If you want to get a professional golfer going, ask them about the grain of the grass. They’ll have takes and complaints. It’s why they spend hours understanding each one, making sure they understand every detail for every lie.
At SoFi Center, the home of the TGL league, players are encountering a new variation. And it’s deceptively difficult.
Players hit their full shots from real turf, grown and tended to by a collection of superintendents from top courses in the Palm Beach Gardens area of Florida. But the rest of the playing arena is populated by artificial grass provided by SynLawn.
It’s top-of-the-line stuff, crafted to match the feel of real turf. But no matter what, artificial turf has its own unique qualities. Mainly, that the blades themselves are stiffer. It means that, unlike most fairway grasses, the ball isn’t heavy enough to sit down into the grass. It sits more on top of the grass, similar to the kikuyu grass you find at many Australian golf courses.
You can see the difference here: real grass on the left, artificial grass on the right.
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With the ball sitting higher on top of the grass, it means that the pros catch the ball higher on the clubface when they chip. This sends the ball forward with a flatter flight and less backspin.
It’s an interesting wrinkle, because it means players have to master a new, flat-flying chip shot – and budget for more runout than they usually do.
First official ball drop test on the TGL rough.
Not too bad! pic.twitter.com/qclKPa9hll
— LKD (@LukeKerrDineen) January 8, 2025
You could see players adjusting in real time during the inaugural TGL match.
On the first hole, Matt Fitzpatrick missed the green and left it to Xander Schauffele. Knowing the ball would run out more, Xander tried to bounce his ball into the fringe short of the green to take some speed off.
The problem was he fell on the wrong side of these thin margins. He landed his ball a fraction too far short of the green, which took too much speed off, and the ball hung up short.
Schauffele had plenty of green to work with on the fifth hole, after another left approach shot miss from Fitzpatrick.
Xander hit a good shot – he landed it about a foot onto the green – but because his ball had less backspin, it didn’t matter. The ball hopped hard and rolled almost 10 feet past the hole.
Wyndham Clark experienced this same effect on the seventh hole. Chipping from the fringe, Clark nipped a chip off the turf that burned the edge of the hole – and rolled out almost five feet past the cup.
Again, an interesting wrinkle, and one that pros will learn to adapt to in time. You could spot Shane Lowry experimenting on the 13th hole. He whipped the clubface way open to try to get more backspin – and it worked. It worked too well, actually. His ball landed and stopped on a dime.
More backspin is the solution. To find it, pros will have to develop a one-of-a-kind shot, specifically for this one-of-a-kind format.
