ESPN’s Matt Barrie on TGL’s Second Year and Lessons From Inaugural Season

At the 2025 Masters, ESPN’s Matt Barrie was out for a stroll on the course when a spectator approached him and greeted him with an unexpected remark. 

“He’s like, ‘Hey man, I just want to thank you.’ I was like, ‘Well, thank me for what?’” Barrie told Sports Illustrated in a recent conversation. “He goes, ‘My daughters hated golf. My daughters wanted nothing to do with it, and now because of TGL, we watch it as a family together because they love it, because they love the players and they love the video game aspect of it.’”

After 14 years at ESPN, Barrie claims that TGL is what people want to talk to him about the most. The tech-infused golf league, which plays at the Sofi Center in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., debuted at the beginning of 2025 on ESPN and begins its second season Dec. 28, with Barrie continuing as the play-by-play voice.

And he calls it one of the most fulfilling endeavors of his career. 

“I think we’re tied with the NBA or just behind the NBA with percentage of viewers for the youngest viewing audience,” Barrie said. “And so, look, [golf is] an old white guy sport, right? It’s been an old stuffy white guy sport forever. Tiger changed that when he came on, but we’re [TGL] changing that a little bit more because now kids and everyone can get involved.

“And to me that’s been the most rewarding.”

Now, TGL looks to build on that momentum. 

Sports Illustrated: How did you become the play-by-play voice of TGL?

Matt Barrie: So when they had announced the league, that was a little over two years ago now, and that ESPN was gonna be a partner, I remember thinking immediately, like, “Oh, this is perfect. I would love to do something like this. This would be kind of a dream job in the golf world to be on the ground floor of something new and innovative.”

And so just through the course of conversations with Jeff Neubarth [vice president of content at TMRW Sports], he and I met a few times, talked about what the league is and what the league wanted to be, and then between [Neubarth] conversations and then meeting with Mike McCarley [CEO of TMRW Sports], I think at the end of the day, it just ended up being a good fit in everyone’s mind for what the league was looking to do, and so I pursued it.

I wanted to do it bad and I’m so fortunate that they agreed that I'd be a good fit for it.

SI: Where did your passion for golf come from? 

MB: Growing up in Scottsdale, Ariz., and going to Arizona State, it’s one of the best golf programs in the country. It’s one of the best golf states in the country, and then I think I took to it as a teenager in Scottsdale, the Phoenix Open at the time, when Tiger Woods hit the hole-in-one on the par-3 16th [in 1997].

Tiger Woods's ace at TPC Scottsdale's famed 16th hole in 1997 left an impression. | Robert Beck/Sports Illustrated

And so, it just became something that I followed, and then I was always fascinated with Augusta National. I was always fascinated with the Masters. And so, coming out of college football season growing up, I’ve always been a college football fanatic, but coming into that season and then always knowing that the Masters was in April, that’s kind of how I got started with it, because in Arizona, we know it’s tradition that the [WM Phoenix Open] is Super Bowl Sunday. That's always been the tradition. And so, I always knew that I could watch that tournament, my hometown tournament, and then turn on the Super Bowl.

I just thought golf was entertaining. I came up in the Tiger Woods era, and he made it cool. Eventually, I just knew that that's a sport that I would like to cover.

SI: Who did you seek advice from going into the inaugural TGL season?

MB: It's a good question, because we didn’t really know what it was gonna be and how it was gonna be, and so I leaned heavily on Mike McQuade, who runs the golf department at ESPN. He's since been promoted [to executive vice president of sports production], and he’s been in charge of golf forever. He was my SportsCenter boss back in 2014 and 2015, and I leaned heavily on him because he's the smartest TV guy in the building. I knew that he would shoot me straight with what he was looking for and what TGL was looking for.

And so with him and Neubarth working hand in hand, it was kind of just good for me to pick their brains as to what they wanted it to be and what they were looking for it to be. So going in, without knowing what it was gonna be, at least I had a bit of a roadmap of how they saw it and how they saw my role in the whole thing.

That helped because, mind you, we were doing something that had never been done, and I was doing it by myself. When I’m doing golf tournaments, the Masters, the PGA Championship, I have an analyst with me. When I’m calling college football games, I have an analyst with me.

This was solo, with players mic’d up, and with six of the best minds in the world in golf, that was the idea: make the [players] analysts. It was daunting at first because it was kind of a high-wire act until we got it figured out, but leaning on Mike and Neubarth at the beginning was definitely beneficial to me.

SI: What does preparation for a match look like? 

MB: What I do is I run through each hole with [Neubarth]. We go through each hole that we’re gonna play that night and we just have an idea, so, “O.K., we’re gonna start with this hole, then there could be some drama at this stage of the match if it's still close when they play this one.”

So we kind of know where the show is headed based on the holes that are out there, and then I have a great researcher who gives us information that allows us to see any trends on the hole. We know, like, “Hey, Xander Schauffele had the closest proximity to the pin on this hole. Keep an eye on that for tonight.” 

A year's worth of data from Xander Schauffele and other players will be shared on the broadcast | GREG LOVETT/PALM BEACH POST / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images

We try to merge both reality and golf, and so that's kind of the things we look out for before, but Justin Ray, he's my researcher, does a phenomenal job looking out for that.

In the production meeting, we sit there, we go through the holes, we go through the lineups, we know what order the players are hitting in, potentially in the storylines when they get into singles and they play against each other.

SI: How do you handle glitches in real time? 

MB: Well, you can't prepare for it, because you're not expecting it, right? I’ve always been one of those people on TV, be it SportsCenter, anything that I do, glitches are gonna happen, it’s live TV.

I think one of the most common errors that are made sometimes is pretending like it didn’t happen. I acknowledge it. We saw this, we’re gonna review it and we’ll keep you updated. There was a freeze one time last year because the shot tracker picked up Tommy Fleetwood’s divot, thinking that it was the ball. We acknowledged that.

I think you have to be genuine with what people are seeing because they’re viewers, they’re watching the same thing you're watching, and so you roll with it.

SI: Last season, were there any unique moments on or off the camera you encountered? 

MB: We’re around the players a lot when they’re in there during the day, warming up, doing their match preparation, playing some of the holes they’ll be playing that night. So we’re around them a lot, and I love hearing them playing, and I love hearing what they’re gonna do and just kind of their gameplay philosophy. I find that invaluable to hear, so you can use nuggets of that during the broadcast.

But just the conversations that you have with people and the energy that's surrounding it. They feel like they’re playing a team sport that night. They’ve got their teammates, they’re out there, and it’s just fun to see the whole thing come together from the time that we get to the arena that day, to watching it become a living, breathing television show that night. It’s been the fun part to see it grow and see how these players have grown with it.

SI: Where do you see room for improvement heading into its second season?

MB: The numbers, I can tell you right now, the information that we’re gonna have this year that we didn’t have all of last year, because now we have data. We have 20 matches of data with these holes being played that we’ll be able to educate the viewer on. Let’s say Boston and New York are playing. We can tell the viewer at home, Boston never won this hole last season or New York won this hole every time they played it.

There’s gonna be some technology changes this year. The holes are gonna be so much better looking because of how the technology’s advanced with the hole layout. It’s the same hole, it’s got everything on it, but the visual quality of that hole is gonna be much better.

I think our tipping point last year was when we changed the hammer rule, and the light went off, thinking, “Oh, this was the right thing to do.” That was the beauty of being a part of a startup in the middle of Season 1. We’re not too proud to understand that we can make an adjustment to make the product better. 

BILLY HORSCHEL CLUTCH ‼️

Horschel gives Atlanta the lead with one hole to play in the TGL Finals 🔥 pic.twitter.com/ctsPoqY4s0

— ESPN (@espn) March 26, 2025

SI: How does the league continue to increase interest and not have the novelty wear off?

MB: Well, I think the first part of it is, when you look at the novelty aspect of it, people were kind of looky-loos, like, “Oh, what is this?” And then they started realizing that their kids enjoyed watching it, and they started watching it as a family.

Because unless anything changes with severe global warming, I can promise you from Dec. 28 through March, it’s cold in most of the country and football season’s over and people are itching to get out and golf. We can’t in certain parts of the country, so you’re going to sit up and you’re just gonna watch this entertaining indoor golf league with some of the biggest stars on TV and I think that’s been the benefit.

It’s a video game culture. It’s a young audience and that kind of appeals to what they like.

SI: What has been your favorite moment from being involved in TGL?

MB: Oh man, there’s so many. I’ll give you a couple because my favorite moment off the course, so to speak, was seeing all of these pro athletes and celebrities that wanted to see it and be a part of it, and the wonder that they had when they walked in and they're like, “Oh my God, look at this place,” and just how people took to it so quickly. Some of the greatest ever, Derek Jeter’s in there hanging out, Big Papi’s [David Ortiz] in there hanging out. Serena Williams is there every week. You’ve got the greatest of all time, Tiger Woods, is a founder. And then Josh Allen, he’s a big golfer. He wanted to come see it for himself. For me, seeing that was fun to watch.

And then, in-house, it had to be the Billy Horschel putt in the championship match. He’d become such a television star throughout this whole process, and a lot of [the players] did because they were able to show their personality and people started to catch on to that, and they started feeling and acting differently than they were on the golf course. 

That Billy Horschel putt, I remember the call because I remember he had done something in the match before, and I remember seeing he and Justin Thomas read it, and we knew it was gonna break back and I just look and I just say, is he gonna do it again?

And the putt goes in, and Billy throws his club, everyone goes nuts, and it just solidified to me that this is not a golf competition, it’s a sports competition.

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This article was originally published on www.si.com as ESPN’s Matt Barrie on TGL’s Second Year and Lessons From Inaugural Season.