Editor’s note: “In Case You Missed It” is a GGP+ feature that highlights a story from Global Golf Post’s Monday magazine.
ORLANDO, FLORIDA | For many in the golf industry, attending the annual PGA Show in this central Florida city is a rite of winter. In addition to being a chance to see old friends and make new ones, it gives people an opportunity to learn about the latest advances in golf equipment, among other developments in the business.
The sentimentalist in me also finds time during that January gathering to reflect on some of the folks who made the Show both fun and productive in years past but for reasons ranging from death and illness to retirement are no longer able to make it. One such soul is Ely Callaway. And though it has been nearly a quarter century since the founder of his eponymous golf company last held court at the Callaway booth here (he passed away in 2001 at the age of 82), I invariably flash back to the interactions we had in O-Town – and chuckle about all the times he held one of his woods or irons before me and said in his high-pitched, Georgia drawl: “John, it’s just a better golf club.”
Time with Ely was always time well spent, and while golf was invariably the focus of our talks, they also touched on many different subjects, from winemaking (at which he had excelled some years earlier with his own vineyard, even producing a Chardonnay that Queen Elizabeth II liked so much she asked for a second glass) to his time as president of Burlington Industries (for many years the largest textile company in the world) and his interactions with eight U.S. presidents. Then there were his relationships with people as wide ranging as his cousin, amateur golf great Bobby Jones; business icons like Jack Welch of GE and Akio Morita from Sony; civil rights leader Vernon Jordan; and Mark McCormack, the man who created the sports marketing industry with his International Management Group, aka IMG, and for decades managed Ely’s dear friend, Arnold Palmer.
Callaway could also talk about roses, which he grew in his garden, and photography, where he demonstrated a keen eye for subjects including the Beatles during their fourth and last appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” in 1965 and President John F. Kennedy at an event in the New York Hilton just weeks before his assassination.
Ely’s successes in golf were extraordinary, with the biggest of those being the oversized, titanium-headed driver he dubbed Big Bertha. And by the time he went on to his great reward, Ely had sold nearly $6 billion worth of clubs bearing his name and made an indelible mark on the industry in another way by having Callaway be the first stand-alone golf company ever to go public, in 1992.
“When it came to equipment sales in golf, Ely Callaway played the music, and the rest of us danced to it,” Barney Adams, another club-making entrepreneur of note, once told me.
Looking inside the bustling Callaway booth during the 2025 PGA Show, I could not help but think of Ely and how much I still missed him.
But in a meeting later that day with his now 71-year-old son, Nicholas Callaway, I suddenly – and in some ways rather spookily – reconnected with my old friend. Part of that had to do with the book Nicholas handed me after we said hello. Titled “The Unconquerable Game – My Life in Golf and Business,” it has been described as the lost memoir by the founder of Callaway Golf and represents the completion of a project that began in 1994.
I loved the idea of reliving the very interesting existence of one of the greatest businessmen the game has ever known. And given what Nicholas had told me about the research that went into the tome he and Andrew Moorhead had edited, I knew it would tell me a lot more about a man with whom I had become pretty well acquainted when I started covering the golf business for Golfweek in the late 1990s.
But what really struck me that day was the audiobook Callaway the Younger was releasing at the same time – and how Nicholas had employed AI to have it posthumously narrated in Ely’s voice.
I felt chills when I heard Callaway’s distinctive intonations as Nicholas played them for me in a meeting room outside the main convention hall.
That and the sight of the book on the table before me made it seem that Ely really was back among us.
And in many ways, he is, thanks to the formal release this month of “The Unconquerable Game” and the ways it will remind readers of what a singular sensation he was in golf, as an innovator, a marketing and management maven and a promoter of his company and a sport he had played and deeply loved.
“They talk about A.C. and B.C., which is Before Callaway and After Callaway. He was that big.” – Jim Hansberger
“Ely was such an important person that people use his entrance into the game as a sort of reference point in the history of the golf industry,” said former Ram Golf president Jim Hansberger when we talked shortly after Ely’s passing. “They talk about A.C. and B.C., which is Before Callaway and After Callaway. He was that big.”
Ely Callaway was really big when Nicholas convinced his father in 1994 that he should pen a book.
“Sam Walton had written one about his life and founding Walmart,” recalled Nicholas, who has long run a cross-platform media company called Callaway Arts and Entertainment. “Donald Trump had just written ‘The Art of the Deal.’ Business publishing was very active, so it seemed like a good time to do that. But I had just published Madonna’s book, ‘Sex,‘ so I was not going to do my father’s book. I was happy, however, to act as his agent.”
“I managed to get him a $750,000 advance from another publisher,” added Nicholas, who by then had also produced a volume, “One Hundred Flowers,” with the reclusive artist Georgia O’Keeffe. “And even though my father was a good writer, he was no professional. So, we tried to pair him with one who was. We started with Bud Shrake, who had co-authored Harvey Penick’s ‘Little Red Book;’ and after that John Rothchild, who was best known for collaborating on a trio of books with investing guru Peter Lynch; and then John Huey, who had co-written Sam Walton’s book and went on to serve as editor-in-chief of Time Inc. during its heyday. Then, Ely turned to New York Times golf writer Larry Dorman, eventually convincing him to leave the Times to become head of corporate communications and public relations at Callaway. That way, he could tail Ely all the time, taking notes and recording his conversations in the process.”
Problem was, Nicholas says, Ely was always onto the next thing and never slowed down long enough to focus on the book and let Dorman complete the manuscript.
“That’s why in 2000, I returned the advance to the publishing company,” Nicholas said. “At that point, the rights reverted to Ely. But then he passed away, leaving behind hundreds of pages of notes and communications from conversations with Larry, Huey, Shrake and Rothchild and daily journals that contained his thoughts and appointments going back 40 years. Ely kept everything.
“We wanted Larry to finish the book,” Nicholas added. “But he said he did not have the distance from Ely to properly tell the story, that he was too close and connected to him to do it properly.”
So, Nicholas shelved the project. But then COVID hit.
“By that point, a generation had gone by,” said Nicholas, who had inherited his father’s personal papers and archives. “And I thought we really needed to tell Ely’s story before he just became a name on a piece of golf equipment.”
“Ely was 53 years old when he left Burlington and 10 years after that he bought the hickory-shaft wedge company that became Callaway Golf. By 1992, it was the largest company in the business.” – Nicholas Callaway
Nicholas’ decision to do that came at a time when he was wrapping up the definitive book on Bob Dylan, a 608-page magnum opus called “Mixing Up the Medicine.”
“And my thinking was that we needed to tell Ely’s story with the same level of research and scholarship,” Nicholas said. “With all the interviews and documents we had, it was like putting together a jigsaw puzzle. It took us a year to get through it all.”
The result is a fascinating read that revealed many things about Ely I did not already know. Such as his coming from a line of 39 Southern Baptist preachers, which certainly explains the evangelistic ardor with which he touted his golf clubs and balls. I also learned Ely took up golf when he was 11 years old and quickly worked his handicap down to scratch. He was that same age when he started his first business venture, which involved growing and selling Georgia peaches. Ely moved so many bushels his first year of operation that he was able to buy himself a $5,000 life insurance policy.
Perhaps the most interesting part is Callaway’s departure in 1973 from Burlington as its president after top executives in the Fortune 500 company, including the chairman and CEO, tried to make him the fall guy for a C-suite scandal over anti-trade practices they had long hidden from shareholders and government regulators. With the help of a childhood friend who also happened to be a first-rate lawyer, Callaway managed to weather that corporate storm. He then set out to reinvent himself as so many Americans have through the decades by relocating to California, first to run his own vineyard and after that creating the golf equipment company that prospers to this day.
“Ely was 53 years old when he left Burlington and 10 years after that he bought the hickory-shaft wedge company that became Callaway Golf,” Nicholas said. “By 1992, it was the largest company in the business.”
It’s quite a story, and so is the one behind the book itself.