Boston Common tees off Monday in debut

They’ll square off against a threesome from Jupiter Links featuring legend Tiger Woods.

“The players are sort of champing at the bit,” said Mark Lev, president and CEO of Boston Common Golf. “I’m not sure you would ever see Rory playing Tiger in a competitive outdoor environment moving forward — you’d need both guys to be in the same group in the final round, and hopefully that happens — but what’s great about TGL is you know who’s going to be playing who.”

There are a lot of unknowns, too.

One is, how will Lev and Boston Common Golf create buzz, never mind loyalty, for a team that features one New Englander in Bradley, an Irishman in McIlroy, an Aussie in Scott, and Japan’s Hideki Matsuyama, who will make his debut in the team’s third match, in mid-February.

Having David Ortiz on site rooting for Boston Common Golf on Monday night won’t hurt, but it will take more than Big Papi.

“I like to consider it a marketing opportunity as opposed to a marketing challenge,” said Lev, who also heads up Fenway Sports Management, the marketing and sponsorship arm of Fenway Sports Group, which owns the team as well as the Red Sox and Liverpool FC.

“Owning the teams that FSG owns who play their games or matches in their own town, obviously, when you’re looking to build fandom, there’s nothing more effective than that,” said Lev. “What we’ve tried to do so far is create that connection, we’ve had a docuseries created around the making of our team that aired on NESN and the Golf Channel. And certainly Keegan and his connection to this region is a huge asset for us. And we’re looking to build that connection, we’re going to be announcing at the match a commitment our team and players are making to donate 5,000 rounds of golf to an organization called Youth on Course that will provide tee times for kids in and around Greater Boston.”

These are still early days for Boston, Jupiter, and the other teams, representing Los Angeles, San Francisco, Atlanta, and New York.

“It will be a slow build,” said Lev. “But I think as our players play and show what they’re all about, they’ll endear themselves to fans in New England just like players on the sports teams in Boston do right now.”

Beyond trying to forge a bond with fans from each team’s region, the league as a whole has its hopes pinned on how the game attracts and keeps viewership.

The first match garnered an average of 919,000 viewers, and in Week 2, when Woods debuted, the number crept to 1.05 million.

Last week, the match between New York and Atlanta featured Justin Thomas, Rickie Fowler, Matt Fitzpatrick, and Patrick Cantlay, but no mega-stars. The result was an average viewership of 682,000.

That’s quite a dropoff, but one that Lev said the league is not making too much of given the small sample size of matches. He focused on the 868,000 average, which he said “exceeded expectations.”

For the 18-to-49-year-old demographic advertisers prize, Lev said TGL’s 43 percent of its viewership in that age group tops most of the major sports leagues and the median age of 51 is lower than the NFL, MLB, NHL, and Premier League.

With time slots being bumped around each week, Lev said viewership has been much higher than previous programming on ESPN.

“I think everybody’s really pleased with that. It’s a great foundation to build from,” he said.

It’s fair to say that the TGL considers the matchup between McIlroy and Woods, who are co-founders of the league, to be the biggest draw to date.

With players mic’d up, non-stop music played, and 1,500 fans in attendance encouraged to express themselves, TGL is deliberately charting a different look and feel from your standard golf tournament.

“There are no ‘Quiet, Please’ signs that are being held, quite the contrary,” said Lev, who noted fans in the arena can sit back and watch the play unfold in front of them, as opposed to picking a group at a traditional tournament to walk alongside for 18 holes. “When they’re hitting chip shots from around the green, they’re no more than 5 feet away from the fans in the stands.”

The players have been adjusting to more than the noise.

Besides hitting into a screen, players have noted the differences reading putts under television lighting than sunlight, plus other subtleties.

“Tiger was talking about how the artificial grass around the green complex, the chipping area, there’s a real difference between when they’re chipping down the grain versus into the grain,” said Lev.

The result is a work in progress, as TGL strives to retain a competitive element with the entertainment factor.

“There’s a little bit of building the plane as we’re flying it here,” said Lev.

Monday night, “Boston’s team” scans its boarding pass and takes off.

Michael Silverman can be reached at michael.silverman@globe.com.