* Within one week of the trade show, before a single consumer had spent a cent on a club, pros on the PGA, Senior and LPGA tours were teeing off with Big Bertha. Big Bertha was one of those products, of which there are very few, that lit a fuse and took off like a rocket. We had fretted over our initial order of 60 000. We should have ordered 150 000. Within weeks of the trade show, before a single consumer had spent a cent on a club, professionals on the PGA, Senior and LPGA tours were teeing off with Big Bertha. President George Bush, Bill Clinton, Sean Connery, Jack Lemmon and most of the CEOs and corporate executives at the AT&T Pro-Am had a Bertha in their bag. Within a year it became the best- selling golf club in the world, favoured by tour pros and hackers alike. Our sales that year leaped to $54 million. During that first year, we ran three print ads and not one second of television ads. It was all word of mouth. Once we sold through our initial stock, it took us the better part of three and a half years to catch up with de- mand. The Big Bertha catapulted us from a small golf- club company into a behemoth. It also kicked off the age of stainless-steel drivers and oversized clubheads, an arms race of bigger heads and lighter metals that would continue into the 21st century. What Callaway accomplished with Big Bertha can be done in any business. Think of how the Internet and email changed personal computing, or how Amazon popularised online shopping. Suddenly an aspect of the game that perhaps felt too advanced for the common man became widely accessible, even beloved. It isn’t that hard to do. The problem is that most people don’t make up their minds to do it.
After we placed the order but before we debuted Big Bertha, the General Electric Pension Fund heard about this promising new club and wanted to have a meeting. Dale Frey told us how excited they were about our new product. “Now, we know you name everything,” he said, “and I hear that you’re going to name it Big Bertha, and we’re wondering whether or not that’s the best name.” I said, “Well, we think it is. Have you got a better one?” He said, “No, no, it’s just that some of us think it might not be the best.” “Some of us who?” “Well, me, and John Myers and Jack Welch.” Well, that’s a powerful group right there, but they didn’t have a substitute, so I told them the name was Big Bertha and that’s the way it was. Very few people rebelled against Jack Welch, but I didn’t give a damn what Jack Welch thought, and I told Dale Frey just that. Now, you can’t do that unless you have a record of achievement or unless you’re very foolish, but my record of achievement was such that I could reasonably take a position, and say, well, I’m going to do things my way. Despite my bold prediction to Nicholas, I didn’t know exactly how good Big Bertha was, or if it would even be successful. No matter how much confidence you have, there’s no real way of knowing until a product is used by the customer. We didn’t really do any market research, either, at least not in the traditional sense. Why would we? If I had gone to consumers in 1991 and asked them whether they would buy a driver that was 25 percent bigger than the one they already had, looked dif- ferent from anything they’d ever hit, was priced twice as high as any driver they’d ever paid for, made a peculiar sound on impact, and had a funny-sounding name, they would say no, so we didn’t ask them! We wanted to do it, and we knew that if we did it right, the customers would buy it and be delighted. We debuted the Big Bertha at the PGA trade show in Orlando in January 1991. We didn’t do much advertis- ing because we couldn’t afford it. Instead, we designed our campaigns to create a maximum splash. During the week of the trade show, we took out a full-page ad in the local North Florida edition of The Wall Street Journal. Our sales staff hand-delivered the paper to every hotel room in town on the second day of the show. Because nobody notices whether it’s a local edition, these people thought they were seeing an expensive national ad. With brain power, a few sore backs, and a little money, we got a lot of high-priced exposure on the cheap. Callaway held a press conference to discuss our revo- lutionary new club, and I made sure to put Jack Welch beside me at the table. I asked him to stand up and ac- cept some recognition for helping develop Big Bertha. He hadn’t really done much, but he was our money, and it’s never a bad idea to let your money feel good about itself. Three years before, our S2H2 irons had established us as a company to be reckoned with, but that was noth- ing compared to the enthusiasm with which the industry greeted Big Bertha.
Printed by permission from the upcom- ing book The Unconquerable Game: My Life
in Golf and Business by
Ely Callaway. Published in print, e-book and audiobook by Callaway Arts & Entertainment Copyright © 2025 by Nicholas Callaway
GOLF DIGEST SOUTH AFRICA 113
JUNE 2025
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