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The Topgolf site in Naperville, Ill., sits on 16 acres about 35 miles west of downtown Chicago.
Photo by: MICHAEL BAXTER, BAXTER IMAGING LLC
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Chicago’s golf seasons are unmistakably short. Having a chance to tee it up near the end of a year: That doesn’t happen often.
It did late last fall, though. But rather than spend the day on some of my favorite fairways and greens (and in a bunker or two, no doubt), I hit the road out to Naperville, Ill., for the day — to visit one of Topgolf’s shiny new venues.
According to the Topgolf website, I’d be experiencing “a global sports entertainment community creating the best times of your life.” That’s a big promise, but I was game.
Others have clearly given it a try. By the end of the year last year, Topgolf was projecting that 8 million people will have visited one of its facilities in 2015, up from 4 million in 2014. Fueling that growth was the opening of eight new facilities in 2015, for a total of 20 in the United States and three in the United Kingdom. Another nine are planned for the U.S. in 2016.
That growth has people in the staid, traditional world of golf talking. I needed to see for myself what it’s all about.
The first thing you see driving up to the 16-acre complex — located some 35 miles west of downtown Chicago — are the protective nets. They dwarf the facility’s driving range, which sits next to a CarMax dealership and alongside Interstate 88.
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A bar area and a lower lounge with pool tables and Xbox Kinect cater to millennials.
Photo by: MICHAEL BAXTER, BAXTER IMAGING LLC (2)
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But it’s immediately clear this isn’t your standard-issue driving range. This is an “entertainment center,” as Topgolf calls its venues. It opened in September, and as you approach the front doors, you notice a sleek, upscale décor. Come inside, and you see a natural-stone and glass waterfall gently splashing near the entrance. You see 200 HD TVs that fill the complex. And you see a bar and restaurant that overlook the outdoor stalls where golfers of all abilities soon enough will be flailing away — aiming at a series of giant targets dug into an artificial turf-covered range that stays open year-round thanks to heaters that melt the snow.
The plush surroundings make Topgolf a golf “experience,” and those tech-loaded targets are the heart of the Topgolf operation.
At Topgolf, the ranges are game sites. Golfers accumulate points for every target hit thanks to a microchip embedded in each golf ball. The competition comes because no matter how ugly your swing, chances are good that you’ll hit a target. And even if you miss a target, the ball, for better or worse, measures the distance hit.
So unlike traditional golf, there are no three-off-the tee penalty strokes, no bunker-to-bunker disasters, no dreaded provisional tee shots, no scorecard-busting unplayable lies. Topgolf, as one local golf industry executive told me, is golf without the misery.
The microchip concept that makes it all happen was born out of a brainstorm in 2000 by Steve and Dave Jolliffe. The brothers were hacking away at a driving range in London and wanted a way to liven up the typically dreary, mundane experience. They figured that if you could implant a chip in a dog to keep track of Fido, why not embed a chip in a golf ball?
Fifteen years later, I’m drinking a beer in a climate-controlled stall looking at a monitor that tells me I’m racking up points after lasering a six-iron at an electronically sensored, trampoline-sized target about 150 yards away.
There is a family component to Topgolf; a KidZone is available on-site. But this entertainment business is aimed at the coveted millennial demographic and at the gamer generation. Its customer base is 70 percent male.
“Our core audience are guys in their 20s and 30s, who have more free time,” said Susan Walmesley, vice president of sales and marketing for Dallas-based Topgolf. “Our secondary market are families.”
That targeting is especially clear when you look around inside. Over in the corner of the bar is a dark DJ booth that later will come to life. Topgolf
facilities offer live music on the weekends, and there’s free Wi-Fi and a rooftop terrace. There also is a lower lounge with pool tables and — naturally, given the target audience — an Xbox Kinect.
Craft beers, designer drinks and signature cocktails are easy to find — the Tipsy Palmer and the Patrón Paloma, among them. The accompanying food options
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The three-tiered range features a variety of targets that allow for games to be played based on accuracy or distance.
Photo by: MICHAEL BAXTER, BAXTER IMAGING LLC (2); CASEY LISAK
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rank a notch above the typical bar fare in both variety and quality. (Each of the approximately 27 chicken wings I ate for lunch was tender and fresh.)
“Every location has an executive chef, and we do a lot of local marketing with a decentralized approach,” Walmesley said. “People who live and work within a 5- to 10-mile radius are our audience.”
On this particular Friday, the three-tiered range was half empty around noontime, but four guys in their 30s with a table full of beers in a nearby stall were giving it all they had on every shot.
You can play a variety of games at Topgolf, with your selections displayed on monitors in your driving bay. Among the games are the signature Topgolf game, which I played, that scores points for any target hit. There’s also a game that scores based on hitting the farthest targets, and there’s one that uses the short-game targets for scoring.
The 102 bays here at the Naperville facility can accommodate 612 golfers at full capacity, a typical size for Topgolf venues nationwide. It’s an effective setup, with friendly servers traveling from bay to bay offering assistance and food and drink while you swing away at the target of your choice and top 40 music is piped in overhead.
The only semblance of a traditional golf range is the tractor picking up the wayward golf balls littering the turf.
The price to play is $25 per hour from 9 a.m. to noon, $35 per hour from noon to 5 p.m., and $45 per hour from 5 p.m. to close — which is midnight Sundays through Thursdays, 1 a.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. You also pay a one-time $5 fee for a “lifetime membership” that includes a member card. (You get the card, Topgolf gets your contact information for use in its customer-tracking system.) For the price you pay, you get an unlimited number of balls, which are conveniently rolled out onto your playing mat with a simple wave of your club over a sensor. No bending, no trekking to some distant bucket box, no looking around to furtively gather miss-hit balls off the front edge of the range.
There is one downside for big hitters, though, at least at the middle tier at this Topgolf location: The tees are cut low to prevent booming drives that could soar over the netting and onto a road behind the range.
But you don’t need to be the next Dustin Johnson to play Topgolf. Actually, no golf skill is required, with targets placed all over the range to challenge your short game, your long irons — or just getting the ball off the tee at all, for the non-golfers in your group. You can play by yourself or you can play with your buddies. You can bring your own clubs or you can use the complimentary Callaway irons located in the bays. There’s also TopGolf merchandise and apparel for sale.
By midafternoon, the bays were filling up, with customers pouring in from the nearby office parks and with happy hour approaching. The crowd figures to grow even more as Friday night approaches.
At the end of my day, I left impressed by the technology, taken in by the gaming aspect, and overall, thoroughly entertained. If I lived closer, I’d be a repeat customer as much for the atmosphere as for the golf.
But I also found that one universal golf truth still holds, even at Topgolf: You will always still aim at the guy in the tractor as he rolls across the range to pick up the balls.
It remains the best target in golf.
