Some 6,000 people came to baseball’s Seattle Mariners’ home park over Presidents Day weekend to play “Topgolf Crush” by driving golf balls at targets set up throughout the field while music blared over the loudspeakers. “We are the place where millennials hit golf balls,” said Topgolf Co-Chairman and CEO Erik Anderson. “We’ve really turned it into this digital game.”
With baseball season still six weeks away, The Seattle Times reported that some 6,000 people cycled through Safeco Field in Seattle, home of major-league baseball’s Seattle Mariners, over Presidents Day weekend during dreary weather to experience Topgolf, the global sports entertainment community that puts a different spin on golf and breathes fresh air into the sport.
“We are the place where millennials hit golf balls,” Erik Anderson, Topgolf’s Co-Chairman and CEO, told the Times. “You get to play the game, you can compete and trash talk with your friends, flirt with your girlfriend.”
The Seattle area does not yet have one of Topgolf’s 34 U.S. locations, but Anderson told the Times that his company is exploring options in the area. To help gauge interest, the company brought a “pop-up” version of the game that is played at its locations to Safeco Field, and Anderson told the Times that a similar event will be held at Camping World Stadium in Orlando, Fla. in March, along with other locations later this year.
“Topgolf Crush,” as introduced at Safeco Field, had players taking aim at six targets scattered across the baseball field in what the Times described as “a fusion of bowling and darts at the driving range.” The longest target was 140 yards away and the shortest was set at 40 yards. And the goal for players was simple: Hit the ball as close to you can to the center of the target.
With music blaring on the stadium’s loudspeakers, players traded off with three swings apiece, the Times reported, as a screen behind them displayed where the ball had landed and how many points had been earned.
“This is not practice. It’s actually playing a game,” Anderson said. “We’ve really turned it into this digital game.”
“Topgolf Crush,” the Times noted, is the latest extension of the concept that began 17 years ago in England when two brothers, Steve and Dave Jolliffe, wanted to find a better way to track their golf shots. That led to the development of the Toptracer technology that is now used on the PGA Tour and launched golf into the digital age, while also spawning the popularity of what are now 40 Topgolf locations around the world.
Anderson told the Times that staging the exhibition at Safeco Field did require that Topgolf staff get to know the stadium’s groundskeepers well.
“They say, ‘You’re going to do what?’” he laughed.
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