Williams Sisters, Ohanian Buy First Tiger-McIlroy Golf Team
Alexis Ohanian and Serena and Venus Williams have purchased the first club in TGL, the new Monday night golf league backed by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy.
The new team, called Los Angeles Golf Club (LAGC), is one of the inaugural six that the league is planning to auction before it begins play next year.
TGL, a partnership between TMRW Sports and the PGA Tour, is hoping to use new technology, a shorter format and a custom-built venue in Florida to package golf in a brand-new way. Golfers already committed to the league include Woods, McIlroy, Jon Rahm and Collin Morikawa.
“I like betting big—and betting early—on things in sports,” Ohanian, who is the control owner of NWSL club Angel City FC, said in an interview. “What’s so attractive about this is that you’ve already got a globally recognized, incredibly popular sport, with the best players in the world committed. … And now they’ve engineered a format that finally makes sense for a casual fan who just wants to get excited and fired up.”
Ohanian is investing through his private equity fund, Seven Seven Six. The cap table includes Serena Williams, his wife, and a trust that will hold equity for their five-year-old daughter Olympia and any other future children.
Both Ohanian and TMRW CEO Mike McCarley declined to comment on the sale price. Each club will hold a 3% stake in the single-entity league, according to an investor deck viewed by Sportico. Each team must have a control owner (in this case Ohanian), who holds at least 33.3% of the team and at least 51% of its voting shares.
The news comes two days after the PGA Tour and the main European circuit agreed to go into business with their archrival, Saudi-backed LIV Golf, creating a dramatic upheaval across the sport. It’s unclear what, if anything, that means for TGL—McIlroy told reporters Wednesday that while he felt like a “sacrificial lamb” because of his PGA loyalism, he believed the merger would eventually be good for the sport.
Ohanian’s involvement has a very 21st-century business origin. On the day TGL announced its plans back in August 2022, Ohanian retweeted the news with a note: “I’m still thinking about how clever this is.” Within a few days, McCarley said, Ohanian was speaking with TMRW leadership, and in their first meeting told the group, ‘I want to be the first team owner.’
“He was incredibly aggressive from Day 1 on his understanding of the concept,” McCarley said in an interview. “After spending a lot of time together, going back and forth on ideas, he was hitting on a lot of the themes that we were looking at, as far as openness, inclusivity, and embracing technology to better democratize sports.”
McCarley pointed to two different Ohanian business ventures that gave TMRW confidence that he and the Williams sisters would be good TGL stewards: The virtual community he built through Reddit, and the physical community he built around a city-based team in Angel City. Both will be needed in TGL, because while LAGC has some geographical rights in Los Angeles, the team itself will be competing in Florida. TMRW is currently building a custom 135,000-square-foot indoor venue on the campus of Palm Beach State College, which includes a huge simulator screen and putting greens.
Ohanian said he believes LAGC will do a lot locally to promote the team and its players, and to expose the game to new fans. He said that over the past few years, he’s noticed the sport drawing interest from people who previously might have ignored it.
“I pay a lot of attention to social media, maybe more than I should, and I started seeing more and more young people just ripping it with golf clubs—whether it was pros on Snap sharing behind the scenes, or folks at driving ranges just teeing off,” he said. “It felt like golf was entering the zeitgeist with young people on social media, which felt new and interesting. And then the Box to Box documentary Full Swing came out, and that’s another trend line.”
Both Serena and Venus are minority owners in the NFL’s Miami Dolphins, and they are building investment portfolios beyond tennis. Serena, who retired from professional tennis last year after earning $94.6 million in prize money, has invested in more than 60 companies, including Impossible Foods, MasterClass, Noom and Tonal. Venus, whose career prize winnings are $42.4 million, recently joined private equity firm Topspin Consumer Partners as an operating partner.
TMRW is working with Evolution Media Capital, CAA’s merchant bank, to handle the team sales. McCarley said they received inbound interest from more than 40 groups, including some outside the U.S., and that news about the other auctions could coming in the next few weeks or months.
Ohanian and Serena Williams were both previously announced as investors in TMRW Sports. Those investments are separate from their financial stakes in the new TGL team.
Source: Sportico
