It was one of those defining moments. Greg Norman had just hit his drive during the Skins Game, that annual affair where a quartet of multimillionaires play a round for hundreds of thousand dollars of the sponsor’s money. As the ball soared off into the ether, the Shark was paying no attention to his drive, focused instead with increasing desperation on the ground beneath his feet.
  The object of the search: his tee. A tee. A three-cent tee.
   All golfers know the feeling. For whatever obscure reason, the loss of one’s tee is an oddly disconcerting thing. That it could have been right there one instant and gone the next seems almost supernatural. We’ve all played with golfers who think nothing of letting a top-of-the-line Titleist shanked into the forest go without a second glance but who will devote precious minutes to searching for that vanished tee.
  It has no movable parts, it doesn’t come with a fancy dimple pattern, it doesn’t have a titanium core, it isn’t endorsed by Tiger or Annika, it doesn’t get updated every other year, and it doesn’t claim to cut strokes off your handicap. It just sits there. Its job, in fact, is to just sit there. But the golf tee, which is celebrating a largely overlooked centennial this year, may be the most perfect piece of golf technology ever conceived.
  Consider: What else can you buy nowadays where the standard purchase size is the handful? Long before I ever played golf, I loved reaching into a large vat of tees for my father, seeing how many I could collect in a single naked grasp. One also first appreciates the principles of retailing when considering the narrow opening proprietors would put on the vats to keep the number down.
   Or consider: What other piece of equipment in your bag is just as useful broken in half? When I play the tight fairways on the back nine at Rock Creek, I rely almost entirely on the chitterings of broken tees thoughtfully left behind by previous golfers for my iron drives.
  Break your Burner Bubble in half and see what it gets you.
   You can clean your club face grooves with a tee. You can scrape your spikes. You can mark your ball. You can create a target for putting practice. You can advertise your company, your course or yourself. You can even chew a tee to calm your nerves, enjoying at the same time a naughty thrill because you know the groundskeepers are always warning you not to.
  In fact, the more one contemplates that a simple 2-inch peg with the gently bulging shaft and the nurturing cup, the more an entire world of golf – historical, social, commercial, emotional – opens up.
   New Yorker writer Roger Angell once wrote that to hold a baseball is to want to throw it. Along the same lines, to see a daintily teed-up golf ball is to want to smack it. The image could not be more humble or inviting: a clean white dot offered up on its own personal serving tray. The sight of a well-hit drive sitting up nicely in the fairway is inviting enough, but nothing can beat the clean, clear shot that a golf tee affords. The golf ball, such a tease at almost any other time on the course, looks completely vulnerable sitting up there, so ready to be ravished — just the way it ought to look.
   In one of the few instructional passages I’ve seen on teeing strategy, Jack Nicklaus sternly condemns the occasional weirdo one encounters who eschews the tee when using an iron to a par 3. “That tells me he prefers a pretty good lie to a perfect lie,” Nicklaus says. “Not smart.”
   As I write this, the Early Spring 1999 L.L. Bean Catalog for Men has just arrived in the mail, with a pretty lame picture of a model pretending to be a golfer caught in mid-backswing on the cover. It’s all wrong: The hands are too high, the swing plane too vertical, the elbow’s flying out, the right leg’s too stiff, even the yellow-and-chocolate-brown ensemble he’s wearing isn’t very attractive. The only perfect things in the picture: the tee and ball, resting invitingly on the ground at the guy’s feet.
  They make tee holders, tee clips, even tee belts, but real golfers prefer to hoard tees in a settled clump at the bottom of their bag’s ball pocket. Even at rest, then, the loyal tee supports the ball. The tee mass is a kind of rich, loamy soil in which ball markers, divot tools, old pencils and spare change can be found, with that blind, swishing motion of your hand like a miniature treasure hunt as you reach in for what you need.
   Since tees, like matches and rubber bands, are a commodity where you always seem to have plenty even if you haven’t bought any in years, I like to think that perhaps they are reproducing right there in the bottom of the bag. And in keeping with their ultradiscreet character, tees never make any noise about it so as not to disturb one’s putting.
   Like the bicycle and the banana split, the “technology” behind the golf tee was around for centuries before an individual genius got the inspiration to invent it. That inspiration was patented 100 years ago, on Dec. 12, 1899, and the man who received the patent deserves more recognition than he’s received.
  Harvard graduate George F. Grant was one of Boston’s best-known dentists and an avid golfer around the turn of the century. He was also not welcome at any of New England’s top courses — Grant was black. (The account here relies heavily on