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Hawaii Winter Baseball League
In 1992, Duane began working on HWBL-borrowing and revamping an already existing winter baseball league, albeit on the brink of collapse.
"This guy came to sell me season tickets for a winter league that was being started here in Hawaii and I thought "Wow, what a terrific idea." Then the next time I saw the guy, he said, "Well, we're closing down, we're pulling out."
"I kept the league going. I kept the president here and we took it to become an international baseball-the first true professional international baseball league of its kind in the world," he added.
The best things that come out of the league stem from the camaraderie that it establishes between the US and international players that get involved. Duane said, despite the cultural and language barriers, the top performing teams in HWBL were those with a mix of national and international talents. He theorized that it was due to the extra effort that each player had to exert to communicate with their teammates. Players in the HWBL spoke fondly of their participation in the league, like Ichiro Suzuki, who Duane quoted as saying that he pointed his success in the MLB to his involvement in Hawaii winter baseball.
As for Duane's entrepreneurial career, HWBL brought him to acquire a stake in one of MLB's most popular teams, the San Francisco Giants. The league also posed as platform for his charitable involvement. One of their promotions engaged the league attendees to make ornaments while watching the game, which at the end of the match were collected and distributed to homes for the aged.
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