarification was that it was the TMRW Golf League, abbreviating one imprecise acronym to squeeze it into one other. However that might require a number of layers of clarification and, if it was the case, I’d by no means seen it written wherever.

I pulled up the TGL web site. Any clarification was conspicuously absent and the league was described solely by its three letters. Truly, that’s not true. On its website and actually in all press-release supplies you’ll discover “TGL introduced by SoFi” which seems to be the official identify. A straightforward dig to make on the league’s expense could be that, in basic golf vogue, they discovered the sponsor earlier than they discovered the league. Nevertheless it’s Week 1! We’re feeling heat and fuzzy about their inventive golf innovation — no want for affordable photographs.

Absolutely Google would know. Any individual else would have requested the query and located the reply. And so they had — kind of. A number of shops had addressed it, however I noticed a number of references to the TGL as “Tomorrow’s Golf League.” The New York Occasions described it that manner. So did ESPN, which added that the inclusion of “Tomorrow” within the identify “stems from” TMRW. Even Wikipedia added the “Tomorrow’s” reference. I get the imagery of tomorrow, which lends itself to a forward-thinking league targeted on beginning one thing new and completely different. However framing it as tomorrow’s league in perpetuity? That introduces a little bit of a Dippin’ Dots downside. Should you’re the ice cream of the long run — or, on this case, the golf league of tomorrow — what occurs once you wish to be the golf league of at the moment?

USA At this time launched extra nuance in its explainer, writing that TGL “unofficially” stands for Tomorrow’s Golf League. That felt higher. I’ve been on the receiving finish of sufficient TGL media supplies that I determine I might have seen some reference to “Tomorrow’s” if it’d been made official, however no.

Lastly I discovered an interview with McCarley within the Palm Seashore Publish the place he’d been confronted instantly with the query and laid out the reality.

“You undergo a bunch of various branding workout routines with completely different companies and on the finish of it what you discover is in the event you’re making a sports activities league, everybody makes use of the acronym anyway,” McCarley stated. “So begin with the acronym as a result of that’s what it’s ultimately going to be known as as soon as individuals begin to understand what it’s and the way they seek advice from it.”

In different phrases, McCarley and co. had settled on TGL earlier than they’d even settled on T. He thought of the identical questions we did. Tiger Golf League? Tech golf league? Merely The Golf League? In the end maybe he determined it didn’t a lot matter. He’s most likely proper {that a} full identify is generally pointless; solely long-winded broadcasters ever reference the “Nationwide Soccer League,” in spite of everything. Nonetheless, it helps outline the league. There’s one thing foundational about its existence. However after I lastly obtained in contact with a league worker, that particular person confirmed the unsettling fact: TGL simply stands for TGL.

I didn’t like that. Acronyms are by definition abbreviations, and it’s unnatural to skip the step of getting one thing to abbreviate. One other league would by no means do that, I believed to myself. After which I noticed, wait a minute — what if the PGA Tour already does?

You might or could not know that the present Tour was as soon as a part of the Skilled Golfers’ Affiliation of America. That’s the place “PGA” originated. However someplace after the entities break up, issues obtained murky. One signal of this murkiness: In 1981 the league even modified its identify to the Event Gamers Affiliation, to be generally known as the TPA Tour, to keep away from confusion, however then modified it again just a few months later. Maybe that’s the place the acronym misplaced its filling, I’m unsure — however I confirmed with a number of Tour staff that, to their information, the PGA Tour at this level isn’t brief for something. That’s the whole factor.

For the primary time in years, a scene popped into my head from the 2004 high-schoolers-steal-the-SAT-answers epic movie The Good Rating, which my household had owned on DVD and thus cycled via a number of instances on street journeys. At one level within the film Kyle (performed by Chris Evans) asks Matty (Bryan Greenberg) what he thinks SAT even stands for.

“[It used to be] Scholastic Aptitude Check,” Kyle says. “Then they removed that altogether. You recognize what it stands for now?”

“Hmph.“

“SAT.“

“What?“

“SAT stands for SAT. That’s it.”

“That’s f—- up!”

For the file, that’s true: the SAT now not stands for something. It’s simply the SAT, full cease. However we already know, for higher or worse, what the SAT is. With the TGL, we’re simply beginning to discover out.

And as soon as we do, the identify received’t a lot matter anymore, anyway.