Tee It Up

Before we go any further, I want you to look down at the tee in your hand  because it’s the story the whole message of this talk in miniature.

For roughly three hundred years after this game began, there was no such thing as a manufactured tee. A golfer, or more often his caddie, would kneel, wet a small pile of sand, and mold it by hand into a little mound just high enough to rest the ball on. Every tee shot in the early history of golf began with somebody else getting their hands dirty so the ball could sit up off the ground.

This course is where the tee itself was born as a sacred place. When Old Tom Morris redesigned St Andrews, this became the first course in the world to build a dedicated teeing ground separate from the green. Before that, you simply teed off right beside the hole you’d just finished. The very idea of the tee as its own starting place — set apart, built for you before you ever arrive — began right here.

And the wooden tee we hold today wasn’t invented until 1899 — by a Boston dentist named Dr. George Franklin Grant, the first Black faculty member in Harvard’s history. He was tired of getting his hands dirty molding sand, so he carved a wooden peg with a rubber cup on top and patented it.

He never sold it. Never marketed it. Never made a dime from it. It sat forgotten for nearly a century, until the USGA finally credited him, in 1991, as the true inventor of the golf tee.

The tee in your hand right now was teed up for you by a man who never once saw the payoff.

I. What Does It Mean to Tee It Up?

Every one of us in this room today is somewhere on a golf course we did not build. Somebody, before we ever picked up a club, walked out ahead of us, bent down, and pressed a tee into the ground so we would have a place to start our swing.

For me, that somebody was my father.

My Dad sacrificed and built a tee for my Brother and me. 

I did not earn that tee-up. I did not deserve it. I simply woke up one day and found the ball already sitting on top of it — and it was up to me to swing. Without my father, I would not have had the opportunities I have had. I would not have been able to hit the ball of my time, my talents, and my treasure the way I have. He teed it up. I just had to swing.

Sometimes my Dad had to get his hand real dirty and been extra low, to help build that tee. Hurricane Fredrick and really made it hard to build the tee. 

II. When Do We Tee It Up?

Teed Up: Rory McIlroy

Before Rory McIlroy was lifting Claret Jugs and completing the career Grand Slam, he was a boy in Holywood, Northern Ireland, swinging a plastic club his father had put in his hands at twenty-one months old. His father, Gerry McIlroy, was a good golfer himself — good enough to play scratch — but not a man of means. So, Gerry did what fathers who cannot write a check do: he worked.

Gerry McIlroy worked close to a hundred hours a week — mornings as a janitor at a local sports club, afternoons and nights tending bar. Rory’s mother, Rosie, worked a warehouse job and took the graveyard shift so she could raise her son during the day. For seventeen years Gerry caddied for him, adjusted the pars on their home course so a small boy could post a real score, and poured every spare pound into lessons and golf balls.

Rory has said he did not fully understand what his parents sacrificed for him until he turned eighteen and started earning his own money — that’s when he finally saw the cost of the tee-up.

Somebody teed it up for Rory McIlroy. And because of it, he has gone on to win major championships and set records that will stand in this sport for a generation.

Teeing Up for Someone Else: Byron Nelson

Byron Nelson is remembered as one of the finest players who ever lived — eleven straight tournament victories in 1945, a record that still stands. But ask the people who knew him best, and they’ll tell you his greatest shot was never on a golf course.

A teenage boy named Ken Venturi kept sneaking under the ropes at tournaments just to get close to Nelson. One day Nelson noticed him, spoke to him, and that was the beginning. Years later, Nelson took the promising young amateur on the road — traveling with him from exhibition to exhibition, coaching his swing and his character — and never charged him a dime.

Venturi’s road wasn’t easy. He battled a serious stutter, survived a car accident, and nearly collapsed from dehydration in the final round of the 1964 U.S. Open — and still won it. Decades later a hand condition ended his playing career early, but he went on to thirty-five years in the broadcast booth as one of golf’s most respected voices. Nelson’s widow said that if her husband could have, he would have adopted Ken as his own son.

Byron Nelson didn’t have to tee it up for Ken Venturi. He had already won everything. He did it anyway — because the whole point of being teed up yourself is to turn around and do it for somebody else.

III. Why Do We Tee It Up?

For the Doctors — Ben Carson

Doctors, this one is for you.

Before he became one of the most respected pediatric neurosurgeons in the world, Ben Carson was a struggling student in inner-city Detroit — failing classes, with a temper that nearly cost him everything. His mother, Sonya Carson, had a third-grade education, had been married at thirteen, and raised two boys alone while working two and three housekeeping jobs at a time. She could barely read herself, but she required her sons to read two books a week and report back to her on every one.

She had no money and no credentials. Only a fierce conviction that her boys would not stay where they started.

Ben Carson went on to Yale, then the University of Michigan Medical School, and became director of pediatric neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins by age thirty-three — the youngest in the hospital’s history. In 1987 he led the team that successfully separated twins conjoined at the head, a surgery that had never before been done successfully.

He needed someone to tee it up. It was his mother — with nothing but conviction — who did it.

For the Business Leaders — Milton Hershey

Business leaders, this one is for you.

Milton Hershey built one of the great American fortunes on chocolate. He and his wife Catherine were never able to have children of their own. In 1909 they founded a school for orphaned boys, and in 1918, after Catherine’s death, Hershey quietly placed the overwhelming majority of his fortune — his controlling shares in his own company — into a trust for that school. He kept it secret for five years because he didn’t want it to look like he was using orphans to sell more chocolate.

When people asked him why, his answer was simple: he’d had opportunities in life, and when they came, he took them — and he wanted boys who started with nothing to have opportunities too. Today the Milton Hershey School still educates and houses thousands of children from families in need, funded entirely by the trust he left behind.

He didn’t have to tee it up for anyone else. He’d already won. He did it anyway.

For the Pastors — Three Tee Graves

Pastors, this one is for you — and it may be the most important story in this entire talk, because in every case, the person who teed it up never lived to see the swing.

Charles Spurgeon

On January 6, 1850, fifteen-year-old Charles Spurgeon was walking to church in Colchester when a snowstorm forced him into a small Primitive Methodist chapel instead. The regular minister never showed — snowed in. So a layman, a shoemaker or a tailor by trade, with no theological training, climbed into the pulpit because there was simply no one else. He had so little to say that he stayed on one verse, Isaiah 45:22, preached in broad, uneducated dialect to a room of maybe fifteen people.

In that room, God saved Charles Haddon Spurgeon — who would go on to preach to congregations of five to ten thousand at a time, whose sermons are still in print more than 130 years later. That shoemaker never knew what he’d done.

John Bunyan

Bunyan’s own wife brought nothing into their marriage but two worn Puritan books as her entire dowry — they didn’t own so much as a spoon between them. Later, walking through Bedford as a tinker, Bunyan overheard a handful of poor women talking in a doorway about the new birth and the work of God in their hearts. He said it struck him like hearing people from another world. Those women sent him to their pastor, John Gifford, who discipled him into the faith.

Nobody remembers the women’s names. Bunyan went on to write Pilgrim’s Progress, one of the most published books in the English language, much of it written from a jail cell.

John Wesley

In 1709, five-year-old John Wesley was trapped upstairs when the Epworth rectory caught fire. A neighbor climbed onto another man’s shoulders and pulled the boy through a window moments before the roof fell. His mother, Susanna, called him “a brand plucked from the burning” and devoted herself to his soul from that day. Decades later, discouraged and doubting his own faith after a failed mission to Georgia, Wesley met a young Moravian pastor named Peter Bohler, who refused to let him quit — telling him to preach faith until he had it. Months after that, at a small meeting on Aldersgate Street, Wesley felt what he called his heart “strangely warmed.”

That moment is remembered as the birth of the Methodist movement — teed up by men on a ladder, and a young foreigner who wouldn’t let a discouraged preacher walk away.

Three men. Three graves I have personally stood at. And in every case, the person who teed it up was never famous, was never thanked, and never saw where the ball would finally land.

IV. Who Do We Tee It Up For?

Now think of the ones who didn’t wait for someone to tee it up for them — who walked out into ground nobody had ever broken, and became the tee themselves.

Adoniram Judson sailed for Burma and labored six brutal years before his first convert. He translated the entire Bible into Burmese, and when he died in 1850, still at sea, he left behind seven thousand believers and sixty-three churches. He is still remembered in Myanmar today as their most significant missionary — Saya Judson, “teacher” Judson.

David Livingstone walked some 30,000 miles across Africa, preaching everywhere he went even though he personally won only a handful of converts. When asked if it had all been a sacrifice, he said no — it was a privilege.

Hudson Taylor refused to ever ask a donor directly for money. He simply prayed for specific numbers of missionaries and specific sums, and trusted God to supply them — then pushed past the safe coastal ports into the interior of China where no missionary had gone. Today China is home to an estimated 100 million Christians, a harvest he never lived to see.

For my entire life I have heard about the underground leaders of the Middle East. It is time we heard about the upper-ground leaders — the leaders of the Himalayas, at the highest altitudes on earth. It is time for us, collectively, to tee it up for them.

V. How Do We Tee It Up Today?

I knew it was my turn to tee it up many years ago. I knew that God Almighty was calling me to tee up synergy, to tee up online education, to tee up networking. On August 17, 2007, I was compelled to send Sir Edmund Hillary a letter. That conviction took me, one afternoon, into the home of the greatest mountaineer who ever lived.

VI. Where Do We Tee It Up?

The Last Interview — Sir Edmund Hillary

On August 31, 2007, I had the honor of sitting down with Sir Edmund Hillary in his own home. I did not know it then, but it would be the last interview he ever gave before his death. I still have in my home the last three books he ever autographed.

I asked him the question everyone wanted answered: of everything he had done — being the first man to summit Mount Everest, crossing Antarctica — what was the greatest satisfaction of his life?

He paused for a long moment. Then he said no. It was not Everest. It was not Antarctica.

The greatest satisfaction of his life, he told me, was helping start twenty-seven schools in the highest altitudes of the world, so that Nepalese children could go further — could learn, could grow, could have a future their mountains had never offered them before.

I looked over at a photograph sitting on his television set and asked him — is that the first school you helped start? He said yes.

Sir Edmund Hillary stood on top of the world. And when he looked back over his entire life, the summit was not what satisfied him most. A tee — one he built for children he would never fully see grow up — was what satisfied him most.

Conclusion

The Ultimate Tee — Jesus Christ

Every story we have told tonight falls into one of three groups. There are those who teed it up for someone else — my father, Gerry McIlroy, Byron Nelson, a mother, a businessman, a handful of unnamed believers in the back of a chapel. There are those who received the tee and took their swing — Rory, Ken Venturi, Ben Carson, Spurgeon, Bunyan, Wesley. And there are those who broke their own ground and became a tee for people they would never live to see swing — Judson, Livingstone, Hudson Taylor, Sir Edmund Hillary.

But there is one more category, and it holds only one name.

Jesus Christ did not simply tee it up for someone else. And He did not simply receive a tee someone else had built. He became the tee — and then He paid the price for it Himself.

Every tee we have talked about tonight cost somebody something — sacrifice, sweat, years, money. His tee cost Him His life. He knelt down the way that caddie once knelt in the wet sand, except the ground He pressed Himself into was a cross. He built the place where we would rest the ball, and then He became the price paid for it, so that we would have somewhere to start our swing — not for one round, but forever.

That is what makes His tee the ultimate tee. He is the only one who was both the one who teed it up and the price paid for the tee itself. And His tee was not built for one generation. It was built for the past, the present, and the future — for everyone who has ever swung, everyone swinging right now, and everyone who has not yet been born to take their turn.

That is the tee underneath every other tee in this message tonight. And it is the tee underneath every swing you and I will ever take.

The Ask

My father teed it up for me. Gerry McIlroy teed it up for Rory. Byron Nelson teed it up for Ken Venturi. A mother teed it up for a doctor. A businessman teed it up for orphans he chose as his heirs. Unnamed believers teed it up for three of history’s greatest pastors. Missionaries teed it up in places no one else was willing to go. And Sir Edmund Hillary teed it up for Nepalese children he would never fully see grow up.

Now it is our turn.

The men and women in this room today — pastors, doctors, business leaders, and the wives who stand behind every one of you — have the resources, the influence, and the hearts to build this tee. I am inviting you to synergize, so we can hand hundreds of millions of people a tee they have never had, and watch them hit the ball of their time, their talent, their treasure and temple for the rest of their lives.

This is our tournament. We are on the 18th tee box! Of all the tournaments we will ever have the chance to play, this is the greatest one we will ever play together. We must not miss it. We must show up for it.

 

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