Opposite Attractions

Master Award winners Dick Egan of EMC and Ely Callaway, now of Callaway Golf, couldn't be more different. But the ways their stories affect us couldn't be more the same

Master Entrepreneur of the Year

An individual who has maintained company-building and management excellence over the years

The Winners

Ely Callaway

Callaway Golf, Carlsbad, Calif.

Golf-club manufacturer

Founded in 1982

$254.6 million in 1993 revenues

$42.8 million in 1993 profits

2,000 employees

Richard Egan

EMC, Hopkinton, Mass.

Manufacturer of mainframe storage devices

Founded in 1979

$782.6 million in 1993 revenues

$127.1 million in 1993 profits

2,300 employees

The Runner-up

Charles M. Leighton

CML Group, Acton, Mass.

Owner of specialty retailers and sporting-goods manufacturers

Founded in 1969

$645.5 million in 1993 revenues

$96.5 million in 1993 profits

5,613 employees

Here's Ely Callaway of Callaway Golf, formerly of Callaway Vineyard & Winery, past president of Burlington Industries, holding court at the golfers' trade show in Anaheim, Calif., a gray-haired lion (75 years old!), the folds that crisscross his face like the hideously complex rigging on a 200-year-old ship of the line. He's perched, ankles crossed, on a black-canvas director's chair, country-club formal in khakis, a blue blazer, and a yellow tie for color, accepting his due from the masses -- suppliers from Tokyo; retailers from Hong Kong, Singapore, Las Vegas, and New York City ("your stuff is like gold in the store"); and ordinary mortals from all over who ask nothing more than to shake his hand. "I'd wish you luck," one says, "but you've already used your portion." Maybe, maybe not . . . but, yes, this is a very lucky old man, still working, still listened to (now more than ever), a secular shaman whose age -- far from being a sad fact -- is at least half the point.

And here, two days later, at the opposite end of the continent, is Dick Egan, chairman of EMC Corp., on the go in his big black Cadillac, in and out of red-brick office buildings on the fringes of Hopkinton, Mass., stopping here to make a sales presentation to Morgan Stanley, there to scout locations for a ribbon-cutting ceremony the governor has promised to attend. He chain-smokes Salems, pausing to make his points and catch his breath, all red-faced and chubby-cheeked.

"It's IBM, Stupid!" says the sign propped against the window back in Egan's office. The metal desk in the office is a remnant from Egan's days as a manufacturers' rep peddling office furniture, before EMC had captured from IBM enough of the market for mainframe storage devices to put EMC on the Fortune 500 and Egan himself on the Forbes 400. And on the bulletin board behind the desk is a black-and-white snapshot: four men in tuxedos, one of them Egan, one of them Louis Gerstner, chairman of IBM. "That's a ceremony at Boston College where they gave him an honorary doctorate degree," Egan explains. "I contribute to BC, I got a lot of friends there. I knew he wasn't an alumnus, I knew he hadn't given them a dime, and I was fucking bullshit!" That's a knife stuck in the picture, right through Gerstner's heart; and while Egan tells the story he leans on it, drives it in another eighth of an inch, and gives it a little twist.

Ely Callaway and Dick Egan, cowinners this year in the Master Entrepreneur of the Year category, are two fabulously wealthy, extraordinarily successful businessmen, but they're also something more than that. Call them American archetypes: Callaway, the child of privilege and breeding who had something to start with (quite a lot, really) but wanted more and pursued it, and kept pursuing it, like an American pioneer who, say, walked away from his sturdy log home and productive farm in Wisconsin for the promise of still more riches and more freedom somewhere farther west. And Egan, not exactly an immigrant (his father was born in the States) but a lot like one in temperament, forever reaching for something he's missing, fundamentally alone, driven to succeed -- to lift himself up -- by anger and fear.

The judges liked them both -- or, rather, each judge had his or her own strong personal favorite. Achieving a consensus proved impossible; the group might as well have been trying to agree on chocolate or vanilla ice cream. Three times they voted, and three times they split, right down the middle. Neither camp would budge.

"Callaway is wholly inspirational," was one judge's view. "Talk about texture and depth -- here's a guy who takes his hobbies and makes them star businesses. Wine and golf. This guy is the epitome of a master -- someone who inspires. He gives you that feeling of hope."

"You talk about inspiring," said another. "Egan comes from a blue-collar background; he struggled personally. It's a real rags-to-riches story. Starts this company in a market that isn't growing and does phenomenally well. He's very impressive on many, many counts."

We have, then, two winners, one utterly unlike the other in nearly every detail, yet each with the same undeniable power to elicit a passionate response from the rest of us. Listening to the two stories, we feel, along with the judges, awe and fascination.

What draws us to them?

Ely Reeves Callaway Jr. comes from the Callaways of La Grange, Ga. La Grange is a Deep South place, a little piney-woods town 60 miles southwest of Atlanta, near the Alabama line. Abner Callaway, Ely's grandfather, was a Baptist preacher who owned 40 slaves (or maybe just 20, Ely admits later, amending his story). All that the family had, it lost with the war, and afterward Fuller Callaway, Ely's uncle, started over again, accumulating wealth in "the typical way a Southerner got something," says Ely: farming first (enough to eat, plus cotton for cash), then dry goods (Callaway's Mammoth Department Store), then a bank (La Grange National Bank), then cotton mills (Callaway Mills). "He was the original Sam Walton," Ely says proudly. Practically the whole town worked for Ely's uncle, including Ely's father. When the time came, the father's advice to his only son -- fresh from Emory University, where he had studied history and had been president of his class -- was this: "Don't go to work for the family."