No matter who comments — hockey coach, manager, leader, player, media person, friend — the late Mike Kelly is always and forever described as an upstanding, outstanding, honourable, giving, caring, and an absolutely wonderful man. Kelly was a true builder of sport. Born in Saint John, NB in 1923, work assignments brought him to Halifax in the late 1940s where, through the next dozen years, he saw a void for hockey players passing the juvenile age group. Junior hockey was virtually non-existent.

In 1961, Kelly approached the United Commercial Travellers, of which he was a member, to sponsor a juvenile team which morphed into a junior club within a year. In 1963, Kelly founded the Twin Cities Junior Jockey League so his team would have a league in which to play.

Jump ahead two years. Kelly co-founded the Halifax Junior Canadians with good friend and Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame inductee Fred MacGillivray Sr. The team, an affiliate of the Montreal Canadiens, attracted top junior talent from the Maritimes and New England. It played a demanding schedule against university and senior teams and the best junior squads from Quebec, Ontario, and western Canada. The team regularly sold out the Halifax Forum (capacity 5,500) with crowds often exceeding 7,000.

When the Canadians ended operations in the late 1960s, Kelly engineered the founding of the Maritime Junior League. He founded the Dartmouth Lakers who eventually joined the MJHL.

His energy, local knowledge and love of hockey was noticed by the higher-ups in Montreal who were looking for a prime location for their American Hockey League franchise. When the Nova Scotia Voyageurs became a reality in 1971, Kelly was contacted to help organize the set-up. He spearheaded negotiations with the city and Halifax Forum. He arranged team travel for visiting clubs (the Vees absorbed many of the visitors’ travel expenses). He led the promotion campaign, speaking at social and business clubs to build the voyageurs’ brand. He developed a season-ticket sale program, sold advertising, handled scheduling, player contracts, billeting, media relations — virtually as a one-man gang.

“Mike was a treasure,” writes Al MacNeil, then-general manager and coach of three Calder Cup champion clubs and a member of the Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame. “His contributions to the sport scene in Nova Scotia were enormous. Hard work and service was not a problem for Mike Kelly. He was tireless in building our team and professional hockey in the province.”

The Vees came to town with the proviso a new arena be built. Kelly’s friendship with then-premier Gerald Regan helped lead to the Metro Centre in Downtown Halifax (now Scotiabank Centre).

In 1973 he founded the Valley Hockey School. Let go suddenly and shockingly by the Vees in 1980, he became promotions director for Saint Mary’s Hockey Huskies of the Atlantic University Athletic Association, then worked 10 years in the marketing department of the Nova Scotia Liquor Commission.

Through the years, he also served as vice-president of the Maritime Amateur Hockey Association, director of the Old-Timers Hockey Association and as operations head of Halifax Mooseheads Junior A team in the Metro Valley Junior Hockey League. Many of Kelly’s long list of supporters say his foresight and belief in junior hockey led to the 1993 founding of the Halifax Mooseheads of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League, arguably the most successful sport franchise ever to play in Halifax and Nova Scotia.

Kelly served the hockey and sports world in so many quality ways. Passing away suddenly, much too early at age 70, he was active until his last day, a day on which Mike Kelly was being Mike Kelly.

Known for his compassion, giving nature, generosity, and love of his friends and their families, he was in Montreal to attend a Canadiens’ hockey game and to pay tribute to long-time friend, hockey broadcaster Danny Gallivan, who passed away a few days earlier.

While entering the lobby of the Montreal Forum for the Saturday night game, Kelly Collapsed and died of a massive heart attack. As Kelly’s best friend Pat Connolly, an inductee to the Nova Scotia Sport Hall of Fame, wrote a couple of days later in the Halifax Daily News. “If there had to be an ending, that would be precisely the place he would want it to happen.”

In Connolly’s March 1, 1993 written tribute to Kelly, he eloquently described his friend this way:

“Mike Kelly was the consummate people person who generosity of spirit, time, and resources knew no bounds, a rare breed of human being who lived his life almost entirely for others. Few gave us much to family and community and fewer still endured as many hard knocks in life than the man whose simple philosophy was contained in one of his favourite expressions: You just get up and keep on going.”

Bio Courtesy of Joel Jacobson