Fifteen or so years ago, if you had asked Charlie Monfort "Where's the beef?" as the president of Monfort International Sales Corp., a major exporter of beef to Japan and the European Communities, he would have answered it with relative ease and confidence.
At the same time, if you asked him to explain Major League Baseball's designated hitter rule, he probably couldn't have, and would have been smart enough to not even try.
Now, Monfort, Colorado Rockies Owner & CEO, can answer both.
"I really wasn't a baseball fan, I was more of a football fan. I grew up in the beef business, that's our background — our grandparents and parents — so that's where I thought I would be," said Monfort, who was in Salt Lake City this week, along with Nobel Prize winner Mario R. Capecchi, J. Brent Harvey, David Grant and Ann Weaver Hart, to receive the University of Utah's Alumni Association's 2008 Distinguished Alumni Award.
After being approached in 1991 to be an investor in the new ball club, his father and brother weren't interested, but he was and jumped aboard with both feet, and that ride has been bumpy at times with the upstart Rockies, but the team made its first-ever World Series last year in only its second trip to the playoffs.
"I said, 'Sure,'" he said of the business opportunity. "As my dad would say, I'm a little bit of the crazier brother."
Later, in order to save the franchise and his investment, he bought the team from the general partners. His brother later bought in.
"You look back on it, and it's 'what happened? How did I get in this position?"' he said. "I love it. I love the business. It's a tough business because of the economic structure of the big-market clubs and ours. Ourselves, Minnesota, Oakland and a lot of teams in our same position have been successful and so we're trying to prove, even within the economic structure we've got, we can have some success."
"That's what you get more making the World Series," said Monfort, a Greeley, Colo., native, who graduated from the U. in 1982. "I think it is somewhere in the bylaws is somebody owns a team and gets to the World Series you automatically get an award."
All joking aside, it was his business acumen that led him to jump on board with the Rockies in the mid-1990s. It took nearly two decades, but the Rockies, after an improbable late-season run, earned and won a one-game playoff with the San Diego Padres.
"It's a huge honor," Monfort said of the Distinguished Alumni award. "It's one that I am very honored to have and humbled by it. You look at the list of recipients and it's an honor to be involved in that."
The Rockies' miraculous run through the playoffs with players like Matt Holliday, Todd Helton, Troy Tulowitzki, Jeff Francis, Brad Hawpe and Garrett Atkins, finally ended with a World Series loss to the Boston Red Sox.
"The World Series team and a lot of my business ideas, management philosophies and marketing philosophies came from the university. In fact, that's where it all started. I'm proud to be an alum of the University of Utah. My education there turned into some success with the Rockies."
He hopes the Rockies get back to the World Series soon, but this time win it.
"I think this team is billed to sustain the success we've had," Monfort said, stating 16 players on the 25-man roster came up the Rockies' farm system, which ranks seventh in Major League Baseball, and two more came via a trade of one of their top pitching prospects.
"It shows we're scouting well and developing well. We got great caches in great places and we're drafting well," he said. "We've got guys behind these guys, so I think we've got a great system in place."
E-mail: jhinton@desnews.com