EXCERPTS FROM THE "TEE IT DOWN" DINNER
Last year at the U.S. Open at Southern Hills in Tulsa, I had the privilege to be included in an informal discussion at a private dinner hosted by the USGA. The discussion turned on how traditional championship courses could stand up against the onslaught of ball and implement technology. Thus I now report to you a proposal made by Peter Dawson, Secretary of the R & A, at that time with which I concur.
"There's one sure way to level the playing field of golf," the Wise Man said." And that is to take away the current artificiality. You don't have to ban any new technology. You don't require the player to give up his preferred ball with its hexogumple dimples and its hoxadymonic flight pattern. You don't even have to fight a patent. The only patent pertaining to my subject has long expired. "We also have a long-standing tradition on which to base our decision. It's called playing the ball as it lies," Mr. Dawson reminds us.
So colleagues, here's the plan: we ban the tee from the tee.
Each club player will be allowed to roll his ball around on that area, praying that he finds a tuft of something, or a worm-cast, or a acorn-cup or whatever, while our job will be to ensure that each tee is properly constructed to be tightly cut and as smooth and fine as any eleven stimp-measured green. But during club medals or other championships, the rule would be simple. Drop the ball between and behind the markers and play it from where it comes to rest.
There will be one new etiquette standard, and that shall be all. A player who scuffs the teeing area will be required to make repairs from available sod and sand to ensure the area is left as pristine as we presently leave bunkers and greens. With that then let the best player find some way to fly the ball with a 7.5 degree light-alloy, bigheaded driver three hundred and thirty-three yards through the air.
And for my fellow golf course architects in the audience we shall have a role to play in all of this. Up until now most of you have been moving bunkers on the fairway wings forward from two hundred and sixty yards out into the high two eighties. Now I want you to consider placing sizable bunkers with significant lips, and very soft, powdery sand, say about fifty to one hundred yards or so from the championship tees as Donald Ross once implemented.
I see some of you grimacing, no doubt thinking that this change will only service to take the driver out of the hands of highly-skilled exponents of golf; and that they will simply use a 3-wood to get ample distance, the way young Tiger Woods has done in order to master holes such as that tough, dogleg 13th at Augusta National with a high sweeping hook. Perhaps therefore I have not been sufficiently explicit in the proposal.
What I heard is exactly the opposite: the driver will still be obligatory for everyone on the par fours and fives. The only other option permitted will be the wedge. Draconian, did I hear someone murmur? Perhaps, but you see we have sat around for long enough doing nothing while that was always the constant complaint. No, we have waited for far too long while technology crept up on us and turned golf on its ear. Now it is impossible to turn back the clock, and we are stuck with lawsuits by manufacturers, and how resistance to change is bad for the game and on and on.
Nevertheless, now we can do something and something very positive, even though it too will cause some measure of resentment. Still, that's the way things have always been with golf, ever since Old Tom Morris or even before his time.
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.
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