The 2026 TGL Playoffs began Tuesday night with semifinals, pitting Los Angeles Golf Club against defending champion Atlanta Drive GC and Boston Common Golf against Jupiter Golf Links. Breaking out of the pack at the end of the night were Los Angeles and Jupiter, who rallied to beat Atlanta in a thrilling run before Jupiter defeated Boston in a huge upset to eliminate the top seeds.
In the opener, the reigning champion Atlanta Drive got off to a fast start, with the Drive line-up of Chris Gotterup, Patrick Cantlay and Billy Horschel coming out sharp and hitting big putts to take control early in the match and take a 4-1 lead over LA through the first six holes of 3-pointers. However, Los Angeles countered with a threesome and narrowed the gap to 4-3 going into the singles match and carried that momentum to a 6-4 victory.
Justin Rose led LA’s comeback, taking the lead with big putts, including a 16-foot putt on the 13th hole to give LA its first lead of the night.
The real drama happened on the 14th hole (and second to last) with LA leading 5-4. Horschel, who dominated the SoFi Center in each of the past two seasons, made a strange decision against Sahis Segala that ended up costing Atlanta dearly. Horschel made a birdie putt five feet from the hole, then rejected a hammer thrown by LA even though Cantlay wanted to accept. This gave LA a point and the match went into the final hole 6-4.
Not surprisingly, Horschel made the putt after refusing to do so in practice. Drive needed to win on the final hole to advance to the shootout. The burden fell on Chris Gotterup, who was facing Tommy Fleetwood on the par-5. Gottarup made an eagle putt from the front of the green, and Fleetwood made his own up-and-down for birdie, sealing Los Angeles’ victory.
If Horschel and Atlanta had simply accepted the hammer, they might have been able to force Seagala into a 3-footer to maintain the lead. He probably would have been successful, but it also might have given Los Angeles another means of putting pressure on the 15th by forcing them to decide whether to accept the hammer, which could have cost them the game, or reject it to go to the shootout.
Either way, the LA team will head to next week’s finals, where they will wait to see if Collin Morikawa returns from a hip injury or if Fleetwood will once again join Seagala and Rose in their bid for the TGL title.
LA will face a team from Jupiter Golf Links that continues to surprise. Tiger Woods’ team, nicknamed the “Bad News Bears,” continued their incredible run by defeating Rory McIlroy’s top-seeded Boston Common team. Both teams traded blows from the start, taking turns winning the first four holes, with Jupiter eventually leading 4-3 going into singles.
Jupiter’s young lineup of Max Homa, Tom Kim and Akshay Bhatia continued to make great shots at the right times against a veteran BallFrogs team that looked a little shaky at times.
Fresh off the biggest win of his career at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, Bhatia had a defining moment on the second singles hole, answering Keegan Bradley’s inside nine-foot birdie to keep Jupiter’s lead at two points after Boston threw down the hammer.
And two weeks after Kim clinched Jupiter’s playoff ticket with an ace, she nearly hit another ace on the same hole to extend Jupiter’s lead to 7-3.
Meanwhile, McIlroy, who is only 10 days removed from his lower back injury sustained at the Arnold Palmer Invitational, had a particularly tough night for Boston. The world No. 2 had a lackluster showing as he put two balls into hazards with his driver and long iron. He also dropped both single holes to Homa in hammer-in-play, but those four points proved the difference as Jupiter cruised to a shocking 9-5 victory and a place in the finals.
Now it will be Homa, Kim, Batia and Kevin Kisner trying to defeat a star-studded LA team. It will also be interesting to see if Woods considers joining the lineup for the first time this season in the best-of-three series next Tuesday and Wednesday, but there’s still a chance he could aim to return at the Masters in a few weeks or look for a conditioning opportunity at SoFi Center.
