A piece of plastic made headlines at the Rugby World Cup in France recently when Samoan fly halfLima Sopoaga took to social media for help finding his lost kicking tee.
The former All Black left it on the side of the pitch while he signed autographs following Samoa's 43-10 win over Chile in Bordeaux. It was gone when he went back to collect it.
"Could whoever took my goal kicking tee from the field please give it back to me. I’ll even pay you for it. I’ve had it since I was 14 years old," Sopoaga said in a Sept. 16 tweet.
Rugby kickers like Sopoaga can thank the late Canadian Don Burgess for the invention of the tee. A former player and renowned coach, Burgess's tee allowed kickers to forgo digging up the field or using a bucket of sand to establish a launching pad for kicks.
"There's no Canadian who's had a bigger influence on the world (rugby) game, really. He's in every game," said former Canada captain Gareth Rees.
Burgess was someone who "was really interested in doing things that benefited the game and made it better, sped up slow passages in play," said Mark Wyatt, another former Canada skipper. "Goal-kicking being one of them."
Historically, rugby kickers had used their boot to dig up the turf to create some kind of platform to place the ball for a kick at goal. The procedure took time and damaged the field.
"I'd like probably an inch-and-a-half-high (3.8-centimetre) tee," said Wyatt, who worked with Burgess on the kicking tee. "You can imagine taking the heel of your boot and hacking at the ground from four different sides to basically (break) the ground up to create that tee."
In some countries, a bucket of sand would be provided for the kicker to use to build a kicking base. If all else failed, another player would lie on his stomach and hold the ball in place.
Burgess, who died in February 2018 at the age of 85, was an all-round sportsman who played for Canada against the famed Barbarians all-star invitational side in 1962. He went onto become a respected teacher and coach and was inducted into both the B.C. Sports and Greater Victoria Sports Hall of Fame.
"He was a special athlete — a great golfer, great track athlete and a boxer. There wasn't very much that he couldn't do on the athletic front," said Wyatt.
And as a coach, Burgess helped a lot of athletes hone their game, with Rees, Wyatt and fellow Canadian international Bobby Ross all benefiting from his expertise.
After much trial and error, Burgess created an artificial tee in the mid-'80s, with the willing assistance of Wyatt.
"The first one he came up with was a Styrofoam design. Because it was really easy to work with. So the first ball I hit, we actually blew the tee apart," Wyatt recalled with a chuckle. "It was back to the design phase pretty quickly."
They then went to a softer plastic, with much of the testing done on the fields at Victoria's St. Michaels University School.
"He'd bring his pocket knife and we'd trim it down and experiment with different heights," said Wyatt.
Burgess developed a prototype that could be stacked to provide different heights.
"The thing I liked about it is it was always consistent," Wyatt said of the tee. "It was the same height, no matter what."
In addition to consistency, the tee shortened the time around kicks. Years later, the quest to speed up games is ongoing. The current World Cup includes a shot clock that requires kickers to take a conversion within 90 seconds of a try being scored and kick a penalty within 60 seconds.
Rees still has his prototype of the tee.
"Almost the size of a dinner plate and it's about that thick," he said. "And when we started, it used to go farther than the ball."
One he settled on the design, in a stroke of genius, Burgess got Tetley to sponsor the tee, which was sold as the Tetley tee.
"He was extremely proud of it," said Burgess' son Mike.
"To advance it into the game, and having the IRB (International Rugby Board, now known as World Rugby) change the rules of the sport to allow a kicking tee to be used, was one of the highlights certainly of his sporting and coaching career and life obviously," he added.
The family is no longer involved in the tee business, with more established companies taking over the cottage industry established by Don Burgess and wife Barbara.
"I can recall the basement of their home being a production line of tees coming in from overseas," said Mike Burgess.
Don Burgess's role as inventor was more about improving sport than making money.
“I’m a teacher first and foremost and I never got into this other thing to make money,” he told the Victoria Times Colonist in 1998. “I was a kicker and I wanted to make life easier for them in rugby. That’s all.”
But while a labour of love, the tee helped pay off his mortgage, according to a 1999 National Rugby Post story.
Wyatt first used the tee in a test match in May 1987 in a 33-9 win over the U.S. at Thunderbird Stadium in Vancouver. He had already arranged to have the equipment manager/water boy to bring on the tee if he had a chance to kick for goal.
"He threw it on the field and the ref looked at me and said "What's that?'" Wyatt recalled.
Wyatt explained its purpose, only to be told by the official he couldn't use it.
"I said 'Well, you can watch me spend the next two or three minutes trying to build a tee or I can put the ball on the tee right now and have ago and then be done with it.' And he just said 'Go ahead.' And that was the first time it was ever used in an international match," said Wyatt.
Rees, one of three Canadians in the World Rugby Hall of Fame, remembers being heckled for using a tee while on tour in New Zealand.
"These hardened Kiwi fans were like 'Oh, Rees. Dig a hole like a real man,'" Rees recalled.
It took a while for rugby's governing body to accept the tee. The IRB approved its experimental use at the 1991 World Cup. And in November 1991, it amended the laws of the game around kicking, saying "The use of sand or approved kicking tees Is permitted for placing the ball."
The tee, literally, helped even the playing field for kickers.
"I don't know if it improved people's kicking. That's more of a biomechanical thing. But it made things a lot more predictable and it made that whole process that much faster and cleaner, which sped up the game and it just made the game better," said Wyatt.
Added Rees: "It meant you could replicate training conditions with match conditions so all the training was more effective. No question about that."
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This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2023.
Neil Davidson, The Canadian Press
