March 29, 2024
Bureau County Sports


Sports

Tees to please

Aimone hands out striped tees to welcome golfers to Edgewood Park

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If you’ve ever golfed at Edgewood Park Golf Club, you’ve undoubtedly met the “tee man” or seen his work around the golf course.

Fran Aimone has given out more than 3,500 of his trademark striped tees at Edgewood Park. It’s his way as a share holder and board member of welcoming new golfers.

“I used those as conversation starters for people who have never been at Edgewood. How you doing? Where you from? I give them tees to make them feel welcome. Made a lot of friends that way,” Aimone said.

“I just love going out there meeting people. I like representing Edgewood and make people feel good about coming. We get people from all over.”

Longtime Edgewood Park Course Superintendent Larry Ringenberg jokes he finds Aimone’s work at tee blocks all around the golf course throughout the day.

Aimone started his hobby with a salute to his Italian blood, striping tees in red and green. Once the Edgewood Ladies League saw Aimone’s work, he was asked to paint tees in pastel colors to be used as passouts for their play day.

His hobby expanded from there, providing tees in all colors for many groups.

He’s made black and gold tees for the Putnam County High School golf team and red and green for Verucchi’s Italian Restoranti play day. He also uses sports themes, including green and gold for Packers fans, blue and red for Cubs fans, orange and blue for Bears fans, gold and purple for Minnesota Vikings fans, black and gray for White Sox fans.

He’s also been known to hand out patriotic red and blue stripes on the white tees for the Fourth of July.

You name it, Aimone will paint it for you.

Most mornings, Helen Aimone will find her husband already out at the kitchen table striping tees. She said it keeps him out of trouble, but is also therapeutic for his hands that have been inflicted by Parkinson’s.

He buys tees in bundles of 500 and keeps a bag of sharpie markers in an assortment of colors nearby. Aimone can finish a tee in about 30 seconds and said it depends on how many tees he handed out the previous day to determine how many he will stripe on a particular day.

He places the tees six to a small bag with special instructions: “Use three today and the other three when you come back. And don’t try to use them on any other course, because they won’t work to keep the ball going straight.”

Aimone, who will turn 79 in January, is going to keep striping tees as long as he can. He said he can paint two stripes on a tee in 30 seconds.

The tees also come in handy for Aimone, who golfs nearly every day at Edgewood Park, although he has been temporarily sidelined for medical reasons.

“As far as playing good golf, the parade has passed me by,” he said. “I used to be a 4 handicap. Now I struggle to break 90.”

Sometimes he’ll play six holes with two balls, “but the problem with that, by the time I hit the second one I forget where the first one went,” he joked.

But he doesn’t lose nearly as many balls as he used to, “because I can’t hit them as far.”

Aimone golfed for many years and never had a hole-in-one. Then he had to switch from golfing from his natural left-handed side to right-handed, and got two aces in the span of three years, the first in 2000.

He still putts left-handed and said he’s known as the best putter at Edgewood.

“I have a 48-year-old putter. It’s the first oversized grip. It’s got 10 wraps of adhesive wrap on it,” Aimone said.

In his day, Aimone was known for his basketball talents. He stands as the all-time leading scorer (1,478 career points) at Hopkins High School in Granville, which became part of the Putnam County consolidation in the ‘60s. He averaged 24.2 ppg his senior year, once scoring 51 points in an 80-77 overtime win over Washburn on a badly sprained ankle.

Aimone, who played basketball at Illinois State University, was inducted into the Illinois Basketball Coaches Association in 2005.