So on those times when his job required him to be PGA Tour rules-enforcer and counselor at the same time, Mark Russell would be the masterful diplomat he was. “I understand it, I really do,” he would say to the player who was guilty of a little too much aggression on an inanimate object that was someone else’s property.
“But you can’t be smashing the damn tee markers.”
Truthfully, the huge majority of players listened because tee markers by overwhelming numbers lived to see another day. But let’s face it, “tee markers are sitting ducks,” said Curtis Strange and a fellow member of the World Golf Hall of Fame, Ernie Els, once explained that “Nobody’s made of rock out here. We all have our feelings.”
In other words, “it didn’t happen all the time,” said Russell, who was the longtime Vice-President of Rules and Regulations before retiring in 2021. “But (the tee markers) are convenient and in the heat of the moment, once in a while it did happen.”
Case in point: Last Friday’s second round of the U.S. Open at Oakmont when Rory McIlroy showed his disgust with an errant drive by smashing a tee marker on the left side of the 17th tee box. Sure, it was yet another hiccup in McIlroy’s wild post-Masters ride, but table that discussion for now. Instead, let’s find some sympathy in our hearts for defenseless tee markers and ask: Why are they the ones always getting smashed?
“Because they’re there.”
That answer was provided by the wisest sage on the pro golf scene, the esteemed Billy Harmon, and after laughing in a heartily fashion at his answer, it occurred to me that there’s plenty of fodder to support a story about smashing tee markers.
And one would need to start with the tee markers that likely absorbed the most smashes in PGA Tour history – those real pineapples that adorned all 18 holes at Waialae CC in Honolulu, which has hosted a PGA Tour tournament since 1965.
Mark Calcavecchia raised his hand and has never deflected ownership of his moment of anger years ago.
“I blew up a pineapple in Hawaii on the fourth hole of the year. Just covered the poor lady marshal,” said Calcavecchia. “John Huston asked me if I asked her if she had pineapple insurance.”
Corey Pavin is another one who one time buried his club into a very soft pineapple on the 13th tee, much to the misfortune of spectators standing close by. Heck, even Brad Faxon – as mild-mannered a player as you could meet – beat up on a Sony Open pineapple one year.
Having wised up, tournament officials at the Sony Open years ago changed to tee markers that are of the traditional box shape. They can still be picked on, but nothing like the days when players could easily take out their anger on a soft, perhaps over-ripe, pineapple.
“They were abused more than any tee marker on Tour,” said Strange. “Why? Because they were soft.”
Not that he condones such destruction, but Strange never was one to over-react about competitors smashing those pineapple tee markers at the Sony Open. “Quite frankly,” said Strange, “they have plenty of them over there. Get over it.”
The two-time U.S. Open champion explained, “We all have moments where we regret what we do, but sometimes it just happens.”
To some more than others, it appears, because in a very primitive data search of golfers smashing tee markers, two names came up frequently: Ian Poulter and Tyrrell Hatton.
The latter smashed a tee marker during the 2018 World Cup of Golf at the Metropolitan Club in Sydney, Australia. Then at the Dubai Desert Classic this past February Hatton explained that he was guilty as charged but threw himself on the mercy of the court.
“Yes, I probably shouldn’t have done it. Does that make me a bad person? No. It was a spur-of-the moment thing,” said the volatile, yet loveable Englishman.
Poulter is masterful at exonerating himself because he apparently considers himself the only one out there with competitive fire. “I won’t lose my passion,” he declared after smashing a tee marker in Cologne, France, in the 2011 Mercedes-Benz Championship. Four years earlier he had been reprimanded for breaking tee markers at the Open Championship at Carnoustie, then at the British Masters.
“I’m not going to accept hitting a bad shot,” said Poulter in his own defense. “It’s not in my DNA.”
Hitting those poor, little ol’ tee markers seems to be in his DNA, but players always need to step back a minute and consider what happened to Aussie Brett Ogle at the 2001 Heineken Classic outside of Perth.
Ogle smashed a tee marker after an errant drive and found out later that a piece of flying debris had cut a 43-old woman standing close by. “A hurtful fit of pique ”opined the Sydney Morning Herald and Ogle felt so awful that he reached out and apologized to the woman.
Certain golf courses, given their extreme set-up, will test players’ nerves more than others. Oakmont, for sure. But Carnoustie might be even more brutal on golfers. It led Lewine Mair, for years the widely-respected golf correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, to write about the actions of Sweden’s Henrik Stenson at the 2007 Open Championship.
“After hitting his first shot out of bounds at the eighth and knocking his second way right, (Stenson) took out his frustrations on the R&A’s tee marker. It smashed into a million pieces . . . ” she wrote, adding later that the Swede was assessed a fine of 500 pounds.
In Stenson’s case it was tough to hide, given the eyeballs on an event the stature of the Open Championship. But Russell said rules officials can’t be everywhere, so many times they only hear of tee marker-smashes through marshals.
“(Yet) I never had a player who didn’t own up,” said Russell. In fact, one time a player corrected the marshal’s account. “(The player) told me, ‘I didn’t take one big smash, I took a swipe at it and missed, but on my second swing I got it.’ ”
If there’s a deterrent, Russell saw it years ago at the LaJet Golf Classic in Abilene, Texas. “They used these oil drill bits and big, steel tee markers,” laughed Russell. “No one was going to smash those.”
Reminded of those tee markers, Strange laughed. “I won there (in 1984),” but, no, it never entered his mind to smash one of them. He could get hot, yes, but Strange wasn’t a tee-marker-smasher, though he understood why others were and to this day he’s not offended when he does see a player act as McIlroy did at Oakmont.
If the PGA Tour or the R&A or the USGA or the PGA of America think it’s an issue and this smashing of tee markers needs to be eliminated, Strange suggests “they just put a big stone there.”
Any chance some of those LaJet tee markers could be found and dusted off?
