The Ely Callaway Era in golf didn’t get off to the best start, at least not in the Callaway family.
Nicholas Callaway and his father, Ely Jr., were at Del-Mar Country Club in California when Ely told his son the name of his new metal driver — Big Bertha.
"That’s the worst name for a product I’ve ever heard," young Nicholas said.
His father paused, then drawled in his familiar Southern accent, "Well, you’re wrong. First, the name has a great story behind it. It’s the name of a World War I cannon that could shoot a ball farther than anything else."
When Nicholas reiterated that it was still the worst name he'd ever heard, his father handed him a club and suggested he try it. Nicholas took a mighty swing and ... contact was made and while the ball dribbled a few feet, the head sailed off.
"We’ve got a few gluing problems," Ely admitted, "but we’re gonna fix it and a year from now, it’s going to be the biggest selling club in the world and change the golf industry. The name doesn’t make the product, the product makes the name."
Dad was right. The hickory golf club, Hickory Stick USA. he purchased in 1982 for $400,000 is worth $1.5 billion today and, yes, Big Bertha turned the golf industry upside down. Ely Callaway, after successful careers in textiles and the wine business, was golf’s original disruptor.
The incredible story behind Callaway’s run is told in an equally incredible book, "The Unconquerable Game," an autobiography of Ely Callaway that will reach book stores March 25 in print form and in AI-assisted audio books that are narrated by a voice that sounds exactly like Ely Callaway, who passed away in 2001. The hardcover edition, $40, is available for pre-order. The audio version is a publishing first, having a posthumous narrator, and that only adds to his disruptor reputation.
Nicholas Callaway played a short recording of Ely Callaway speaking years ago for this writer to reacquaint with his familiar voice. Then he played a clip from the opening of the audio book, helped by AI and two voice actors: "As long as you’ve got a good story, you can convince anybody. I’ve told an awful lot of stories. Sixty years ago in 1941, one of my stories convinced the New York mafia to help me, a skinny, 21-year-old kid from LaGrange, Georgia, to procure $350 million worth of uniforms for the U.S. Army during the Second World War. Over 25 years ago in 1974, I persuaded the Bank of America to loan me a million dollars on the basis of only a few sips of wine. And 10 years ago in 1991, I prophesied to the golfers of the world, if they tried a strange-looking driver with a funny name and a funny sound made by an itty bitty company they’d never heard of, it would change their lives and the game of golf forever."
The resemblance was part uncanny and part spooky. The voice didn’t just resemble Ely Callaway, it virtually was Ely Callaway.
"My dad had a unique way of expressing himself," Nicholas says. "It was a reflection of his time and place of origin in southwest Georgia, the Deep South. He was a true Southern gentleman. His voice was his instrument and he was a virtuoso. Everyone who knew him remarks that his voice was so charming and persuasive. Of course, I heard that voice as the first voice of my life."
Nicholas and Andrew Moorhead, a researcher and co-editor of the book, agreed that an audio version of the book had to have that distinctive Ely voice — if something like that was even possible. It was and Nicholas ended up in a studio in Kiev, Ukraine, which had a leading studio for text-to-speech and voice cloning. Just an AI assist was enough to create Ely authentically. The voice actors, Fred Newman and Vince Marcus, were hired to complete the work. Newman was a long-time voice in Garrison Keilor's "Prairie Home Companion" and is also from LaGrange, and Marcus had an ability to mimic the performance aspects of Ely’s tempo and delivery.
"I played Fred a historical recording of Ely and he was silent," Nicholas says. "Then he said, 'Those are the voices that I grew up surrounded by.' He began to tell me all the details, down to the geography of LaGrange, and the origins of that manner of speaking. I said, 'Fred, could you be our voice director and work with Vince to be his mirror as he’s narrating for all the nuances, so we can go from capturing 90 percent of Ely to 100 percent?'"
After that, it was just hard work by and repetition for the actors. "I said at the beginning, 'We won’t do this until we achieve a result where I can’t tell the difference between the voices,'" Nicholas says. "It has to be authentic. On our 10th iteration, I went, 'Oh my god! He’s there!’ I couldn’t tell the difference."
The book is the culmination of 20-plus years of effort on Nicholas’ part. He and Moorhead used Ely’s comprehensive notes, documents and recordings done with Ely and the four biographers — Larry Dorman, John Huey, John Rothchild and Bud Shrake, who attempted to tell his story. And the book gives an unvarnished look into 20th century business and the adventures of Ely Callaway, who truly had a life well-lived.
Some things you’ll learn about Ely:
> His family owned eight textile mills in LaGrange, and young Ely caught the entrepreneurial spirit, using money he earned from delivering magazines to plant peach trees on an acre of land he leased, earning $700 from his first crop.
> He was a chief procurement officer for Army uniforms in World War II, which would eventually mean more than 500 million pieces including coats, jackets, trousers and boots.
> He was inspired to become a scratch golfer while listening on the radio in 1930 to the BBC broadcast of the British Open won by Bobby Jones. Ely’s mother had told him that Jones was one of his cousins. Ely later became long-time friends with Jones.
> He became president of Burlington Industries, the largest American textile company. He left in 1973, not because he wasn’t offered the company’s chairmanship, as had been reported, but because he discovered a scandal within the company. It had secretly defied a cease-and-desist order from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission regarding its actions of buying out small textile factories to create a monopoly. Callaway demanded a letter from the company clarifying that he was not involved in that process and knew nothing about what had occurred. It took him two years to finally get that letter but his effort to change corporate policy led to his dismissal, which then turned into a lucrative buyout instead because he had kept detailed notes and had copies of incriminating corporate memos.
> He was among the first American corporate giants to recognize globalization and fair trade, and popularized the term Japan Inc. Says Nicholas Callaway: “Ely said, ‘You know, the Japanese are coming and they’re going to eat our lunch.’ He was always so forward-looking. It’s like he could see around corners.”
> Looking for a new gig after Burlington, his research led him to believe that Temecula, inland and well southeast of Los Angeles, had the weather and soil for growing wine grapes. It was a minority opinion not shared by California wine experts. His Callaway Vineyard and Winery wines were a success. Notably, at a 1976 reception in New York, Queen Elizabeth II was served a glass of Callaway wine and liked it so well that Her Majesty asked for a second glass.
> He made Callaway Golf the first publicly traded golf company, another innovation. He also recognized golf as a target ripe for disruption. He said he never would have gone into the computer business up in Silicon Valley because those companies are filled with geniuses. In golf, though, the competition at the time was very easy to beat because they weren’t very smart or innovative.
> There is much more, of course. The fourth chapter, which covers the Burlington Industries scandal, may be the most riveting. It starts with a scene straight out of a murder mystery novel. Nicholas had just spent an exhausting year going through 35 boxes of Ely’s documents and papers, mostly boring financial projections and stuff. There, he found a sealed manila envelope. On its outside, in Ely’s handwriting, it said, “Only to be opened after my death by my personal lawyer.”
“So I opened it,” Nicholas says. “And there was the key that no one had. He never told anyone about this. In Ely's transcripts he alluded to it once with Dorman, a former New York Times golf writer hired by Ely to handle media relations and was one of the biographers. He asked Larry, ‘Do you know what a consent decree is?’ Larry said, ‘Not really.’ Ely said, ‘Well, this is the most important story that’s going to go into the book.’ Then they started talking about other things and never came back to the subject. So that gave me permission, I believe, that Ely wanted this story told as part of his legacy.”
Ely Callaway, corporate justice warrior? Along with being a textile giant, world-class vintner and golf industry disruptor?
What Ely Callaway did during his lifetime could fill a book, and it did. “The Unconquerable Game” is his story in his own words — literally and figuratively.
