Players 2026: Is TGL to blame for the recent spate of back injuries? This sports doctor explains
With a single swing of Collin Morikawa’s driver on Thursday, the entire complexion of the Players Championship changed. After an innocuous practice swing on the par-5 11th, Morikawa’s second hole of the tournament, one the hottest picks for the week grabbed at his lower back in obvious pain.
A short while later, Morikawa officially withdrew from the tournament.
Though Morikawa didn’t see his injury coming, a chorus of critics have attributed the recent spate of back injuries to a surprising source: TGL, the upstart simulator golf league now entering the final weeks of its second season.
Of course, these are just people on the internet, and as we all know you should never trust people on the internet, but the theory, on its own, isn’t that far-fetched. Boston Common GC captain Rory McIlroy is dealing with ongoing back issues, Justin Thomas has just returned from winter back surgery, and Billy Horschel has still yet to find his form after a lengthy injury absence following Atlanta Drive GC’s SoFi Cup win in 2025. Is there more to Morikawa’s early exit on Thursday than mere coincidence?
To dig a little deeper, we reached out to sports doctor Ara Suppiah. Suppiah wears many hats—he continues to practice as an ER physician and serves as Golf Channel’s chief medical analyst—while also working as a sports physician to superstars across golf and tennis. Asked about the recent back injuries among TGL pros including Morikawa, Suppiah refuted any direct connection, instead pointing to the added load, both in miles and swings, that players face on the modern PGA Tour.
“They're just very, very good players [Morikawa, McIlroy, Thomas, et al.] who happen to qualify for TGL. They could just as well play Augusta National and have similar back issues, so I don't think it's a direct correlation [to TGL]," Suppiah told Golf Digest. "What I do think that is probably unspoken, is that additional load is a factor. The TGL is played in Florida. Some of these guys fly across country from the West Coast to the East Coast to play an event for two days, and then off they go again. Their bodies are fatigued, they’re hitting more balls and then they injure themselves not necessarily because they’re hitting off mats—not necessarily, because they’re trying to chase speed on a simulator or anything like that—it’s just the extra load, of, hitting balls in any situation.
“You see it in other sports like tennis … When Carlos Alcaraz broke out, he ended up playing a bunch of exhibitions at the end of the season all over the world. Then the following season his game suffered … If you add load to the system, the system is more fatigued, then the players go off and practice on a normal day and they end up getting injured. People look back and they go, ‘Oh, it's because, you played TGL,’ but there’s no direct correlation there.”
Suppiah believes there is nothing specific about the TGL setup—not the grass, not omnipresent launch monitors tallying up every mph, not the need to swing harder to compensate for the limitations of the technology, as some have speculated—that is causing these injuries. It’s simply the increased workload. Given PGA Tour CEO Brian Rolapp’s outline this week about a new quality-over-quantity schedule, it seems the tour may already understand this.
In addition to the increased number of reps and distance traveled, Suppiah believes the other major contributing factor to back injuries are the all-out demands of the modern golf swing.
“I know these guys personally. They are gym rats. They work out really hard to protect the back. To be super strong. Sometimes you'll get an athlete whose engine is powerful but their chassis is not matured. I think someone like Will Zalatoris or [LIV Golf’s] David Puig falls into that picture,” Suppiah said.
“But then you have a person whose engine is super strong, and the chassis is super strong, and now they’re just going at it really hard … add to that travel, heat, dehydration, poor sleep and stresses off the golf course … the body then is fatigued. It’s in a state of stress and it's got to do something that's pretty unusual and then it gets injured.”
TGL is, of course, relatively young, with its second postseason set to begin on Tuesday when Atlanta Drive GC takes on LA Golf Club and Boston Common Golf faces Jupiter Links GC. The impact it has, or doesn’t, on players will continue to evolve as the league itself does. The good news for players like McIlroy and Thomas, as well as other TGL pros like L.A.’s Sahith Theegala, who missed much of 2025 with a pinched nerve in his neck, is that SoFi Center is just a four-hour jaunt down I-95 from TPC Sawgrass. It’s also, conveniently, near many pros’ South Florida homes. Perhaps a few nights of sleep in their own beds will do their weary backs some good, TGL or no.