Tee ’em Up

For the past few years, one of the things I’ve tried to do to keep active is play golf. Weather (and other activity) permitting, I try to play every week. Recently, I had occasion to buy a bag of golf tees. There were about a hundred of these things in a plastic bag labeled wooden golf tees. I got to wondering why they were called “tees.” They don’t look like a “T.” I know they “tee” a football up for the kickoff and the contraption they use to sit the ball on doesn’t look like a “T” and it doesn’t look like a golf tee. When our kids were young, they played T-ball. The ball was set on something that looked like a long pipe and they tried to hit the ball with a bat. That pipe looking thing didn’t look like a “T” or a golf tee or a football tee… seemed like this was just begging for some extensive research.

Apparently the word tee is derived from the Gaelic word “tigh” meaning house and is related to the game of curling — it refers to the “house” in curling (the colored circles.) In early golf, one hit the first shot toward the next hole from within a “circle” of one club length around the hole just played. In the 19th century, Tom Morris created a separate area to hit the first shot for the next hole and it was referred to as a teeing area.

The original “tees” that golfers used to raise the golf ball off the turf were made of piles of sand. On each tearing area there were boxes filled with sand for that purpose. Some golf courses still have these boxes, but today they are filled with fertilized soil for filling in divots in the tee box.

Well, you might imagine that the little piles of sand were messy, so naturally ingenious golfers came up with alternatives. They tried things much like a football tee — a slab resting on the ground with vertical rubber prongs or a hollow tube to hold the ball in place. The first known tee to penetrate the ground was the “Perfectum” tee, patented in 1892. The first commercial golf tee (the one we know today) was called the Reddy Tee and wan invented in 1921.

A standard golf tee is 2.125 inches long, but both longer and shorter tees are permitted. According to the PGA, for a tee to be legal, it must not be longer than 4 inches and it must not be designed or manufactured in such a way that it could indicate the line of play or influence the movement of the ball.

My extensive research didn’t turn up much in the way of an interesting story, but it is what it is. The origin of some words is just boring — in fact, a lot of people think golf is boring. But, I bet there’s some interesting history behind some terms used in golf — stay tuned….
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