Word: callaway
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Nobody played the business of golf better than Ely Callaway. He bought a fledgling four-person start-up in 1982 and turned it into the most successful purveyor of golf clubs in the sport's 300-year history. Callaway's innovation was to design clubs with oversize heads (remember your first Big Bertha?), which made a difficult, frustrating game immediately more satisfying to the weekend duffer...
...Callaway Golf's success spawned a fiercely competitive $4 billion industry that has lately been showcased by a pro named Tiger and the marketing magic of a company called Nike. Yet if anything troubled Ely Callaway in his final days (he succumbed to cancer on July 5 at 82) it was that despite a decade of entrepreneurial zest, his beloved game had landed in the rough. For all its apparent popularity, golf is not attracting new players, and those who do play are not playing as much. The wave of aging baby boomers the industry counted...
...makers are spending millions of dollars battling each other for the same 26.7 million customers. Small, independent start-ups that seemed so promising just three years ago have folded or been folded into a few big companies like TaylorMade (owned by Adidas-Salomon), Fortune Brands and Nike. Earnings at Callaway (2000 sales: $837.6 million) failed to meet expectations, and the stock is down 40% from its 52-week high. "The industry is flat, and rounds played declined for the 10th straight month in a row," bemoans Callaway spokesman Larry Dornan. "This is unprecedented...
...Callaway revolutionized golf with the simple idea that if he made a demonstrably better club, people would pay big bucks for it. Over the past decade, Callaway's formula became the conventional wisdom for growing almost any game: combine new technology, savvy marketing and a stable of mediagenic, talented pros, and then watch new equipment fly out of shops everywhere...
DIED. ELY CALLAWAY, 82, golf-equipment innovator and founder of Callaway Golf Co.; of pancreatic cancer; in Rancho Santa Fe, Calif. Callaway's aim was simply to make golfers happy; to that end he designed more "forgiving" clubs, like the popular, oversize Big Bertha driver, which he introduced in 1991. In 1999 he launched the controversial ERC driver, banned by the U.S. Golf Association for exceeding the limit on the so-called springlike effect (how far the club head rebounds after striking the ball) but soundly endorsed for recreation by golf's favorite son, Arnold Palmer...