Shonda Rhimes
Ryan Murray
Shonda Rhimes’ obsession with golf will now extend beyond her own game.
The TV creator behind hits Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and Bridgerton is the newest investor in the Los Angeles Golf Club, the L.A. based team of the upcoming, tech-focused golf league, TGL, which aims to democratize the sport.
Rhimes had read any early article about the concept — effectively, indoor team golf backed by Tiger Woods and Rory McIlroy’s TMRW Sports — and was immediately intrigued. She and one of her daughters had started taking golf lessons when they relocated to the east coast, and Rhimes quickly became fanatical. “I don’t know how to do anything halfway,” she acknowledges, adding with a laugh: “It helped that I’m sort of naturally good at it, which is not something that I expected. So, then it was sort of like, ‘Well, I’m born to do this.’”
At one point, Rhimes flirted with the idea of investing in a professional basketball team, but then the TGL opportunity came along and it felt considerably more authentic. “Just much more me,” she says. And though she insists she couldn’t be happier with her 3,000-mile distance from L.A., she opted to invest in the L.A. team because of the fellow investors, namely the Williams sisters and Serena’s husband, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian. Other high-profile backers include golfer Michelle Wie West and soccer icon Alex Morgan.
Other TGL franchises have been confirmed in New York, Boston, Atlanta, Jupiter, Florida, and the Bay Area, with the inaugural season set to kick off in January 2025. The games, which will be televised on ESPN and streamer ESPN+, are all going to be played in the custom-built SoFi Center in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. It will feature both state-of-the-art simulators and physical greens. In its ongoing bid to make the sport more accessible, the L.A. club has already committed to give 10 percent of sponsorship revenue to community-based programs across Southern California.
The news comes as Rhimes continues to grow her footprint across the entertainment landscape. Her titular company, Shondaland, which is in its second, nine-figure deal with Netflix, has tentacles in television, film, podcasts, major brand partnerships and live events. (It’s among the reasons that she was recently honored as THR‘s TV icon.) On a personal level, Rhimes is also a board member at both The Kennedy Center and Lincoln Center as well as at her alma mater Dartmouth, serves as an advisory council member of the Obama Foundation and as a trustee of American Film Institute, or AFI.