The COMING golf ball wars - golf industry

Golf Digest, Feb, 1999 by Mark Seal

Sedition, rebellion and revolt

Now, let's move from the East Coast to the West, from the 1940s institutional buildings in towns as good as they sound to the sleek, new glass bunkers of Carlsbad, the erstwhile golf boomtown where anything goes.

"How are you going to position yourself?" Chuck Yash, president and CEO of Callaway Golf Ball Company, is asked of his new golf ball.

"Well, I'd rather not give our competition too many clues," he says.

"How many balls will you launch?"

"We have a pretty good idea but, again, we're not gonna basically be able to tell you that today," he says.

"So you can't tell me anything specific?"

"No, we can't," he says.

Sitting in his office, Yash plays his cards extremely close to his chest, as if the old man a few sunny bunkers down the road-Ely Callaway-is monitoring every word. Yash issues as many "no comments" as an embattled politician, while steadfastly maintaining that not only will Callaway have a ball, but it could very well be The Ball, a ball that will, in time, revolutionize the field as radically as the Big Bertha forever changed the landscape of clubs.

At the very moment of our interview, in Ely Callaway's office just down the street, the House of Big Bertha is reeling. To combat the recent downturn in what Ely Callaway calls the "declining worldwide" market, Callaway is laying off 700 employees and jettisoning peripheral businesses-interactive golf sites, golf-book publishing, driving ranges-to concentrate on, as Ely Cal-laway drawled on CNBC, CNN and Fox News, "our core businesses . . . golf clubs and golf balls."

In this distressed market, Callaway is betting $150 million and his company's future not only on golf balls, but on the man he selected to lead his invasion into the competitive ball market: the da Vinci of golf-ball discounting, the inventor of the 15-ball pack, Chuck Yash. The former Navy lieutenant with the Harvard M.B.A. wears a golf shirt and slacks. But beneath the at-ease exterior beats the heart of a warrior, hungry for the taste of sea air and gun powder. "Oh, it's a huge degree of importance," Yash says of Callaway's success in the ball market.

If you have any doubt, a visit to the construction site of the company's (since-completed) 200,000-square-foot ball plant, with its sign, Future Home Of The Callaway Golf Ball Company, is all the proof you need of Callaway's commitment.

Yash's life has been a blur since the summer of 1996, when he jumped ship from the presidency of Taylor Made to accept Callaway's offer to create "a ball that's demonstrably superior and pleasingly different to leading competitive golf balls," a directive now posted in the office of every Callaway Golf Ball Company employee.

Talking about the ball, Yash tends to speak in "Ely Sezes," as in, "Ely says he's never seen this happen in American business."

They are talking about something called "Parallel Pathing," the insanely intense and expensive process of building a golf-ball company from scratch. It's never been done with golf balls before, for good reason. Parallel Pathing re-quires juggling everything-assembling the multifaceted team to invent the ball, designing and building the ball plant, developing the ads and marketing, educating the sales forces, and manufacturing, testing and developing the product-at the same time. Yash has his parallel path mapped out on his wall, a multicolored chart of forward-marching straight lines, one line for each of a dozen different functions, each line stacked on top of the other in different colors, all lines leading to the planned launch in either late 1999 or early 2000.