Does this crazy indoor course represent the future of golf design?

No one can say for sure what the future will bring, but it doesn’t hurt to make an educated guess.

As golfers, we can gaze into the crystal ball and ask ourselves: Is this the future of the course?

The image in question comes from Tianjin, a booming municipality in northern China, where the ribbon was recently cut on an out-of-the-box facility called City Golf: a sprawling, indoor course that combines virtual and real-world play.

If that sounds a little like SoFi Center, the Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., custom-built facility for the Tiger Woods-led golf league, TGL, is, well, sorta. The difference is that City Golf is designed for community play. And while the SoFi Center will boast one, large screen and one, modular screen, City Golf has 18 screens for 18 holes with 18 artificial greens, spread over 106,000 square meters (about the size of two football fields ), inside the giant. convention center.

Fully equipped, state-of-the-art in-house training.

The company behind it is GolfZon, a golf screen giant based in South Korea, which has been hailed as a bleeding-edge and eco-conscious project: all the high-level pleasures of the game, in small steps.

Golf chairman Kim Young-Chan described it as “the perfect urban golf course,” offering “a new and unique golf experience that’s like playing a round in the middle of the city.”

Simulators are by no means new to the game of golf, but their use in alt-golf-like recreation areas has been on the rise, seen in concepts from TGL to Fairway Social, Topgolf Swing Suites, X-Golf and Five Iron Golf. Like those other locations, City Golf aims to further market golf as a lifestyle by offering additional amenities and services, including golf lessons, merchandise, fitness classes and dining. (It also hosted a $700,000 on-screen golf tournament last month.)

And it’s not meant to be the only one of its kind. If you’re looking to the future, consider this: GolfZon says it envisions City Golf expanding into major cities around the world.

Josh Sens

Golf.com Editor

Golf, food and travel writer, Josh Sens has been a contributor to GOLF Magazine since 2004 and now contributes to all aspects of GOLF. His work has been honored in The Best American Sportswriting. He is also the author, with Sammy Hagar, of Are We Having Any Fun Yet: The Cooking and Partying Handbook.