What is a golf tee?

A small device used to raise a golf ball off the ground when teeing off.

Definition

A golf tee is a device that raises the ball above the ground for the first stroke on a hole. Under the Rules of Golf it may be used only when starting play of a hole, must not be longer than 4 inches, must not indicate the line of play, and must not influence the movement of the ball.

Before tees existed

For most of golf's history there was no tee. Players formed a small cone of damp sand or earth on the teeing ground and balanced the ball on top. Caddies carried a box of sand for the purpose. It worked, and it was slow, messy, and different on every hole.

The first patented golf tee came from William Bloxsom and Arthur Douglas in Scotland in 1889. A decade later, in 1899, Dr George Franklin Grant, a Boston dentist and the first Black faculty member at Harvard, received the first American patent for a wooden tee. Grant never commercialised it. The tee that became universal was Dr William Lowell's Reddy Tee in the 1920s, which succeeded largely through an arrangement with Walter Hagen and Joe Kirkwood on their exhibition tour.

What a tee actually does

Two things, and only one is obvious.

The obvious one is height: it lets you strike the ball before the ground, which for a driver means catching it on the upswing, high on the face, for higher launch and lower spin.

The less obvious one is consistency. A tee sets the same lie every time, which is something no other shot in golf offers. That is why tee height is worth thinking about at all. It is the one variable in the golf swing you can fix exactly before you move.

Materials

• Wood. Usually birch. Cheap, breaks easily, biodegrades slowly once lacquered.
• Plastic. Usually polypropylene. Durable, cheap, and effectively permanent in the environment.
• Bamboo. Stronger than birch under tensile load and biodegrades faster, though most are made a long way from where they are used.
• Rubber. The socket-mounted tees found on driving range mats. One fixed height, and they track the synthetic grass.

Tees and hitting mats

A conventional tee does not work on a hitting mat, and the reason is structural. A mat is synthetic pile over a dense rubber underlayer. The pile alone is too soft to hold a tee upright, and the rubber beneath is too dense for a wooden or plastic tee to penetrate. That is why range mats use fixed rubber tees mounted through the mat, and why golfers practising at home end up improvising.

Legal limits

4 inches (101.6 mm) maximum length. No alignment aids and no mechanical assistance.