When Ely Callaway died, he left a lot of things to his family, but one of the most interesting was an unfinished biography. Completing that work fell to his son Nicholas. It took more than a decade to assemble all the parts. You see, it had been started two or three times by various writers, but it was not finished before Ely died in 2023.
Now Nicholas Callaway has compiled all the various material into a comprehensive business life and golf life story of Ely Callaway called The Unconquerable Game.
Callaway, who most golfers know for the golf club company and Big Bertha, actually began his career in textiles, in LaGrange, Georgia. Textiles were the family business.
After college at Emory University, he enlisted and was with the Quartermaster Depot in Philadelphia.
After the army, Callaway went back to the private sector and eventually became president of Burlington Industries as well as a director of the company. He left Burlington in 1973, and no one really knew why until his biography. Let’s just say it was equal parts subterfuge, deception, and duplicity on the part of some business associates. That was explained in the mystery letter.
After leaving Burlington, Callaway bought acreage near Temecula, California, and started a vineyard, which eventually became Callaway Vineyard & Winery. In the 1980s, he sold the winery to Hiram Walker and made a tidy profit, nearly $10 million. Then, by accident, Callaway discovered the Hickory Sticks golf company. That eventually became Callaway Golf. But it wasn't by accident that he bought it.
Ely Callaway’s golf roots run deep.
Ely started swinging a golf club at age 3. But as a youngster, he became more interested in golf when he discovered that he was a distant cousin to none other than Bobby Jones. That would inspire just about anyone. Seeing Bobby Jones instructional movie shorts at the local theater was how he learned to play golf, according to Nicholas. And later in his life, Callaway would hunt down those movies and arrange for Sybervision to package them for sale under the title “How I Play Golf.”
One particularly amusing story was about the Big Bertha, the club that really put Callaway Golf on the map. Nicholas was also a golfer and was visiting Ely who just had to tell him about the new club that the company had designed. Nicholas said the name of the club, Big Bertha, was awful and that he should use something else. But the funniest thing was when Nicholas made his first swing with the club. The ball dribbled off the tee, and the clubhead flew off and bumped into the grass.
According to Nicholas, Ely said,”We’re having a little trouble with the gluing right now.”
Now, there are bound to be some charming stories in this biography because Ely was, in fact, a particularly charming and gracious man. I was introduced to him at the 1985 PGA Show, as the owner of the Hickory Sticks Company.
When I told him I was getting ready to move out to the California desert, he said in his very southern Georgia accent, “Call me before you come out. You and I and Cindy (his wife) will have BOO-FAY dinner at Eldorado --- because it is the BEST in the desert – and then we’ll play golf.”
Now, I can’t wait to hear the audio version of this book because it took several years for Nicholas to find the right voices and the right AI people to recreate the sound of the man that he grew up with, the “voice he heard every day,” as he said in an interview for The Golf Show 2.0.
True to his word, when I moved to the desert, we had BOO-FAY dinner and the next day, Billy Casper was my partner playing against Ely Callaway and his wife Cindy, who was delightful and quite a good golfer. We played at The Vintage Club in Indian Wells where he and Cindy had a residence.
A year or so later, when he was transitioning into a wider line of Hickory Sticks, he invited me to bring my parents out to play golf with him, again at The Vintage. My dad was a very good golfer, and my mom was no slouch, as they say in Caddyshack. Ely had a bunch of prototype clubs he asked my dad to hit during the round. A good time was had by all. My parents were thrilled to be invited, and I think Ely enjoyed himself as well. I was happy I could provide my mother and dad with a wonderful golf experience and an introduction to such an interesting business person in golf.
Later, in 1991, at the West Coast PGA Show, I was given a thorough explanation of a brand new club by Ely and his dynamic head of marketing/ sales, Bruce Parker. It was called the Big Bertha, and nobody had ever seen anything like it. It took the industry by storm, and after that week, both persimmon and golf’s standard drivers were left in the dust. At least for a while.
The book The Unconquerable Game, will be available in late March but can be pre-ordered now at Amazon. If there’s an option to hear part of the audiobook, take it.