Ely Callaway, founder of the namesake golf club company, did something few golf enthusiasts could imagine doing. He declined an invitation from Bobby Jones to join the Augusta National Golf Club in 1957.
Jones, a revered amateur golfer who won the Grand Slam in 1930 and was a co-founder of Augusta National with Clifford Roberts, was Callaway’s distant cousin and hero. Over the family’s mantel, long before the Masters achieved the major status it has today, hung a lithograph of Jones winning the Amateur Championship, also known as the British Amateur, and completing the Grand Slam. Across it was a personal handwritten inscription from Jones to Callaway and his first wife, Jeanne.
Nicholas Callaway said his father had practical reasons to turn down Jones.
“Ely’s rationale later in life when he became the Callaway of Callaway Golf was that since Augusta was only open for a portion of the year, most of the year he would spend fielding calls from friends angling to get an invitation to play,” he said. His father’s posthumous memoir, “The Unconquerable Game: My Life in Golf & Business,” is being released this month.
It worked out fine for him. “In the 1990s, he attended the Masters for many years and would get invited to play often in the days following the tournament,” his son said.
The decision had to have been difficult. Something that comes across in Callaway’s memoir was the impact Jones had on him.
“I know that Bobby was the single most important force in Ely’s life — as much for his great human qualities as his place in the pantheon of the sport,” Nicholas said.
Yet when his father got that invitation, he wasn’t the Callaway whose name adorns one of the biggest golf equipment manufacturers in the world, one whose clubs will be played at this week’s Masters tournament.
In 1957, Callaway was a senior executive at Burlington Industries, a large textile company, and he lived in Darien, Conn., with Jeanne, his wife at the time. He played at a high level for a suburban club golfer. In other words, he was a typical titan-of-industry candidate for Augusta in the 1950s.
But at the time Callaway wanted to run Burlington Industries, his son said, and the chief executive frowned on golf, preferring tennis instead.
Callaway left Burlington Industries in 1973. Out of work, he had to start over. He focused not on golf, but on building his California vineyard.
“Without that professional leap, there would be no Callaway Vineyards and Winery, no Callaway Golf,” Nicholas said. “It’s so hard to give up everything. It was the era of the company man, but he was a maverick within the company.”
The vineyard did well — Queen Elizabeth II drank two glasses of Callaway wine at a 1976 lunch in New York — and in 1981, he sold it for $14 million.
“I never saw him happier,” Nicholas said. “To come into his own. To start from the ground up. To create a great product that he loved. He took such delight in being a viniculturist, but also in creating a brand. He didn’t share how incredibly difficult it had been.”
Callaway had always been a solid amateur player, having taken up the game when he was 11 years old in LaGrange, Ga., after listening to his cousin Jones win the Grand Slam. After selling the vineyard, at 62, he played retirement golf in Indian Wells, Calif.
How he got into the golf business was more weekend hacker than golf club visionary. As his son recounts, Callaway picked up a wedge in a pro shop and started swinging it. He liked it and went to the founders of Hickory Stick, the company that made it, to talk about why they had put a steel rod through a hickory shaft, essentially blending old and new technology. The reason doesn’t matter so much as that the founders were running out of money.
He bought Hickory Stick and from there added golf properties. He wanted to rerelease the Bobby Jones instructional films from the 1930s. Then he got the idea of licensing the name of Jones’ putter, called Calamity Jane. Bobby Jones apparel came next.
“Without Bobby Jones, Ely wouldn’t have taken up golf,” Nicholas said. “He learned from Bobby Jones’ films on how to swing. He talked about Bobby throughout my life. I knew he was the most important figure to him, his North Star.”
How Callaway went from a traditional vision of golf to a breakthrough product, the Big Bertha driver, which started the current era of oversize and very forgiving clubs, was rooted in something more democratic, his son said. “Throughout his entire life, Ely wanted to take great products and bring them to the largest possible audience,” Nicholas said. “He was an anti-elitist. He had a business reason: The larger your audience, the larger your business would be.”
The Big Bertha, released in 1991, was a big bet at the time. Persimmon woods were still played on the PGA Tour, and metal woods were roughly the same size. The Big Bertha had a larger head, which helped golfers hit much longer drives, forcing courses like Augusta National to increase the length of their holes year after year.
“When I went out to California in 1990, he had a tour bag with a towel over it,” Nicholas said. “He was the cat that ate the canary when he had something new. He told me he had invented a club that was going to change the game of golf.”
Arnold Palmer, the four-time Masters champion, said at the time of Callaway’s death that the driver was “one of the most important things that ever happened in the game.” He added that Callaway’s “whole idea was to give them [average golfers] an opportunity to enjoy the game a little more.”
Callaway ordered 60,000 Big Berthas, which was a huge bet at the time. They sold out when the club was first offered.
“The first 10 years of Callaway Golf were very, very iffy — it was month to month and shipment to shipment,” Nicholas said. “Ely described the Big Bertha as betting the farm. But he did that a lot.”
Paul Sullivan, the Wealth Matters columnist from 2008 to 2021, is the founder of The Company of Dads, a work and parenting site aimed at fathers. He is also the author of The Thin Green Line: The Money Secrets of the Super Wealthy and Clutch: Why Some People Excel Under Pressure and Others Don’t. @sullivanpaul
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