Stop Letting Your Tee Steal Your Yardage with Mark Chantal

·38 min·2 clips

Cup the ball and tee together, lean the tee to 17 degrees forward, and if the ball falls off, rotate it.

1. The IMAGEN Golf Podcast episode 'Stop Letting Your Tee Steal Your Yardage' covers the Pickup Tee, a hollow plastic golf tee that sits at a forward lean of about 17 degrees. 2. Host Daniel Guest, a former corporate professional of 30 years who became a golf instructor, interviews inventor, owner and president Mark Chantal, who started as a machinist. 3. Mark's central claim is that the tee is kicked forward rather than backward at impact, which he says improves backspin, side spin and ball speed 'across the board.' 4. Mark traces the idea to a day he heard a course owner's son complain about broken wooden tees, then made his first tee on a lunch hour from glass-filled Delrin and gave it a mirrored 45-degree ball seat. 5. His patent lawyer's 11-month wait ended in a rejection, and Mark says a Titleist ball with a new dimple pattern led to an amendment and a patent granted in 1996. 6. Mark says Dr. Jerry Elwell, a PGA PhD who studied golf balls for 20 years, projects 2 to 4% better data with a center-weighted driver, and that Johnny Miller called it 'a PhD product' for its dispersion data. 7. Mark describes slow-motion video and robot testing in England in which his tee outperformed every competing performance tee, with 5 mph more ball speed and a 0.6-degree higher launch angle. 8. Mark says Chip Brewer at Callaway asked about mold capacity after a club fitter tested the tee, and Mark now wants a PXG driver for further testing. 9. Mark reports one tee that took 3,062 driver impacts, and a magnetic grip pickup system that Daniel tried in a simulator where the tee traveled three to five feet. 10. Golfers curious about equipment data and small-company inventors would enjoy this episode.

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