....Our own historian Geoff Cornish, and some older members of the audience will probably recall reading about the acrimonious feud between featherie ball maker Allan Robertson and Old Tom Morris. It was so contentious that Old Tom moved his club-making and teaching business across the entire width of Scotland from St Andrews to Prestwick. Morris favored the new guttie ball, a product that would have put Robertson out of business had he not been decent enough to die first. That ball changed golf, and most say for the better, and perhaps that is hard to dispute because the easier, cheaper guttie attracted many more players to the game.
But fifty years later, the next-generation ball - that bouncing, bounding Haskell - was not viewed by top professional players as an improvement. The great Harry Vardon, after his first test, stated the new ball would make the game too simple and particularly decried the loss of one skill. "Playing the guttie into a tough headwind," Vardon wrote, "has always been the toughest shot in the game. Learning to strike down hard on the ball to ensure it does not bellow up and finish behind you was an art. Sadly this new ball has taken all the risk out of that shot." Thus the sand patty tee mound became more in vogue to help get the new ball get airborne. [Subsequently Vardon, the most talented player of his era accepted a lucrative tour of the United States to promote this new ball.]
Innovations, good and bad, were arriving thick and fast at the end of the nineteenth century. Among them the original greens mower provided the first consistently maintained putting surfaces. Dr. George Franklin Grant, graduate of the Harvard School of Dentistry, class of 1870, spent most of his nineteen-nineties leisure time on the recently imported fad of golf. Perhaps he was a persnickety fellow accustomed to permanently clean hands. Whatever the reason, he tired of making mud-pie tees from damp sand, he returned to his study and invented golf's first artificial aid.
Patent 638,920 was granted in 1899, a ball-perch around two inches tall, a folding rubber top on an upright stem. An immediate success? Not at all. Grant died in 1910, his tee-up idea shelved a decade earlier from lack of general interest.
The tee-it-up business and dentistry would appear to have no obvious connection, but the next and considerably more successful attempt to put the golf ball on an artificial pedestal was the brainchild of yet another American dentist, Dr. William Lowell from Maplewood, New Jersey.
Lowell first experimented with gutta percha, the material used to produce the rubber "guttie" ball but found the material too brittle. Local birch-wood proved more durable and he painted his trial batch green. Wrong! Red turned out to be the color that caught on and in no time at all "Reddy Tees" became a vogue. Walter Hagen helped the cause when he accepted a healthy fee from the inventor to publicize the product. Unlike Grant, or perhaps because Grant's patent was still viable, Lowell failed to register his product. Soon the burgeoning golf-market was flooded with imitations.
he artificial peg itself would change very little in the next eighty years, outlasting hickory shafts, the stymie, leather wraparound grips, the British ban on center-shafted putters, persimmon drivers, golf hats and shirts without logos, and yellow, bell-bottom pants. So please, if you will, concentrate on that word, artificial. Because that is what a tee is, an artifice, a ploy to simplify the game, a scam invented by a high-handicap player to help get the ball in the air. Golf, my friends, should properly be played from the ground to the ground into the ground.
Here's a bit of history. The "T" is an ancient Egyptian surveyors' mark, set in the ground, meaning 'begin here,' in the direction of the stem of the "T". But begin what? — A pyramid? — Or begin playing the Royal and Really Ancient game?
To my knowledge, only two entrepreneurial types made personal fortunes from tee-related matters. Naturally one was a frugal Scot, Hamish MacFadgen, who invented the woolie-bobble. The bobble, a sort of sporran tassel but made from knitting wool of various colors, was attached by a piece of tough thread, about a foot in length, to the tee-stem.
"Aye, I know it costs sixpence when the tee only costs thruupence. But you'll only need ane o'each in a lifetime of golf," he'd tell his parsimonious clients.
MacFadgen woolie-bobbles sold in millions until Grandma Gourlie discovered, much by accident, that bobbles were easily and cheaply made at home simply by means of twisting and knotting excess knitting yarn and so ended MacFadgen's fortune.
The sprawling British Empire introduced the game of golf to India long before it reached New York and Jamil "Pindle" Singh — so nicknamed for the paucity of his drives — also made a small fortune from the game. Aware that the ownership of a tiger's tooth was considered one of the most significant of all good-luck charms in his native land, he inventively added superstition to his sales pitch. Boring a small hole in each large tiger-tooth, he threaded a small wire through the hole and attached the other end to a wooden tee; a ploy by which he persuaded gullible clients that they could always find their tee and have good fortune at the same time. Such aids are now but a footnote in the litany of golfing memorabilia, while the artificial tee lives dangerously on. It is time to kill it before it kills the classic courses we know and love.
Of course there will be a minority who say we are changing the nature of the game by limiting freedom of choice. Yet, in modern times, we have most certainly done this before. Name me one golf course where a player, whether professional or amateur, is allowed to use any club other than a putter on the greens? Yet once upon a time the tee-off area was from just alongside the previous hole, and there was small difference to be noted.
I see a smirk over there. You, Sir - are you one of the Mulligan-types or perhaps an all season "winter rules" nudger? Of course there will be surreptitious rascals who will sneak wooden tees onto the course. But to quote a better source than anyone in this room, those fellows are simply not playing the same game as the rest of us. So be it. For the vast majority the game is simple. The USGA and the R&A set the Rules - we honor them.
We have choices now being forced upon us as rapidly as the Industrial Revolution forced unremitting change upon the 19th century. For us to simply sit back and do nothing will ultimately result in a routine of nine thousand yard golf courses, and what will be the point of that? To prove professional golfers play a different game from the rest of us? To defend Par as some sort of gesture to tradition? To humble those of us who from time to time would like to play the back tees?
Finally, we have Big Bertha and the little ball. Those who swing ever larger-headed drivers will set the ball upon even higher pegs. Today's young college limberbacks are already swinging from their heels every time because the physical properties of the medal driver have overcome Hogan's fear of the hook with his persimmon woods. But drop the ball on the ground and the large trampolined sweet spot will physically be above the ball as it lies and therefore useless. Get to the root cause and the new equipment will revert automatically to its former size.
And for all you architects who like to crack eggs to make fresh omelets, you will have plenty of design work to do. For example, you could even design, as Tom Fazio did, a "teeless" golf course like the short 10-hole replica course at Pine Valley. Let your imagination be your guide to help save the game.
Ladies and gentlemen, one simple decision today can change golf forever, for the good of all.
Ban the artificial tee from the game and do it now!
Robert Trent Jones, Jr.
as presented to the American Society of
Golf Course Architects annual meeting
Santa Barbara, California
April 28, 2002