Brad Kwong
Calgary 51° 2' 44.18" N, 114° 3' 27.15" W Business Sports and Athletics Canadian Football League Hockey Person
Brad Kwong is part of the group that owns the Dubuque Fighting Saints of the United States Hockey League, the top junior league in the United States. [1] When Northern Lights, LLC purchased the team in 2009, Kwong became part of a growing number of people of colour, Asians in hockey’s ownership ranks, from the junior leagues to the National Hockey League. [2]
Kwong, a defenseman played his hockey as the captain of the Harvard University’s hockey team from 1984 to 1985. [3]
His time at Harvard helped cement ties with other entrepreneurs through the Fighting Saints ownership. He played hockey in the 1980s with Phillip Falcone, Northern Lights’s principal owner and part owner of the NHL’s Minnesota Wild and Peter Chiarelli, general manager of the Boston Bruins. Mark Falcone, another Northern Lights managing partner and a Minnesota Wild board member, played hockey for the University of Denver hockey player. Phillip Falcone is chief investment officer of Harbinger Capital Partners, a Wall Street private hedge fund, and Kwong is a managing partner in the firm. [4]
Kwong says: “I have the benefit of having some really good partners that helped me get along in this profession. “I don’t ever recall an encounter where I was compromised or biased because of my ethnicity. And that might be me just having the blinders on or being naïve to it. But I think this sport in particular, because I lived through it, and in business in general, if you prove that you have a certain acumen, drive, and initiative you can succeed in anything.” [5] He continues. “We all believed that hockey, most notably college hockey, changed the trajectory of our lives. So we wanted to give back to the sport and college hockey and obviously the USHL being the primary feeder of players to NCCA Division I hockey was a great platform to do that.” [6]
Brad Kwong is the son of Norman “Normie” Kwong, a star running back in the Canadian Football League’s Calgary Stampeders and the Edmonton Eskimos from the 1940s to the 1960s. Normie was also part of the ownership group that bought the NHL’s Atlanta Flames and moved the team to Calgary in 1980. When the Flames won the Stanley Cup in 1989, the elder Kwong became one of the few people whose names are etched on both the CFL’s Grey Cup and the Stanley Cup. [7]
Kwong says that his father, “of course, back in the 40s and 50s, experienced the racial stuff. He always just fought through it, never saw himself as different, and just kind of worked hard and achieved a lot, regardless of his race. He always instilled in my brothers and me to just do your best, work hard, and you’ll achieve the goals you set out for yourself.” [8] Brad Kwong continues to play competitive hockey, this time in the World Financial Tournament. [9]