“I’m not in love with the guy,” says Robert Sauerhaft, equipment editor of Golf magazine. “That was part of the deal.”įor some industry watchers, the intoxicating triumph of Callaway Golf belongs to a superb huckster whose marketing shtick may be more effective than his sticks. “But it said Hertz on the bag,” Callaway says. All were freebies from Callaway, part of his endless pursuit for promotion through celebrity usage.Īnd for the record, the golf bag that went to Chicago before being impounded as potential evidence in the O.J. Prince Andrew, of course, didn’t send a manservant to Harrod’s to purchase clubs. It praises Callaway’s clubs, expresses regret over a military schedule that interrupts golf, but also happily reports that “my handicap is now dropping to single figures.”Įven Callaway-a wry rogue who travels by Concorde and Bentley Continental, an epicurean who prefers to rest wherever there is a Ritz, a friend of Bill’s who attended the white-tie state banquet for Japanese Emperor Akihito and Empress Michiko-is impressed. He lifts a letter from the mid-morning mail.
“But these clubs are easier to play with, make the game more fun, and I call them the friendliest clubs on Earth. As always, he is dressed in an alpaca pullover and cotton turtleneck. “Now, these clubs don’t make the game of golf one bit easier,” Callaway says.
When flagging tour veteran Johnny Miller won the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am in January, he kissed his Callaways, then the check. Lemmon, a 15-handicap hacker, says Big Bertha adds 20 yards to his tee shots and permits par fours that he failed in the past. It’s in the bulbous, fat-faced Big Bertha metal woods this courtly, hard of hearing, Southern-canny CEO crafts at Callaway Golf in Carlsbad. “I wish,” begged Clinton on the birthday tape, “that you’d find a way to make my golf game as good as my golf clubs.” Hence Ely Reeves Callaway Jr.’s third and latest disruption of the way things used to be. “Meant to look old, but performed like the best of modern clubs.”Ĭallaway was fascinated. “Frankly, it was one of the loveliest clubs I’d ever seen,” he recalls. He stumbled upon a four-man company fumbling to stay alive making steel-core, hickory-shaft clubs. For $14 million.Ĭallaway-a club championship golfer in earlier years and a distant nephew of legend Bobby Jones-retired to country clubs and weekend tournaments around the region. Point proved and a large profit beckoning, Callaway sold his little vineyard in 1981 to Hiram Walker & Sons. They were sipped at the Four Seasons and Ma Maison and in 1976 were chosen for Queen Elizabeth’s bicentennial luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria.
Within four years, Callaway wines-marketed by another radical means, an all-woman sales force-were receiving favorable reviews. So when they do grow, the wine will be different and a guaranteed attention-getter. That’s the point, replied Callaway the contrarian. Experts said fine grapes would never flourish there. This whispering Georgian, however, set his 150-acre vineyard facing a coastal saddle at Temecula in Southern California.
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