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You think finding your little white golf ball hidden in the woods is hard? Imagine tracking it down somewhere behind 60,000 seats.
Luckily, Stadiumlinks doesn’t enforce such insanity in its own unique take on golf. Thank goodness, too. The company requires no short game in its Topgolf-inspired game, where players shoot for nine different holes on a field hundreds of feet below.
The golfing experience, which debuted last year, has taken its show to Atlanta’s Turner Field, the Texas Rangers’ Globe Life Park and the Kansas City Chiefs’ Arrowhead Stadium. It’ll head to the Tampa Bay Bucs’ Raymond James Stadium later this summer.
“Shank a ball into the stands and it will go down as the most memorable double bogey of your life,” the announcement on the stadium’s website reads.
Participants generate a score according to their proximity to the varying flags on each hole. Rings determine whether a shot is a birdie, par or bogey. Tickets for Stadiumlinks’ previous events have generally started at $75.
Of course, there’s no golf course owner that has an NFL or MLB stadium at his or her disposal. But it’s nevertheless another unique take on golf that should give operators something to chew on as they look for their own new, creative ideas to generate revenue outside of a typical 18-hole round.
—Chris Cox