Callaway in 1983, the year he bought the company that would become Callaway Golf.
Source: Courtesy Nicholas CallawayThe Game Changer: How Ely Callaway Remade Golf
Twenty-four years after the death of the man who gave the world the Big Bertha driver, his memoir is being published. Bonus: Through AI, you can hear it in Callaway’s own voice.
At the dawn of the 1980s, Ely Callaway Jr. was a spry sixtysomething with a Rolls-Royce in his garage, an elegant golf swing and not a care in the world. He’d already enjoyed one highly successful career as the president of Burlington Industries, back when it was a Fortune 50 company. Callaway had a Don Draper-esque existence in New York, dining most nights at 21 Club, Gallaghers or the Four Seasons before retiring to his penthouse on Sutton Place or his 20-acre estate in New Canaan, Connecticut. Or perhaps a cabin at Pine Valley in rural New Jersey, one of the most exclusive and macho golf clubs in the country.
Callaway’s abrupt departure from Burlington in 1973 had puzzled his friends and colleagues, but it led to his unlikely reinvention as winemaker in an unexpected place: Temecula, California, in the high desert 500 miles south of Napa Valley. While few people believed decent grapes would grow there, Callaway leveraged his considerable charm, showmanship and connections to turn his eponymous wine label into an underdog success story. In 1981 he sold the company for $14 million (about $48 million in today’s money) and settled into a golf-centered preretirement at the Vintage Club in Indian Wells, California.