The remarkable life story of Ken Kendrick, the Arizona Diamondbacks’ principal owner and general managing partner.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. They’re some of our favorites.
And now Alex Cortez brings us the life story of
Ken Kendrick, the principal owner and managing general partner of
(00:40):
the Arizona Diamondbacks, the baseball team, a gig he probably
didn’t expect to have as a child. Here’s Alex. Ken
Kendrick grew up in the small town of Princeton, West Virginia.
I had the great good fortune when you look back
(01:00):
on your life when you’re in my age, and I
know that I had great fortune in growing up in
a small town, not a place of wealth, but it
was a place of great comfort to have great friends
that you started out And I even today have my
group of friends from that time called my Sandbox friends.
(01:21):
And we celebrated as a group our seventy fifth birthdays,
all from the same little town, the same little kindergarten,
the same twelve grades until we all went off to college.
And I’ll give you one story that’s one of my
great now that I’m in the world of sports, one
of my greatest sports exploits, which once I tell this,
(01:45):
you will realize I didn’t have very many great sports
exploits as a fourteen year old. Our baseball team, as
a Pony League thirteen and fourteen year old was a
pretty darn good team, and we competed to go to
the World Series. And we were in a double elimination tournament,
(02:05):
one game away from going to the World Series of
the Pony League, which would have been when Washington, Pennsylvania
was where they played there. Like Williamsport to the Little League, Washington,
Pa Is to the Pony League. So we’re in the final.
We now have the game where we’re playing a team
they’ve already been defeated once and we have to beat
(02:27):
them once to go, and they have to beat us twice.
There were three of us that were the core guys
on the team. My one friend was the catcher, I
was the first baseman, and our third friend was the pitcher.
And our pitcher was really good. He was geared to
be the pitcher. So we were going to win the game.
And sure enough, we get to the last inning and
(02:49):
we’re head five to two. All we have to do
is get them out, and all of a sudden, my
friend the pitcher can’t throw the ball over the plate,
and he just goes completely wild throw it over the plate. Eventually,
they load the bases with walks, and of course the
next guy hits a Grand Slam home run and we
lose the game six to five. I lose my temper
(03:14):
as a result of this, and I go after my
dear friend and I had evil in my heart, and
my friend the catcher got in between us and looked
me in the eye. We’re fourteen years old, and he
said to me, Ken, we wouldn’t be here if it
wasn’t for Wayne, get your act together. We got another
(03:35):
game to play, and unfortunately we lost that other game,
but it was as close as I ever got to
any real great success as a player in sports. And
those two guys were my lifetime friends. Sadly, the catcher,
the guy that was wise beyond his years done, passed
(03:56):
away some years ago with a LS, But my friend
Wayne and I are still in close touch. Even this
morning we were texting. So that’s a story of childhood
that you know, could have come out of some other place,
but it came out of that town that I grew
up in and left a big impression on me, especially
the maturity of a fourteen year old boy. My friend
(04:20):
Dawn and I spoke at Don’s memorial and honored him
by telling that story because you know, it was really
an important thing for him to do, because maybe my
friendships would have been fractured because I was very angry
and very upset and felt like I had to blame
my other friend, which was wrong. And I went through
(04:43):
a whole iteration of things that I learned from sports
in that same era. The baseball team in these towns,
they have all star teams that compete in these tournaments,
and so we had an all star team and it
was very good, and I was their coach, and I
had this group of young guys that really looked up
(05:06):
to me. I now know they did, but I didn’t
think about it much then. I’m just trying to make
them play as well as and I had a lot
of rules. I was a very hard coach, may be
hard to play. For several years ago, after I’m involved
in Major League Baseball, I get a package in the
mail and a letter and it’s from one of the
(05:30):
kids that played on my team when they were twelve
and thirteen years of age. And he said, I’m completing
my bucket list, and there is a baseball I want
you to sign for me and return to be a
part of my bucket list. And he said the reason
that I wanted is that you taught me one of
(05:52):
my great life’s lessons when you were my coach. He
went on in his letter to explain that the lesson
was that he pitched a perfect game, no hitter with
me as his coach, and he’s facing the very last
batter and he gets an O and two count on him,
(06:15):
and he said, I threw my very best fastball right
down the middle, and he swung and missed, and I
had a perfect game, no hitter, and everybody was so excited,
but you weren’t. He said. I saw you standing over
to the side, not celebrated, and finally I came over
and I said, coach, why aren’t you celebrating? He said, Bobby,
(06:38):
what did I teach you? And I taught him what
you should always do as a pitcher when you have
an O and two count on the batter, you’ve got
him under control. You don’t throw the ball right down
the middle. And I had taught him never to do that,
and he did it. And even though he was successful,
I who didn’t And he said, I’ve always carried that
(07:00):
through my whole life. And he said, I just I
feel like I need your name on a baseball to
put in my bucket lips. And you’re listening to Ken
Kendrick tell his story growing up in a small town Princeton,
West Virginia, not a place of wealth, but a place,
he said, of great comfort. When we come back more
(07:23):
of the story of Ken Kendrick here on our American Stories. Folks,
if you love the great American stories we tell and
love America like we do, we’re asking you to become
a part of the our American Stories family. If you
agree that America is a good and great country, please
make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and
(07:43):
seventy six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters.
Go to our American Stories dot com now and go
to the donate button and help us keep the great
American stories coming. That’s our American Stories dot Com. And
(08:09):
we continue with our American Stories and the story of
Ken Kendrick, who just so happens now to be the
principal owner and general managing partner of the Arizona Diamondbacks.
But how did that happen? Here is Ken talking about
the story of his life and him becoming an entrepreneur. Well,
(08:31):
it’s been along on windy road. I started out in
my very early years out of college. I worked for
the IBM Company. While it was a subsidiary of the
IBM company. It was when they were first getting into
the software world that a subsidiary company, and I was
employed in sales and learned an enormous amount. It was
(08:51):
my graduate school. You worked out of a local office,
but you went off for training. You would come back
and it went over sixteen months or something. So time
in the office, time in classroom, and you know, it’s
a little bit like you’re going to go to live
in Spain and if you can just speak some of
the language, you’re better than if you speak none of it.
(09:14):
So I learned the technology side of the business at
the level of a broken Spanish. But it was helpful
because I could identify with the things that needed to
happen to design a system to do whatever process my
business client needed. I’ve benefited more from that than I
would have benefited from going to business school. I’ve never
(09:34):
looked back to go to business school, so it’s just
my conclusion of what they taught me. I was able
to go out and be successful early on with the
IBM company and built enough confidence that allowed me to say, hey,
I think I could maybe succeed in my own business.
And of course I didn’t know what I didn’t know
and ran into a lot of obstacles. I always remember
(10:02):
my exit interview in our office with the wizened veteran.
You know, he seemed very old to me because I’m
in my twenty four the wing on being twenty five
and this fellows in the sixties and he’s the senior
citizen in the office. Bruce Smith was his name, who’s
a wonderful man. And he called me in and he said, look,
(10:23):
Kenny said, I want to tell you I think you
have a lot of skills. You’ve done a great job
for us. He said, I want you to understand that
often people starting their own business don’t succeed, and I
hope that you will. But I want you to know
you would have a home here if you wanted to
come back. And then he said, and I want to
(10:46):
give you some advice about being in business. He said,
you’re going to have a lot of dark days. And
he said, the thing that I would tell you you
need to learn to do is manage your time because
(11:09):
there’s gonna be a lot of demands on you. And
he said, you know time has two measurements, length and intensity.
And he said, I would advise you to be intense
about how you use your time. I think he was
a wise man, and he wished me well, and I
(11:31):
think it was really valuable to me to know that
I was well enough respected there that I could come
crawling back if it didn’t work out, which is a
huge gift to an aspiring entrepreneur, a sense of security
that many don’t have. This would be more than fifty
(11:53):
years ago. It’s why I remember the conversation just like
it was yesterday, and the vivid of that advice he
gave to me. The software world was just really getting started.
The word software was not born, you know. It was
hardware programming and systems design, etc. Worked into the word software.
(12:18):
So my friend thought that we could go out and
start our own software company, and we did, and it
was a struggle from day two. I think we celebrated
on day one, but on day two it began the
reality of what’s starting and operating a business really is.
(12:41):
Within a year, my friend, who had a family and
was very capable guy, you know, we were struggling financially.
He got an opportunity to go with a very large
banking company in their technology group, and he decided to leave.
And so here I am stuck, you know, now without
my original partner and a group of people who backed us,
(13:05):
and we were on the edge of failure. And I
felt a sense of duty, you know that I couldn’t
really give up. And so in year two of my company,
I called the staff together. I did two things. Went
to the staff and said, look, we have to make
some real sacrifices here. We need to all look at
ourselves and determine what paycuts we can take to keep
(13:30):
this going. And I will agree for the next year
to work for free. I won’t take a salary, and
each of the rest of you, I would like you
to think what you can do. I then was able
to go to my outside investors and say, look, here’s
where we are, here’s what we all have agreed to do,
and I need each of you to consider whether you
(13:52):
will make another investment to give us a chance to
make it. And most of them did, and we continue
to operate, and hard work tends to pay off, and
within the second year, we hit on a client relationship
with a substantial local company who signed to be a customer,
(14:13):
a very large customer, and that kind of got us
to the point where we were in the black. And
we operated for a couple of years, and then I
met my now more than fifty year partner who had
a similar story, and we decided the two small businesses
made a merger of a fifty fifty deal. It’s now
(14:36):
a world renowned software company, the largest company in the
world providing enterprise software to run colleges and universities, a
company called Data Tell with thousands of employees worldwide. Later,
Ken became one of the founding investors of the Arizona Diamondbacks,
who achieved their greatest triumph of winning the two thousand
(14:58):
and one World Series against the Yankees, team whose city
just endured their greatest tragedy of the September eleventh terrorist attacks,
one of the saddest and yet most rewarding my World
Series ring and the inscription on the inside says nine
(15:20):
to eleven, Oh one, never forget. And of course that
was the Domondbacks one World Championship, and you know, I
was proud to be on the edges of that. And
there were so many things that were memorable, searing, vivid memories,
some of which the entirety of the country watched. The
(15:43):
sports part of it was the rebirth of sports tied
into nine to eleven. You know, the baseball I think
took a great lead in and the first World Series
game played in New York City and George Bush throwing
out the first pitch. The President heart in to the
United States, and prior to the first pitch, he’s down
(16:06):
under the stadium. You know, there’s pitching areas and hitting
areas under these stadiums. So he’s under the stadium and
the Yankee side of the stadium warming up, throwing some
pitches in private, and Derek Jeter comes in and sees him,
walks through and he sees him, and so he comes over,
(16:26):
being the most prominent Yankee player, and he comes over
and you know, lad, mister President, glad you’re here, Glad
You’re going to be throwing the first pitch. By the way,
mister President, are you going to stand on the rubber
on the mound? And the President said, yeah, yeah, I
guess so he said you better. If you don’t, they
(16:48):
will boo you because most of the celebrities. You don’t
get up on the mound because it’s tough if you’re
not used to it. You stand down in front on
the flat ground. And then thought, a ball on the
flat ground. You know I can do that. So all
of a sudden, the President, he said, it just hit
me like a ton of bricks, and he said, I
froze up. And he goes out, and you don’t know
(17:12):
that you’re there watching, of course as a fan, you
don’t know this has happened. You don’t see him walk out,
you know, and the crowds just one of these emotional moments.
Marches right up onto the pitcher’s mound, throws a perfect strike,
and it was a searing moment with intense drama and
(17:33):
unbelievable security in the ballpark. I mean, it’s hard. It’s
hard to communicate how uptight everybody was believing that an
attack could occur on the ballpark. When we come back,
more of this remarkable life story. Ken Kendricks story here
(17:53):
on our American stories, and we continue with our American
stories in the final portion of Ken Kendrick’s Remarkable life story,
(18:14):
and Ken now tells the story of his great hobby
his mom helped inspire. The thing my mother did better
than any other, and all of my friends from childhood
would now agree, was every one of us as young
boys got into collecting baseball cards because that’s what you
(18:36):
do when you’re a certain age. And we would march
down to the five and ten cent store with a
quarter in hand by five packs of baseball cards, and
we would eat the bubblegum and trade the baseball cards,
and then we would bring them home. And you eventually
grow out of doing that, and mostly those cards disappear somehow.
(18:57):
But we now have acknowledged that my mother was the
best mom ever because she kept my baseball cards. And
I still have my baseball cards, and none of my
friends have theirs, And of course they say there’s word
better than mine, but we will never know because I
have mine thanks to my mother. So I decided after
(19:22):
I got my cards and realized there was value there,
and I be got enamored. So I began to look
for valuable cards, and I have near fifty and what
my collection has become is unquestionably the most well recognized
elite card collection in the world, and includes the Honeys
(19:44):
Wagner card, which has a whole book written about it
called the Card and has been titled the Mona Lisa
of Cards. They’re fewer than thirty of them known to exist.
Cards are more than a hundred years old. Lot of
folklore about why there are so few in the era
of Honus Wagner, who was a player in the early
(20:06):
nineteen hundreds and one of the original members of the
Baseball Hall of Fame. Cards were produced by tobacco companies
and they were inserted into the packs of tobacco, either
tens of tobacco or I guess rappers. I’m not sure
I know exactly. Anyway, as you bought your tobacco product,
(20:27):
you got a card and the advertising on the back
is that they didn’t put the players performance data as
they do in later years, but in the old days,
the tobacco companies used it for advertising, and that happens
to be Piedmont, who was one of the prominent cigarette
or tobacco companies because they sold a lot of loose
(20:49):
tobacco in those days, in the early nineteen hundreds, And
the popular legend is that there’s not a lot of
Honus Wagner cards because he was opposed to tobacco and
told them to stop making the card. That is a story.
It’s a part of the legend, but I think I
know enough about it. He was a cigar smoker, so
(21:10):
he was a smoker. But this tobacco company. The belief
now is that the legend of him being anti tobacco
was not true, but that they the tobacco company, wasn’t
willing to pay him what he thought was a fair
amount to use his image, and he required them to
stop printing. Therefore a scarcity of these cards versus others
(21:35):
of his peers in those days. What I have gotten
to do, and I did it even today. I help
other people who have collections and don’t know anything about
what to do to monetize them. Generally, there are older
(21:56):
people who have inherited from some now long to see
family member. Example, I’m working with a family right now
who has a collection from their grandfather. Four grandchildren of
a gentleman born in eighteen ninety six who, based on
his age, collected all of these very prominent cards in
(22:19):
the era of Honus Wagner and Christy Matheson and Walter
Johnson and all that great. Collected these tobacco cards as
a kid, and this family has inherited his collection, been
in the family all these years, went through their parents
who are now gone to these siblings, and the cards
(22:42):
have never been graded. They really don’t know what they
have exactly. They know something about it, and they have
a collection of nearly three thousand cards, most all of
which are a hundred years old. Now the cards or
not of the highest grade because I’ve seen them digitized photos.
(23:06):
But anything in baseball that’s from one hundred years old
has some value. Well, they called me. They read a
story about me and know what to do, and they
called me out of the blue. I’ve never no, I
don’t I’ve never met them yet. I know their names,
and I’ve texted and emailed and phone called. But I’ve
(23:27):
been working with them for about a month or a
little longer, helping them learn the setting that their inheritance is,
so that when they go to the professionals to monetize,
because that’s what they want to do, they will be
not as naive as as they started. And I’ve sent
(23:50):
them a couple of books and spent more hours than
I probably should have. But I just think, now, man,
I want these guys to get every penny that what
they have is worth. I’ve done this fifty times. Why
do I do it? Well? I love the game, I
love the collecting. I love that people have things, you know,
that I can help them learn about and benefit from that.
(24:12):
I don’t want someone because there are many people who
would take advantage of them, and I don’t want to
see that happen to somebody. And I do that as
something that I think it’s my duty to try to
help people. To a point I can’t give my life
over to doing it. And I don’t have a sign out,
although now that you’re gonna publish what I’m telling you,
(24:33):
I may start a new business and become a broker.
And now Ken shares a final sports story about his
son Cal when he was eleven years old. He’s a
little league ball player. He’s on a very very competitive team,
really really good team, good coaching, outstanding players, and you know,
(24:58):
he’s a decent player on the team. And I go
to their games and I make it a absolute solemn
promise to myself. I will never make criticisms of these kids,
you know, because I’m in the business I’m in and
I’m a parent. But I you know, if I say
something like parents are always chirping at the coach, chirping
(25:20):
at the players, I never do that. I just enjoy watching.
I’m proud of them. I’m glad he does well, and
I cringe when he doesn’t. And so this one game
was a night game. And now we’re in the car
and it’s fairly late, and we’re driving home. He’s in
the back seat, and I start talking out of the blue, inexplicably.
(25:43):
I began to analyze his horrible performance, and I say,
I can’t believe that guy struck you out, and I can’t,
you know, And it’s like I get on rent and
he’s totally silent, and finally he says that I said, yeah,
how he said, you do understand I’m not going to
(26:05):
ever do this for a living dada. And you know,
back to the young person, you know, in the anyway
the young person’s wisdom overcoming, you know, maybe the older
person’s kind of losing touch with what he or she
may be doing maybe should be doing in this case
(26:27):
me I shouldn’t have been ranting on my son’s performance.
So anyway, he’s a very special young man and I’m
proud of him as I am my daughter. And you’ve
been listening to Ken Kendrick. Great job as always to
Alex for finding this story, doing the introductions and the interviews,
(26:51):
and great job to Robbie on the production and what
a voice you just heard. And that’s what we love
doing here on the show. We just tell folks stories.
Whether they own a baseball team or a body shop,
it doesn’t matter to us. Everyone’s the same. People live
their lives differently and beautifully, so many of them. I
love that last story about his son, cal Dad. You
(27:12):
do understand I’m not going to do this for a living,
and sometimes our kids have wisdom and teach us stuff.
I know mine does. Ken Kendrick’s story a beauty here
on our American Stories
Discover more real American voices.
