No one can say for certain what tomorrow will bring, but it doesn’t hurt to take an educated guess.
As golfers, we can gaze into the crystal ball and wonder: Is this the future of course design?
The image in question comes from Tianjin, a booming municipality in northern China, where the ribbon was just cut on an out-of-the-box venue called City Golf: a sprawling, indoor course that combines virtual and real-world play.
If that sounds a bit like the SoFi Center, the Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., facility custom-built for the Tiger Woods-led golf league, TGL, yeah, well, sorta. The difference is that City Golf was designed for public play. And while the SoFi Center will boast a single, giant screen and a single, modular green, City Golf features 18 screens for 18 holes with 18 synthetic greens, spread across 106,000 square feet (nearly the equivalent of two football fields), inside a giant convention center.
It’s a full-blown, high-tech indoor course.
The company behind it is GolfZon, the South Korea-based screen golf giant, whose honchos have hailed the project as both bleeding-edge and eco-conscious: all the high-tech pleasures of the game, on a smaller footprint.
GolfZon chairman Kim Young-Chan has described it as “the most ideal urban golf course,” offering “a new and unique golf experience akin to playing a round on a real course right in the middle of the city.”
Simulators are hardly new to golf, but their use in alt-golf-as-entertainment venues has been on the rise, evident in concepts ranging from TGL to Fairway Social, Topgolf Swing Suites, X-Golf and Five Iron Golf. Like those other venues, City Golf aims to further tap the golf-as-lifestyle market by offering additional services and amenities, including golf lessons, merchandise, fitness classes and dining. (It also hosted a $700,000 screen golf tournament last month.)
Nor is it meant to be the only one of its kind. If you’re looking to the future, consider this: GolfZon says it envisions expansion for City Golf into major cities around the world.
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