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By Curtis Eichelberger

Nov. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Jerome Kenney spent three decades at Merrill Lynch & Co., where he helped transform a retail brokerage into an investment bank and became vice chairman before it went out of business last year. But he’ll always have Yale University football.

Kenney earned his bachelor’s degree from the New Haven, Connecticut, school, and between him and his three brothers, a member of his family was on the team from the 1957 season through the 1970 season. A nephew, who graduated in 1993, also played. Tomorrow, the Kenney Center, a three-story athletic building with meeting rooms and offices financed with donations from the family, will be dedicated before the game against Harvard University.

Kenney, 68, said the school can become a football power again. Yale produced two Heisman Trophy winners and in 1960 shared the title as best college football team in the east with the U.S. Naval Academy, beating out nationally ranked teams such as Penn State, Pittsburgh and Syracuse. Merrill, once the largest U.S. securities firm, suffered more than $55 billion of losses and writedowns before being sold to Bank of America Corp.

“The long-term goal is to restore what you had earlier; world-class facilities, which enable you to hire the best coaches and you are competing for the brightest athletes to consider Yale among any other choice,” Kenney, now a senior adviser at BlackRock Inc., the largest publicly traded U.S. money manager, said in an interview about his family’s contribution. “That’s the broader goal.”

30-Year Career

Kenney joined Merrill Lynch as part of its 1978 merger with White, Weld & Co., where he was director of research. He was chief executive officer of Merrill’s capital markets business from 1984 to 1990, helping lead the firm’s expansion into stock underwriting and investment banking.

He was head of Merrill’s corporate strategy and research until 2002, advising three different CEOs during that time. He also was vice chairman, senior adviser and a member of the executive client coverage group until he left last year.

The Kenneys are the only family to have five members play football at Yale and the only four-brother football combination in school history. The brothers are Brian from the class of 1960, Jerome ‘63, Robert ‘67 and Richard ‘71. Robert’s son, Jeffrey ‘93 also played for the Bulldogs.

$30 Million Program

Neither the Kenneys nor the school would disclose the size of their donation. The Kenney Center is part of a $30 million improvement program that includes a plaza and renovations to the 64,000-seat Yale Bowl.

Yale now plays in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s Football Championship Subdivision, which does not send its members to bowl games or play for the Bowl Championship Series national title against the likes of the University of Florida.

The Bulldogs produced two Heisman Trophy winners, Larry Kelley in 1936 and Clint Frank in 1937. Yale has won at least a share of 14 Ivy League titles.

Back then, the top student athletes either went to Harvard or Yale, Kenney said. Now they are picking schools like Stanford, Northwestern and Duke universities. All three play in the college football Bowl Championship Subdivision, making them eligible for postseason games like the Rose Bowl. They also offer full athletic scholarships. It costs about $47,000 a year to go to Yale, and like the rest of the Ivy League, it doesn’t offer full athletic scholarships.

Standards

That’s something that may need to be changed, said Brian Kenney, who earned a masters of business administration from Harvard.

“I’m all for the highest academic standards,” he said. “But it doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive.”

Yale was ranked the third-best school in the nation by U.S. News & World report, behind Princeton and Harvard. Stanford was No. 4, Duke No. 10 and Northwestern No. 12.

Stanford, meanwhile, beat the University of Southern California, then ranked ninth, 55-21 on Nov. 14. Northwestern beat Iowa, then ranked No. 8, on Nov. 7.

The Kenney Center is attached to the 95-year-old Yale Bowl and includes areas dedicated to honoring the school’s Heisman Trophy winners, All-Americans, Rhodes Scholars and Academic All- Americans.

Robert was a fixed-income salesman for Morgan Stanley, retired at 50 and started a real estate business in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. Brian started an investment company, Kenney Investments in Northfield, Illinois, and Richard became a social worker.

Irish Immigrant

“My father was from an Irish immigrant family and no one had gone to college, so there was no pedigree to start with,” Kenney said. “It was a family that you worked hard and striving for the best education and being loyal to your institutions and your family,” said Jerome Kenney.

He credits the lessons he learned on the playing field with helping him succeed in business.

Football game film forced him to analyze his mistakes and make adjustments, he said. Track taught him to take an honest look at his potential and set a course that would make the best use of his abilities. And the overall experience demonstrated that he could go farther as part of a team than as an individual.

“It’s not just the players, it’s how you mobilize people; how do you get a collective advantage? Wall Street firms are collective advantage firms,” he said.

Yale might need more than teamwork to beat Harvard this year. The Crimson have a 6-3 record and have a chance at a share of the Ivy League title with a win. Yale is 4-5 and has lost seven of the past eight games against Harvard. This is the 126th year of the rivalry.

Yale first-year coach Tom Williams says the Bulldogs have already won. The improvements the university has made to support the program will pay dividends in years to come.

“The facilities puts us in the upper echelon of the Ivy League,” Williams said. “We think it will be a boon for us in recruiting.”

To contact the reporters on this story: Curtis Eichelberger in Washington at ceichelberge@bloomberg.netMichael J. Moore in New York at mmoore55@bloomberg.net.