The ReTee: Brilliant or Bonkers?

Have you seen the ReTee? It's a ballmark repair tool whose claim to fame is that it comes with a sharpener built in. A sharpener? You know, like those little sharpeners schoolkids use for their pencils: insert pencil into hole, twist pencil, blade of sharpener shaves off pencil wood and sharpens the lead.

Here's the thing about the ReTee's sharpener: It's pitched as a tee sharpener. Snap a long tee? Pop it into your ReTee sharpener, sharpen up the point of the tee, and use it again on a later hole.

Clever or crazy? Brilliant or bonkers?

My first reaction to the ReTee was this: I wouldn't be caught dead using a tee sharpener on the golf course, any more than I would show up with a ball retriever sticking out of my golf bag. C'mon, man, I'm not in my 70s yet!

And who needs to sharpen a tee to re-use it? On par-3 holes I frequently scour the tee box looking for a snapped off tee to use. But any tee will do, I don't need a sharp point on in order to be able to push it into the ground. C'mon, man, I'm not in my 70s yet!

But you know what? Fact is, every golfer should carry a ballmark repair tool. And the ReTee is that. And the sharpener can be used to sharpen pencils, not just tees. And while I would never bother sharpening a tee - that's just silly - there have been times when the little golf pencil has needed sharpening, or when the lead of the pencil broke and it became unusable. That's happened to every golfer at one time or another.

So maybe the ReTee isn't so silly after all? If you're going to carry a ballmark tool - and you should - why not carry one that can do more than one thing? Well, the ReTee costs around $6, and that's one reason you might not bother with it. You can get ballmark tools much cheaper than that (I've never paid for one, yet there are probably eight in the bottom of one of my golf bag pockets).

One other thing concerns me about the ReTee: I haven't seen one in person yet, but I've tried looking closely at the pictures. As far as I can tell, the blade of the sharpener is not covered on the back of the ballmark tool. That seems ... hazardous. Like a cut to your thumb waiting to happen. Maybe they've addressed that issue somehow that I'm not seeing.

What do you think: Is the ReTee brilliant or bonkers?

ReTee website

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