Chapter 3: The Foundation

My husband started learning carpentry at fourteen. Give him a rough idea of what you want built and he’ll map out the whole thing in his head, measurements, angles, all of it, barely needing to put pen to paper.

Every so often, he’ll tell me stories from those early years. He’ll go on about the blistering roof jobs, ten bucks an hour in the kind of heat that melts shoe soles, and all about his buddy Brent hauling metal up a ladder that probably wasn’t up to code.

When you ask Brent about it, he loves to embellish the stories a bit over an ice cold can of Coors original.

And while I love these stories, I also don’t believe half of them. They’re the construction worker version of my parents walking to school uphill both ways in the snow. Technically, the stories are rooted in something true, dressed up for effect over twenty years of retelling.

I bring this up because I want to be very clear about something before we go any further in this series: nothing you’re about to read got the Brent treatment. No flair, no rounding up, no letting a good story win out over an accurate one. Every claim in these chapters is built the same way my husband builds a house. Carefully, and on a foundation you can actually stand on. In this case, that foundation is public records.

And in this chapter, business documents.

Where It All Began

Before there was a Planning Commission seat, before there was a City Council campaign, and long before there was a mayor’s office, Tony Kennon was a physical therapist.

Kennon grew up in Chickasaw, Alabama, a small community in Mobile County. According to his official city biography, he settled in Orange Beach full time in 1991. He earned his degree in physical therapy from the University of South Alabama and spent four years working as a team physical therapist and director of rehabilitation for the University of Alabama’s athletic department. He also helped found the University of Alabama Sports Medicine Bureau, the kind of resume that reads less like a future politician and more like a guy who genuinely loved sports medicine.

From there, Kennon built something on his own: Forever Young Rehabilitation Services, a physical therapy business. It’s easy to skim past a detail like that, but I want you to sit with it for a second, because this is where the story actually starts. Long before Kennon was approving rezonings on the Planning Commission or casting votes on the City Council, he was running a small healthcare business on the Alabama coast.

That business didn’t stay small forever, and it didn’t stay his forever either. At some point, Forever Young was folded into what is now known as Encore Rehabilitation, one of the largest privately owned rehabilitation companies in the Southeast.

Forever Young didn't simply wake up one morning with a new name on the door. Encore Rehabilitation was already a company of its own, and had been for more than two decades. According to Encore's corporate history, physical therapists Paul Henderson and Paige Plash founded the company in 1981 after studying together at the University of South Alabama. From there, Encore expanded beyond traditional outpatient physical therapy into sports medicine, athletic training, occupational therapy, industrial rehabilitation, contract therapy, fitness, and rehabilitation services for schools, hospitals, and private businesses. By 2005, Kennon was not selling his practice to a start up. He was dealing with an established regional rehabilitation company.

But Kennon never fully walked away from that sale. Two decades later, in his 2024 Statement of Economic Interests, the annual disclosure Alabama requires of its elected officials, Kennon reported income from Encore Rehabilitation Inc.

When you go looking for how Kennon explains that income, the answer he's given publicly is a simple one. He isn't a consultant for Encore, and never has been. The money, as he's told it, traces back to that 2005 sale — a buyout for a business he built and let go of, not a paycheck for anything he's doing today.

According to a July 2025 interview with Gulf Coast Media, Kennon said he sold his physical therapy business to Encore Rehabilitation in 2005 and continues to receive payments related to that sale. When asked about the ongoing financial relationship, Kennon told the publication that Encore "give[s] him regular payments as a part of the buyout," but declined to say when those payments would end. The same report noted that Kennon's 2024 Alabama Statement of Economic Interests listed income from Encore Rehabilitation, Inc. in the range of $50,000 to $149,999. While Kennon attributes those payments to the 2005 sale, the underlying purchase agreement and terms of the transaction have not been made public, making it impossible to independently verify the structure of the deal or determine whether the reported income represents installment payments, compensation for ongoing work, or a combination of both.

I want to take that explanation seriously, because on its face it's a reasonable one. Businesses get sold on installment terms all the time. A man can part with something he built and still be collecting on it years later, and there's nothing improper about that.

But let's take a look back at the paper.

Was This Really a Buyout?

If the Encore money were only the long tail of a 2005 sale, you’d expect it to look that way on the forms. A line here, a note there, a number that thins out year after year as the payout runs its course. That isn’t what the disclosures show. Encore Rehabilitation is the single most consistent private entity in twenty years of Kennon’s filings.

In statement after statement, from 2008 through 2020 and again from 2022 through 2025, Encore is the outside work he reports, the non-public occupation he certifies he spent at least a third of his working time doing. In the earliest filings he identifies himself as a physical therapist with Encore Rehabilitation. In later years, the forms simply list Encore Rehabilitation, Inc. before returning in 2025 to "Occupation: Physical Therapist" with Encore Rehabilitation as the associated business.

That’s not really the shape of a buyout. A buyout is a transaction. It happens, and then it’s finished, and you stop listing it as your job.

And then there’s 2025.

For most of two decades, Encore appears in Kennon's disclosures as ordinary outside income or employment. Then something changes. In the filings covering 2025, submitted in March 2026 and later amended that May, Encore moves into a different section entirely. For the first time, Kennon identifies Encore Rehabilitation Inc. as a company in which he served as an officer, director, or board member and received at least $5,000 in compensation.

So inside these documents we end up with three versions of the same relationship, and they don’t quite sit flush. There’s the version said out loud of a clean break in 2005, a sale, nothing ongoing. There’s the version filed for most of the two decades, which is “Encore is my job, I’m a physical therapist there.” And there’s the version in 2025 that adds something like “I sit among the people who help direct the company.”

None of this proves the 2005 sale didn't happen exactly as Kennon has described it. But it does complicate the picture. Instead of a business relationship that disappears after a sale, the public filings show one that continues year after year, eventually expanding to include a paid officer or director role. Whether those facts are perfectly consistent with the sale depends on details the public has never been given.

A buyout and a continuing role can both be true at once. But this is Chapter 3, and this is still the foundation, and the entire point of a foundation is that everything stacked on top of it depends on the corner being square. So I’m going to do what my husband does before he trusts a wall to hold. I’m going to check that corner myself.

Pin the officer and director detail, the same way I asked you to pin 2005. A mayor’s tie to a private company matters most at the precise moments that company’s interests come anywhere near the city’s, and Encore Rehabilitation, as it happens, has had reasons to be in the same rooms as the public bodies Tony Kennon helps run.

So that’s Tony Kennon the businessman, at least the start. A physical therapist from Chickasaw who built a rehabilitation practice on the coast and sold it the same year his political career hits its first major speed bump.

But healthcare wasn’t the only business Kennon would eventually find himself connected to. Years later, those same economic interest disclosures would reveal a mayor of a city built on real estate, tied to companies that make their money on real estate. We’ll get to that.

I don’t want you to get information fatigue, but a head’s up. Understanding this web is almost as difficult as learning a new coding language. There are new terms to learn, categories that sound interchangeable until they aren’t, and rules that only make sense once you’ve seen them applied. Officer versus employee. Occupation versus income source. A sale that reads like a job. It’s a lot, and I know it.

But stick with me. You don’t need to memorize the syntax. You just need to keep adding pins to that brain board, because by the time we’re finished, you’re going to look back at this chapter and realize we were never really talking about physical therapy at all.

Remember Brent, up on that roof, dressed up over twenty years of retelling? Here’s the thing about a story like his. It isn’t exactly a lie. The heat was real. The ten bucks an hour was real. The ladder probably was as sketchy as he says. Brent just knows which details to lean on and which ones to let fade, so that by the time the story reaches you over a cold can of Coors, it feels bigger and cleaner than it actually was.

Although I am no carpenter, I know there is one thing carpentry can teach you. You can dress up a foundation all you want. Paint it, frame it, tell a good story about how it went in. But eventually something gets built on top of it. And when that happens, the only thing that matters is whether the corner was ever actually square.