Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy in a battle for final TGL semi-final slot

Tiger Woods’ Jupiter Links Golf Club and Boston Common Golf Club featuring Rory McIlroy are left fighting for one remaining semi-final slot at the inaugural edition of the tech-heavy Tomorrow Golf League after the last set of matches at the SoFi Centre in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, earlier this week.

There were only two matches on Tuesday at the arena-style SoFi Centre, but three teams clinched a spot in the playoffs led by table-toppers The Bay GC who have eight points from four matches, Los Angeles GC with seven from their four encounters, Atlanta Drive (six points, four matches) and New York Golf Club (three points from four matches).

At the bottom of the six-team league are Tiger’s Jupiter Links GC (two points, four matches) and McIlroy’s Boston Common who have earned just the lone point from their four outings and go up against the vulnerable NYGC in their fifth and final league encounter next week, plus with the hope that some of the other results fall in their favour.

Jupiter Links had a chance to move up the table but Woods’ team went down 3-6 to league leaders The Bay GC and need to beat third-placed Atlanta Drive and may also need a tie-breaker in terms of holes won through the season to advance. On this count, they are at the bottom of the pile with just nine holes won in fur matches against New York’s 15 and Boston’s 11.

In the penultimate set of matches, Los Angeles GC did not score a point in the first 11 holes still managed to scrape past New York 5-4 in extra time while Boston faced yet another setback in going down to Atlanta Drive 3-6. By then though, the first match had already decided the top three spots in the league standings.

LAGC owed it to Indian-American star Sahith Theegala to kick-start their revival after being 0-4 down to New York after 11 holes with his monster putt on 12 before stand-in Tony Finau won hole 13 in a double-or-quits format. Collin Morikawa then sent LA into the playoff by winning 14 before sealing the win in extra time.

“So fun to be a part of matches like this,” Finau, who was playing as substitute for England’s Tommy Fleetwood, was quoted as saying later. “Momentum is a crazy thing in sports, and happy we ended up on top.”

“The entire team … we all want to thank Tony because you see something and you never know if players buy into it,” added Morikawa. “It was all a question of whether we want to buy in, and we've all bought in, and I think you guys have seen that. But for someone like Tony to come out and say, ‘Yeah, I'm going to try it out and love it over the past few days, it's been a lot of fun.’”

Irishman Shane Lowry played a key role in The Bay’s win over Jupiter Links though the former still need victory in the closing set of matches next week to seal the league table’s top spot. “We really wanted to win and keep our winning streak going,” Lowry told tglgolf.com. “You want to finish as high as you can and get the best seed possible and I thought we did a great job tonight.”

The semi-final playoffs will be held on March 17 and 18 following completion of the final set of league matches next week.