The big tees - Company does its share to give golfers a lift

BURNHAM, Maine -- For Bob Burr, bigger is better when it comes to the lowly golf tee.

Burr, the chief executive officer of Pride Golf Tee Co., has taken the small wooden spike to new heights -- literally.

The company has cashed in on the popularity of oversized golf drivers by adding five-eighths of an inch to the standard tee. Sales have grown sixfold in the past two years as they have become a staple among a growing legion of golfers, including some on the PGA Tour.

The longer tees are projected to account for 30 percent of Pride's sales this year. That's up from 15 percent of sales in 2002 and 5 percent in 2001.

For a product that has remained virtually unchanged since it was invented 107 years ago, that sort of sales shift is as rare as a double eagle.

"It's amazing. The golf tee business is fairly ho-di-do, and we don't experience wild swings like this," Burr said. "It's a phenomenon to us."

The wooden golf tee was created by a Boston dentist who was tired of making a mound of dirt for the ball when he teed off. He fashioned a wooden peg, patented it in 1899 and changed the game.

While better drivers, irons, golf balls, bags and gloves have been fabricated through the years, little attention has been paid to the tee. After all, tees sell for less than a nickel each and reside in the dirt.

But as drivers started getting bigger in the early 1990s, Pride Golf smelled opportunity. It took the standard 2 1/8-inch tee and elongated it 29 percent, to 2 3/4 inches. A 3 1/4-inch model was added last year.

At first, oversized tees barely made a blip on the sales charts. But now that oversized clubs have become the norm, long-tee sales have taken off.

The reason is simple: physics. Because club faces are taller, golfers need to tee their ball higher to hit the sweet spot.

Tom Wishon, owner of Tom Wishon Technology in Durango, Colo., said drivers a decade ago typically had club faces about 1.7 inches high. Today's oversized drivers can have club faces as high as 2.4 inches.

Golfers can probably tee the ball to the appropriate height with a standard tees, but the longer tees are more stable, he said.

"There are a lot of drivers who psychologically look at a normal tee on the ground and say, 'This thing isn't large enough to get the ball up high,"' he said. "Technically they'd be fine, but psychology is 98 percent of it with golfers."

Burr estimates more than 7 million U.S. golfers use the longer tees, including some on the PGA Tour. Rich Beem, who won the 2002 PGA Championship, and Bob Estes have said they are fans of the longer tees.

A big market for tees

It's estimated that Americans will go through 1.5 billion to 2 billion tees this year, based on the 502 million rounds of golf that the National Golf Foundation says were played on U.S. courses last year.

Pride, the nation's only mass manufacturer of wooden golf tees, says it has 85 percent of the market. That means it will make more than 1.5 billion tees a year, including 500 million or so that are oversized.

Pride Golf, a division of Pride Manufacturing in Guilford, manufactures tees at plants in Burnham and in Florence, Wis.

At the 240,000-square-foot plant in central Maine, the machines run two shifts a day, 52 weeks a year.

To make tees, workers cut logs of white birch into 50-inch sections -- each of which will yield 10,000 to 15,000 tees. The sections are cut, dried in a kiln, and shaped into dowels on lathes.

The dowels are then put into machines that turn them into tees. Those machines, 32 of them, spit out the tees one by one.

The tees are then sanded and painted with multiple coats in tanks that spin around like cement mixers. The company offers 25 standard colors and is capable of producing more than 600 custom colors.

After passing final inspection, the tees are packed in plastic bags and boxes for shipping around the world. One day last week, as many boxes were packed with 2 3/4-inch tees as 2 1/8-inch ones

Besides adding to Pride's bottom line, the oversized tees have drawn attention to the tee -- an all-but-forgotten part of the game that The Old Farmer's Almanac once named as one of the 10 inventions that changed the history of sports.

"People don't think much about tees," Burr said. "Whether you have one or not is the only question."