“It’s such a simple thing,” said John Spitzer, managing director of equipment standards for the United States Golf Association. “I’m amazed that so many people spend so much time and energy on trying to change it.” The simple thing to which he refers is the humble golf tee, a peg made of wood that most of us grab by the handful or buy for a few pennies each, stick in our pockets, and don’t give a second thought to.

The road to the tee began with a Boston-area dentist named George F. Grant, who received a patent in 1899 for “an Improvement in Golf-Tees.” Grant’s tees consisted of a small piece of rubber tubing attached to a tapered wooden peg to be pushed into the ground. The rubber held the ball, and yielded when the club contacted it. He had them produced by a nearby manufacturing concern and gave them out to his friends but never tried to sell or market them.

That fell to William Lowell—another tooth doctor, coincidentally—who created the Reddy Tee in 1921. It was a one-piece implement of solid wood, painted red at the top so it could be easily found and cleverly named. He paid Walter Hagen and trick-shot artist Joe Kirkwood to endorse and use the device, and it was a commercial success, with more than $100,000 in sales by the time it was patented in 1925.

The introduction of the oversize metal driver in the 1980s led most golfers to adopt longer tees to go along with the larger and higher sweet spot of those clubs. The USGA has banned tees longer than 4 inches, a height that is well past the point of diminishing returns. Even back in the 1960s, Jack Nicklaus understood the value of teeing the ball high, which he explained by saying, “Through years of experience I have found that air offers less resistance than dirt.”

Golfers who have fairly steep swings (like me) break a lot of tees. We can only envy the legendary Canadian pro Moe Norman, who could play for weeks with a single tee. When his playing partners asked him how he managed to stripe his drives without dislodging the peg, he answered, “I’m trying to hit the ball, not the tee.” So are we all, Moe. So are we all.

We may learn from the last two sentences that the author________.