“Open the damned gate!” the old man commanded in his Georgia drawl behind the wheel of his snub-nosed black Bentley at the gates of his golf company’s testing center. “It’s Ely Callaway!”
Damned right it was. Ely Callaway, then 78, four times married, was at that moment a supreme titan of the golf industry, prowling his sprawling Callaway Golf–company hallways, fairways, and factory, “400,000 square feet in eight buildings, a plant where a new cart of clubs comes off the line every five minutes, around the clock,” I wrote back then. “Three shifts of 1,800 workers try to keep pace with demand.”
