A "non-Pro" Kennex?

[Sanglier]

Newbie here. My sincere apologies if this topic has been covered elsewhere in the forum. Searching for this racquet by name only brought up posts mentioning the "normal" Black Ace.

My personal experience with racquets only goes back to about 1980. As far as I can remember, the Kennex brand has always had the "Pro" suffix attached to it, which I once thought was rather pretentious and off-putting in some ways, given the brand's virtual absence from the pro circuit. However, I became a fan of their "Ace" racquets after spending a couple of years in the mid '80s working in a tennis and ski shop...

Last week, I came across this beat-up stick at a Goodwill store and was quite intrigued by what I saw. Here it is next to a normal Black Ace:




Clearly, if this Black Ace "II" was not made to look like the real thing to fool buyers, then it must have been a legitimate sibling of the latter somehow. It has a (bumperless) standard-sized head and is actually a hair longer than the Black Ace, so it cannot really be mistaken for the latter when viewed within 5 ft (provided that the viewer knew what the real Black Ace looked like). I am most curious about the brand itself however - The font used is virtually the same as that of PK. There is even a mystery number next to the small prints in the throat area (replete with awkward grammar and non-American spelling), just like on the real thing, only this one is preceded by an even more mysterious letter "G". The logo on the other hand bears no resemblance whatsoever with that of PK - and is saturated with American pride!

So what is this thing then? A sneaky Black Ace knock-off designed to fool the gullible (but cloaked under just enough differences to deflect legal actions)? Or did Kennex actually go through a patriotic amateur phase before turning pro overseas?

Thanks for any and all input!

[Clintspin]

The name Pro Kennex is actually supposed to have come from the owner's admiration of John Kennedy. Apparently he was told that it would not be wise to name his company Pro Kennedy and settled for Pro kennex.

[Sanglier]

Thanks for the tip, Clintspin! Without it, I would never have found this link: http://cforum.cari.com.my/viewthread.php?tid=1153184

Those who don't read Chinese may need to use an online translator, but the relevant passages basically say this about the origin of the ProKennex brand:

Kunnan Lo (the Taiwanese founder of the company) was looking to expand beyond his successful but low margin OEM business and to establish his own brand. On a trip to New York, he asked one of his advisers about the meaning behind brand names such as Wilson and Dunlop. His adviser responded that those are people's names! Just before they landed at JFK, this same adviser conveniently came up with the idea of using "Kennedy" as their brand name. So it's the airport, rather than the ex-president himself, who was the direct inspiration for the brand name!

As for the logo, Lo wanted it to look American (so that American consumers would think that the racquets were made in the US). On the same trip, he happened to have stayed at a Sheraton while he was in Boston, and thoughtfully converted the "S" logo of Sheraton into a "K" for his own brand, which he liberally accented with stars and stripes - just in case the kind of consumers he was hoping to attract needed additional evidence of the brand's "American-ness".

Just like that, the "Kennedy" brand was born - in Taiwan!

However, American consumers didn’t exactly flock to these racquets the first year. After some market analysis, it was decided that the "Kennedy" name carried too much political baggage and was negatively affecting sales in the US. Lo didn't want to change the logo, so he simply took a cue from the popular "Yonex" and "Kleenex" brands of the period and changed “Kennedy” to "Kennex" (my "Black Ace II" is therefore completely legit!)

The problem was, "Tennex" was a registered trade mark at the time, and the people behind that name saw "Kennex" as enough of an impediment to their livelihood for some reason to threaten Kunnan Industries with a lawsuit. It was only then that Lo added "Pro" (in the “professional” sense, rather than the “enamored with” sense) to "Kennex" to create ProKennex. The idea for this final change is credited to Charles Drake, the head of Leach Industries (Leach is located in San Diego - hence PK's San Diego connection!).

The article doesn't specify it, but I assume the logo also changed with input from Leach Industries.

All of this information supposedly came out of a 2006 Taiwanese magazine article. Given the physical evidence before me, I am inclined to believe that it's mostly accurate. This means that not only should there be a few ‘non-pro’ Kennex racquets around (including the Black Ace), there must be a handful of surviving “Kennedy” sticks still waiting to be rediscovered!

[Migelowsky]

Thanks, nice thread.Very interesting.
I think this is the most troll-less section of the board

[Hannah19]

I've have and have had several rackets with just the Kennex name on it. Mostly wooden frames such as the "Number One".
What does interest me is the fact that I have had rackets with brand names such as Sunsports or Taisports on the buttcap and on the front of the stem a logo that stated: Kunnan, in a square .
They seem to be made in Thailand and only wooden frames.
Any idea if that is Kunnan Lo or just a manufacturer with a similar name?

[Sanglier]

That same Taiwanese article linked above implied that Kunnan Industries was founded in 1967 (when Kunnan Lo was only 23!), and that it began experimenting with its own brand in 1974. I read elsewhere that PK became a brand in 1978, so all those "Kennedy"- and "Kennex"-branded sticks had to have been made between 1974 and 1978. Wooden racquets would certainly have been part of the product line-up during those years, if not the bulk of it.

As for those racquets with a simple "Kunnan" logo on the frame but someone else's brand on the buttcap, my impression at this point is that they constituted Kunnan Industries' core business in the pre-PK era.

Kunnan is not a common name (there is no such thing as a common surname in Chinese), so it is highly unlikely that there was a second Kunnan who also happened to be in the OEM racquet business at roughly the same time.

Making the products in Thailand made sense as well, as Thailand was probably the most politically stable country in SE Asia at that time, was blessed with an abundance of cheap resources, which the large Chinese diaspora in the region had ready access to. Given the low profit margin of OEM manufacturing, Kunnan Lo really couldn't have picked a better place to set up his manufacturing facility outside of Taiwan - before Mainland China became available some years later...

[olliess]

That. Is. Hilarious.

Thanks for the background info guys.

[JUAN_PRADO]

Very interesting ....

[anirut]

And it's really sad to know the story of why PK ended its manufacturing in Thailand and how the manufactured rackets were ridded of. I heard it from some locals who knew the story.

[akamc]

Great research and very nice write-up, Sanglier (are you French by any chance?). I had seldom seen this much background info about the origins of ProKennex - kind of strange, for such a major producer which has been around for a while. Would you know which major labels they supplied as well? And weren't they linked with Technifibre at one point?

They sure came up with quite a few innovative and unique technologies (like the Kinetic system) which were no gimmick. Would anybody also know what the general opinion was about their wood Core Series? Those racquets did not seem to be popular, but I wonder how they were to hit with.

[Wuppy]

Yes, growing up all my tennis playing friends had Pro Kennex racquets.. I always assumed it was an Asian attempt at an Anglo-American sounding name. Didn't realize there were so many gyrations in its history though.

[Sanglier]

akamc, Non, je suis amerlot, mais j'ai passé ma jeunesse en Europe, donc j'arrive encore à me débrouiller en français, plus ou moins...

I actually knew almost nothing about the history of Kunnan Industries when I started this thread last year (as you can tell from what I wrote), and only began searching for answers after getting the hints from Clintspin's response.

Those Taiwanese articles I summarized above led me to many others, which helped to paint a more complete picture of the Taiwanese OEM industry in general, and Kunnan's epic rise and fall in particular.

A couple of interesting tidbits I picked up along the way:

Kunnan began OEMing (badminton) racquets at the same time as several other manufacturers, including Sanhosun (still in business) and Huafeng (an arts and crafts supply maker that had been producing kits for school children to assemble their own racquets since the '50s, and was thus partially responsible for creating the work force that would eventually power the Taiwanese racquet industry towards global prominence ).

Their first customer was a Japanese import-exporter named Takemae, whose purchase orders fueled the rapid growth of the entire industry during the earliest years.

After branching into tennis racquets and before the arrival of the metal frames, Kunnan OEMed for Spalding (Impact 310 and 444), while his major rivals Sanhosun and TaiwanStrong (also still in business) made racquets for Wilson (Epic) and Slazenger (Vintage), respectively.

Kunnan's break through came via Prince, after Howard Head sold his namesake to AMF and began designing his revolutionary oversized aluminum frames. Howard needed low cost manufacturing capacity, and Kunnan came out ahead of his competitors in seizing that big opportunity. He initially sourced the aluminum from the US (7046 alloy from ALCOA), then switched to a local supplier to cut cost (adopting a softer 6061 alloy as part of the change - it should be interesting to find out if there is way to tell these racquets apart from a playability and collector's stand point), in the process forging a decade-long exclusive deal with the only high quality aluminum tubing maker in Taiwan. The commercial success of Prince Pro is what really triggered Kunnan's meteoric rise, and his virtual monopoly on high quality aluminum tubing in Taiwan gave him ample breathing room to develop the graphite technology that will be responsible for the next phase of his growth.

Kunnan Lo was instantly sold on the future of carbon fibers after handling a prototype racquet at a New York trade show. Shortly thereafter, he secured the service of one Harvey Chung, a Taiwanese native who had taken part in some pioneering R&D work on carbon fibers and resins at American Cyanamide and a number of aerospace companies. One of Chung's major contributions was the adoption of a solvent-based manufacturing technique (unlike in the West, Taiwan's environmental protection laws were not exactly stringent at the time), which was more adaptable for racquet-making than the hot-melt process used in the West to make aerospace components. Kunnan's own engineers jury-rigged the tooling needed to start production, as no ready-made solutions were available commercially. This particular setup, called "filament drum winding", pioneered by Kunnan, continues to be in use by all racquet makers to this day. That, plus the quick adoption of an inner bladder pressure molding technique originally developed in the US, are the two main reasons Kunnan was able to make competitively priced graphite frames that completely changed the landscape of the racquet business within a decade.

The very first graphite racquets produced by Kunnan in 1977 did in fact carry the "Kunnan" brand, but it was very quickly superseded by "Kennedy", etc.

Alternative approaches taken by Kunnan's competitors, such as the braiding and compression-molding technique developed in Japan and adopted by Sanhosun, all turned out to be economically non viable in practice due to significantly higher rejection rates. Before long, everyone was either making racquets the Kunnan way or having them made by Kunnan. By 1990, up to 90% of all racquets in the world were produced in Taiwan, and a good number of them by Kunnan Industries (for instance most racquets sold by Prince and Wilson).

Kunnan's success spawned a huge ancillary industry of mold-makers, cover makers, string makers, decal printers, etc., numbering almost a hundred at their peak. Those that survived the Kunnan implosion and industry-wide migration to the Mainland continue to support the remaining dozen or so OEM racquet makers based in Taiwan, none of whom appears to harbor the kind of ambitions that both made and doomed Kunnan Lo.

Today, Lo devotes all of his time to religious work as the chairman of a Taoist organization. He claims that this had always been his father's wish, but fate had made it so that it took the crumbling of his "empire" for him to finally see the light.

[akamc]

Pas mal du tout, les lycées laissent toujours leur marque
Thanks for a fascinating bit of tennis history. Howard Head and Kunnan Lo, this is Jeopardy-worthy... My first graphite racquet was an own-label Prima, which I suppose was most likely made by PK. I wish I had kept it.

[OldFedIsOld]

Guy: "Hey buddy that's a nice stick you have there, what is it?"
Me: "It's a Kennedy, it's flexible and gives me good control on my strokes."

I'm glad they changed the name to Pro Kennex, sounds a lot better...and you know what else.....

[Ramon]

OMG...I use a Pro Kennex and I'm a right-wing conservative! What should I do now?

[coachrick]

Originally Posted by akamc

Pas mal du tout, les lycées laissent toujours leur marque
Thanks for a fascinating bit of tennis history. Howard Head and Kunnan Lo, this is Jeopardy-worthy... My first graphite racquet was an own-label Prima, which I suppose was most likely made by PK. I wish I had kept it.

It's too late to think...was Prima a Nevada Bob's line? ca 1980s ?

[akamc]

Bingo! I'm always amazed at the wealth of collective memories here. Looking back, that Prima was a pretty good player's racquet even by today's standards (thin-beamed, flexible but solid). They even custom-strung it with slick black graphite strings. All I knew was that it was a huge improvement over any old warped wood or pingy aluminium racquet I might have previously struggled with. Back then, Nevada Bob's used to carry some exotic tennis stuff (I really wanted Mats Wilander's Rossignol F200 which they also had but was beyond my meager budget at the time). I guess they only do golf now.

[fortun8son]

Fascinating!. Great research. Thanks.

[Don't Let It Bounce]

Originally Posted by anirut

And it's really sad to know the story of why PK ended its manufacturing in Thailand and how the manufactured rackets were ridded of. I heard it from some locals who knew the story.

How did their Thailand venture end, and what happened to the rackets?

[anirut]

Originally Posted by Don't Let It Bounce

How did their Thailand venture end, and what happened to the rackets?

"From what I heard", it was about stealing, big time. The bad guys drove in an empty water truck into the factory and filled the tank with rackets!

That was it. It seemed the factory then dug a large pit and threw in the rest of the rackets and covered them up to end its busines here.

Do note that: "that's what I heard".