Persistence and Practicality Personified

If you go on Amazon.com, you can find packets of more than 100 golf tees for $10 that can be at your door in a day. But the item wasn’t always so easy to come by.

The wooden golf tee was invented by an African-American dentist named Dr. George Grant, who was born in 1846 to escaped slaves. Grant worked as an assistant at a dentist’s office and became the second African-American man to graduate from Harvard Dental School. He later became the university’s first African-American professor and launched his own dental school, according to Usga.org.

But his true love was always the links — and he had grown frustrated with using wet mounds of sand provided by golf courses to hit his initial shots.  

So, in 1899, Grant got a patent for the wooden tee and distributed them to family and friends in his native Arlington Heights, Illinois. But he never monetized the concept, and the wooden tee really didn’t become commonly used until another dentist introduced it in the early 1920s.

Grant died of liver disease in 1910, but the United States Golf Association recognized him as the wooden tee’s original inventor in 1991.

Grant will never be a household name, but his story of perseverance, resilience and practicality is an important one for us to know.

The next time we’re either playing a round or are simply watching a professional drill a powerful shot off a tee, let’s remember and appreciate its origins.