Butler Pitch & Putt · Gumtree Golf & Nature Club · Manors Golf — photographs courtesy of each brand
The independent golf tee started as a joke on a blank. A gag about three-putts, a slogan about country clubs, screened onto whatever 4.2-ounce shirt the local printer had in a box. It was funny, it was $18, and it went translucent by the second summer. That was the whole category for most of a decade.
Read the product pages now and something has changed. Badlands publishes the construction: “Heavy Weight Jersey / 100% USA Cotton / 6.5 sq oz | 220 GSM / Side-seamed garment construction. 1x1 rib collar with straddle stitching.” Casualist lists 380gsm and Made in Portugal. Walker names 250gsm and a twin-needle stitch. Gumtree says its graphic is printed on 6.5oz American cotton and the shirt was sewn in the USA. Merrill gives you four lines and three of them are specification.
That is the shift. Not that the graphics got better — they were always the good part — but that the thing underneath them turned into a garment somebody is willing to describe in public. A brand that prints its fabric weight has made a claim you can hold it to. A brand printing on a Comfort Colors blank is telling you exactly which garment-dyed body it chose. Five years ago almost nobody in this category published either.
What follows is twenty-seven tees, one per brand, starting at $25. Eight of these brands are new to the site. Three of the twenty-seven are Austin businesses, and two of those three had never appeared here before. Every price was read off the brand’s own store on 19 September 2026 and is reproduced in the currency that store displays.
Two of these come out of Austin, and they arrived at the same sentence. Butler Pitch & Putt has been a par-3 course by Lady Bird Lake since 1949, and the shop prints its own Comfort Colors rather than licensing the logo to a merch company. Southside Golf Co is PGA professional Justin Aragon’s label out of Manchaca, attached to an indoor facility opening this month. One sells a shirt reading “This ain’t no country club.” The other sells one reading “No Country Club.”
That is the muni shirt in one image: the same sentence occurring to two people in the same city because it is the true thing to say about the place they work. Goat Hill Park in Oceanside sells “World Class, Working Class.” Muni Kids has been printing municipal-golf shirts in Portland since 2015. The category exists because public golf has a self-image and nobody else was going to print it.
What the numbers actually mean. Cotton weight is given two ways and they describe the same thing: ounces per square yard in the US, grams per square metre everywhere else. A standard fashion tee is around 4.5oz, or 150gsm. Everything in the section above starts at 5.5oz and goes to 380gsm, which is roughly double — the difference between a shirt that drapes and one that stands slightly away from you and keeps its shape through the wash.
The second number is singles, and Seamus is the only brand here that prints it: 22-singles. Higher singles means finer yarn, which means a softer hand at the same weight. A 6.5oz shirt in 18-singles and a 6.5oz shirt in 22-singles weigh the same and feel nothing alike. Garment-dyed is the third thing to look for — Swag, Fried Egg and Merrill all specify it — and it means the shirt was sewn first and dyed after, which is why those colours look slightly faded on day one and then stop moving.
Three notes before you click anything. Muni Kids’ I Am Tiger is sold on backorder — every size is purchasable, and every size currently shows negative inventory on their store, so it ships when they print more. Guerrilla Golf does not track inventory at all, so treat their sizes as a question for the shop rather than a promise. And Odd Ritual prices in South African rand; R1,000 is what their store charges, and we have not converted it into anything else.
The last thing to notice is where the artwork went. The Gumtree shirt puts an entire reference chart of American state flowers across the back. Walker, Merrill, Southside, Seamus, Hidden Links, BOLD and Casualist all print front and back. Butler’s whole statement is on the back, which is why the photograph at the top of this page is shot from behind. The chest logo has become the quiet half of the shirt, and the thing you are actually buying is facing the group behind you.
