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20/06/2026

Fifty-Two Seconds From Oblivion, and a Moose Who Changed Everything

There is a moment in every dynasty when the door between glory and collapse swings on the thinnest of hinges. For the Philadelphia Flyers, that moment came with 52 seconds left in Game Two of the 1974 Stanley Cup Final, the score tied at nothing good, the Boston Bruins standing between them and history.

And then André Dupont stepped into the slot and fired.

The puck beat Gilles Gilbert. The Spectrum erupted. Not a forward, not a superstar — a big, physical defenceman from Trois-Rivières who most of the hockey world knew only as Moose. Ten days later, the Flyers lifted their first Stanley Cup. They would lift another one the following spring. But in the long, loud legend of the Broad Street Bullies, the moment that opened the door belonged to the man nobody always remembered first.

Here is the thing that should stop you cold. Had that puck not found the net, had Gilbert smothered it or the post swallowed it, the Bruins would have taken a stranglehold on that series. Philadelphia could have unravelled. The dynasty — the parades, the second Cup, the identity that defined an entire city — might never have happened. One shot from the slot, with less than a minute left in regulation, rewrote the franchise. Dupont skated back to the bench as if it were just another shift.

That was always the Moose way. He came into the NHL as a first-round pick of the New York Rangers in the 1969 Amateur Draft — a teenager who had already won a Memorial Cup that same year with the Montreal Junior Canadiens. He was the real article from the start, a stay-at-home defenceman with size, snarl, and a competitive streak that made him a natural fit for what Philadelphia was building. After a stop in St. Louis, he arrived with the Flyers and became one of the cornerstones of the most feared team of the 1970s. Broad Street was a place where gentleness was not a survival strategy, and Dupont thrived in that fire. He wore the orange and black across back-to-back championship seasons, 1974 and 1975, playing a brand of hockey that left marks on opponents and memories on a fanbase that still talks about those years in a particular tone of reverence.

He played 13 seasons in the NHL in total, closing out his career with the Quebec Nordiques before retiring in 1983. Thirteen years of bus rides and blocked shots and dressing rooms that smelled of sweat and analgesic and the particular tension of playoff hockey in the old barns of the eastern conference.

The hockey did not stop with him, either. His son Danny Dupont carved his own path through the game — a different kind of path, one lined with penalty minutes rather than goals. In the 1994–95 season, Danny led the entire QMJHL in penalty minutes with a staggering 446, spread across three teams in a single year. The apple landed near the tree, even if it took a harder bounce. Danny eventually turned to coaching and became head coach of the Acadie-Bathurst Titan in the QMJHL, carrying the family name forward in the game they both loved.

André Dupont played junior hockey in Trois-Rivières, won as a teenager, won again as a young man on the fiercest team the league had ever seen, and then played on through a decade of grind and grit. He never scored a more important goal than the one most people forgot he scored.

A draft pick from Trois-Rivières. A Broad Street Bully. A Stanley Cup champion. The Moose who bought a dynasty ten days of breathing room, with 52 seconds left on the clock.

20/06/2026

Left Unprotected. Never Let Go.

Nobody in the NHL wanted Gary Dornhoefer badly enough to protect him.

That sentence should sting a little — because it's true. When the 1967 Expansion Draft came around, the Boston Bruins left the young right winger unprotected. He was 24 years old, had shown genuine promise in his debut season three years earlier — twelve goals and ten assists in 32 games — and had then spent most of the following three seasons riding buses in the American Hockey League with the Hershey Bears while Boston found better uses for its roster spots. So when the new franchises arrived to pick through what the established clubs had discarded, there was Dornhoefer, unprotected, unclaimed by the team that had originally believed in him.

The Philadelphia Flyers took him 13th overall. And from that moment forward, Gary Dornhoefer never played for another NHL team.

He spent eleven seasons in orange and black. Eleven seasons — surpassed in franchise longevity only by Bobby Clarke, Bill Barber, and Rick MacLeish. On a team that would become the most feared and talked-about franchise of the 1970s, a team built on grit and controlled fury, Dornhoefer became one of its essential men. Not a superstar. Not a headline. Something rarer than that — a player the team could not function without, and who understood exactly what that meant.

His style was bruising and honest. He hit hard, he ground shifts down to the bone, and he accumulated 1,291 penalty minutes across his career — ranking eighth all-time in Flyers franchise history on a team that was practically legendary for brawling. But here is the thing the casual hockey fan tends to forget: the man could score. He reached the 20-goal mark five times. In 1973 he had his finest season — 30 goals, 49 assists, 79 points — and was named to the NHL All-Star Game. He would earn that honour again in 1977, finishing that regular season with a plus-47 plus/minus that speaks to just how much he mattered to the architecture of a winning team.

Here is the moment that stopped a city cold.

In the 1973 Stanley Cup playoffs, Dornhoefer took the puck himself, went end-to-end, and scored a crucial overtime goal against the Minnesota North Stars on a solo rush. It was the kind of goal that lives in a city's memory long after the building that witnessed it is gone. The Spectrum was demolished in 2010 and 2011, but the statue memorialising that overtime rush survived. It stands now outside Stateside Live in the middle of the South Philadelphia Sports Complex — a man alone with the puck, frozen in bronze, still going somewhere.

The back-to-back Stanley Cup championships came in 1974 and 1975. Dornhoefer was there for both, one of the pillars of a team that ran the league for those two electric seasons. Injuries were a constant companion — the consequence of playing the way he played, never with half-measures, never looking for the safe option. He missed significant time throughout his career because of the toll that style exacted. But he kept coming back. In 1978, when his scoring touch had finally gone and the body had taken too much, he walked away. He finished with 214 goals, 328 assists, and 542 points across 787 NHL games. At retirement, he was second only to Clarke as the franchise's all-time leading scorer. He still ranks tenth in that category today.

After the skates came off, Dornhoefer moved into broadcasting — first briefly in Philadelphia, then back to Ontario, where he spent nearly a decade as a colour commentator on Hockey Night in Canada. He returned to Philadelphia in 1992 and joined the Flyers broadcast team, working alongside the irreplaceable Gene Hart before carrying on as the club's colour analyst all the way through the 2005-06 season. He gave the game another quarter century after his last shift on the ice.

Left unprotected in 1967. Chosen by one city. Never let go.

19/06/2026

Eight Points. One Night. One Number That Changed Hockey History.

There are defencemen who win Cups, and there are defencemen who rewrite the record books. Tom Bladon did both — and most people today couldn't tell you his name.

He came out of Edmonton, Alberta, a kid who had been a forward before fate and tragedy pushed him to the blue line. When team captain and defenceman Lorne Owens died during the 1969-70 season with the Edmonton Maple Leafs, the team needed someone willing to step back and hold the line. Bladon stepped back. He was barely seventeen years old, and the position would define the rest of his life.

He was good enough to catch the attention of the Edmonton Oil Kings and good enough that the Philadelphia Flyers took him in the second round of the 1972 draft. He signed with Philadelphia in June of that year, and when training camp ended, Flyers head coach Fred Shero named him to the opening night roster — then leaned on him harder than any other rookie, using him in every situation the game could throw at a young defenceman. Shero said it plainly: Bladon was playing under more pressure than any other first-year man on the ice. He absorbed it. By mid-February of his rookie season he ranked among the NHL's leading rookie scorers, and by early March he had tied the franchise record for points by a defenceman. He finished that first year with 11 goals and 42 points, and along the way he surpassed Bobby Orr's NHL record for assists by a rookie defenceman. Bobby Orr. Let that settle for a moment.

Then came the Cups. Back-to-back, 1974 and 1975, the Broad Street Bullies at their most ferocious. Bladon signed a long-term extension and stayed in Philadelphia, part of one of the most physically dominant teams the sport has ever seen.

But here is the number that stops people cold.

December 11, 1977. Philadelphia versus the Cleveland Barons. Final score, 11–1. Tom Bladon scored four goals and added four assists. Eight points. In one game. From a defenceman. No defenceman in NHL history had ever done it before, and the record stood untouched for nearly a decade until Paul Coffey of the Edmonton Oilers matched it in 1986. Eight points in a single game remains, to this day, one of the most extraordinary individual performances in the history of the position.

After the 1977-78 season, Bladon was traded to the Pittsburgh Penguins alongside Orest Kindrachuk and Ross Lonsberry in exchange for Pittsburgh's first-round pick in the 1978 draft. He later signed with the Edmonton Oilers as a free agent in July 1980, but refused to report to their minor league affiliate after just four periods of play. He received his release and earned a tryout with the Detroit Red Wings before his playing days finally wound down.

Life after hockey took him somewhere quieter and, by all appearances, somewhere good. He opened a trophy store in Victoria, British Columbia — a fitting enough line of work for a man who had held two Stanley Cup championships in his hands. He coached at the Island Pacific Hockey School For Girls, passing something of the game on to a new generation. And by 2007, he and his wife Diane had built something lasting together: ownership of a Tim Hortons franchise in Calgary, the kind of steady, community-rooted life that so many former players quietly build far from the spotlight.

He never got the headlines Orr got, or the reverence Coffey would earn. He played the thankless minutes, made the bone-jarring transitions, won two championships in the most brutally physical era the game has ever seen, and then one winter night in Cleveland put up a number that the sport has never seen a defenceman exceed.

A prairie kid turned into a Flyer. A Flyer turned into a record-breaker. A record-breaker who went home and built a life.

Tom Bladon deserves to be remembered for more than just a trophy store.

Penguins

19/06/2026

Flin Flon. Philadelphia. Forever.

Before a single NHL team trusted him, before a single scout wrote his name without a footnote, Bobby Clarke had already beaten the hardest opponent he would ever face. Not the Soviets. Not Bobby Orr. Not Eric Lindros or the Edmonton Oilers or the ghosts of four consecutive first-round exits. The hardest opponent was a diagnosis handed to a twelve-year-old boy in a northern Manitoba mining town — type 1 diabetes — and the quiet verdict that followed it in every NHL front office: he will never last.

He lasted fifteen years. Every single one of them in orange and black.

The scouts were not entirely wrong to hesitate. Diabetes in the early 1970s was not what it is today, and the NHL was not in the business of taking chances on fragile bodies. What they could not measure was the thing Clarke had built in Flin Flon, playing for the Bombers in cold rinks before crowds who knew his name and his blood sugar both. His coach Pat Ginnell took him to the Mayo Clinic after the 1967–68 season and got the doctors to put it in writing — Clarke could play professionally if he looked after himself. Ginnell carried that letter into arenas like a legal brief, showing it to every scout who came through the door. Even then, teams looked away. The Flyers' own general manager Bud Poile passed on Clarke with his first-round pick, choosing Bob Currier — a man who retired five years later without playing a single NHL game. It took scout Gerry Melnyk calling a diabetes specialist in Philadelphia to finally convince Poile. Clarke went 17th overall in the second round of the 1969 draft. Detroit and Montreal immediately offered deals to pry him away. The Flyers refused both, made it clear he was not for sale, and handed the number 16 jersey to a twenty-year-old from a town most people couldn't find on a map.

Here is the number that stops people cold. In 1,144 career games — all of them as a Flyer — Clarke produced 1,210 points. Three Hart Trophies. A Selke Trophy. Nine All-Star Game appearances. Three times he hit 100 points in a season, including a 116-point campaign in 1974–75 when he set the NHL record for assists by a centreman with 89, a mark he matched the following year. His career plus-minus stands at plus-507, fifth all-time in NHL history. He became the first player from an expansion franchise to crack 100 points in a season. He was the youngest captain in Flyers history at twenty-three, the C on his chest before most players his age had settled into a role.

But the story that cuts deepest is not in the point totals. It is in the moments when the body should have quit and didn't. The 1974 playoffs: a stick to the eye, a broken contact lens embedded under his lid, a scratched cornea — and Clarke back on the ice the next game. The 1981 regular season: a Reggie Leach slapshot catching him flush, Clarke leaving the ice bleeding, returning moments later stitched and covered in blood, then scoring 31 seconds into the third period for his 1,000th career point. The opponent was Boston. Of course it was Boston. The man who scored the Stanley Cup–winning overtime goal in Game 2 of the 1974 Finals against the Bruins' Gilles Gilbert, who won 48 of 66 face-offs against Phil Esposito in that same series — he always seemed to find another level when the Bruins were in the building.

The Flyers won back-to-back Cups in 1974 and 1975. The 1975–76 season brought his third Hart Trophy and a personal-best 119 points on the LCB line with Reggie Leach and Bill Barber, a trio that set the all-time record for goals by a line with 141. The undefeated streak of 35 games during the 1979–80 season, still the longest in North American professional sports history, happened with Clarke wearing the C and contributing 8 power-play goals in 19 playoff games. A broken foot in 1981–82 was the only time in his career he played fewer than 70 games in a regular season. Fifteen seasons. One team. One address.

Off the ice, Clarke and his wife Sandy raised four children and built a life rooted in South Jersey, the community that had claimed him as its own. When the Flyers retired his number 16 on November 15, 1984, they also created the Bobby Clarke Trophy, awarded annually to the team's most valuable player — his name permanently woven into the franchise's future. The Hockey Hall of Fame came calling in 1987, first ballot. The Order of Canada followed. And back in Flin Flon, the trophy he won as a junior scorer was renamed the Bob Clarke Trophy, given every year to the WHL's best scorer — a northern mining town insisting that the world remember where he came from.

A boy from Flin Flon they said couldn't play. A captain at twenty-three. Back-to-back Stanley Cups. Three Hart Trophies. Fifteen seasons, one sweater, and a plus-507 that tells you everything about what he believed hockey was actually for.

19/06/2026

Two Brothers. Two Cups. One Orange-and-Black Brotherhood.

There is something the record books cannot quite hold — the feeling of playing alongside the person who taught you the game. For Jimmy Watson, that feeling lasted an entire decade, at the highest level of professional hockey, in the most ferocious dressing room in the sport.

Watson arrived in Philadelphia in 1973, a defenceman out of Smithers, British Columbia — a small town tucked into the mountains of the province's northwest, far removed from the bright lights of the Spectrum. He wasn't there to score. He wasn't there to headline anything. He was there to hold the line, to defend, to do the grinding, unglamorous work that championship teams quietly depend on. And right beside him on that blue line was his older brother Joe.

Here is the thing that should stop you cold. The Watson brothers didn't just play together. They won together — back-to-back Stanley Cups, 1974 and 1975, with the Broad Street Bullies. In an era of blood and broken noses, when Bobby Clarke's Flyers were dismantling opponents with a violence and purpose the league had never quite seen, two brothers from the mountains of British Columbia held the defensive blue line together. Not many families in hockey history can say that.

Jimmy wasn't the loudest name on that roster. He never needed to be. But the hockey world noticed. He was named to the NHL All-Star Game five times — in 1975, 1976, 1977, 1978 and 1980 — and he twice won the Barry Ashbee Trophy as the Flyers' best defenceman, in 1975–76 and 1977–78. Ashbee's name on that trophy meant something in Philadelphia; it carried the weight of a teammate who had died young, and winning it twice was a quiet signal that Watson understood what it meant to honour the men who came before him. In 1976, he suited up for Canada in the Canada Cup, two games that placed him among the best the country had to offer.

His decade in orange and black ran from 1973 to 1982 — ten full seasons, one sweater, one city, two championship rings.

But what came after the playing days is where Jimmy Watson's story takes a turn that deserves its own telling. He didn't vanish into the broadcast booth or the front office. He stayed close to the ice. He built the Jim Watson Hockey Academy and the Jim Watson Hockey Camp at Iceworks Skating Complex in Aston, Pennsylvania, spending his post-playing years teaching the game to the next generation. His youth teams competed — his Philadelphia Little Flyers Midget 16U squad won back-to-back AYHL Championships in 2008–09 and 2009–10. The instinct for winning hadn't gone anywhere; it had simply found a new expression.

His two sons, Chase and Brett, both went on to play professional hockey — Chase with the Reading Royals in the ECHL after his time with the Providence Friars, Brett in professional games with the Wheeling Nailers. A hockey father raised hockey sons. The mountains of Smithers, the ice of Philadelphia, the rinks of Pennsylvania — one family's line through the game runs long and clear.

On February 29, 2016, the Flyers inducted Jimmy Watson into their Hall of Fame, honouring a man who had given them ten seasons, five All-Star appearances, two championships, and a lifetime of service to the sport. He came in as a young defenceman from a small British Columbia town. He left as a piece of the greatest chapter in Flyers history.

A mountain kid. A Broad Street Bully. A two-time Cup champion. A teacher. Still on the ice.

19/06/2026

First Overall. One Season as GM. A Power Outage That Changed Everything.

Mel Bridgman arrived in Philadelphia as the most coveted young player in the country. The Flyers took him first overall in the 1975 NHL Amateur Draft — a hard-nosed, smart, two-way centre out of Victoria who had just won the WCHL scoring title and earned a league All-Star selection. The Broad Street Bullies didn't draft soft, and Bridgman was anything but. He checked, he fought, he produced, and he eventually wore the captain's C in Philadelphia. He would later wear it again in New Jersey. Two franchises trusted him with the hardest job in the room.

Here is the number that stops people cold. Mel Bridgman played 977 NHL games, scored 252 goals, added 449 assists, and accumulated 1,625 penalty minutes across 14 seasons. In 1981-82 he put up 87 points — 33 goals and 54 assists — the kind of season that defines a career. He reached two Stanley Cup Finals with the Flyers, in 1976 and again in 1980. He was the complete package: grit and brains, muscle and vision, the kind of centre who could play any situation and lead any locker room.

But here is where the story turns.

When the Ottawa Senators were awarded an expansion franchise in 1991, Bridgman had just earned his master's degree in business administration from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. He was sharp, credentialed, and ambitious. He was named the Senators' first-ever general manager — a chance to build something from nothing, the way only expansion hockey can offer. It was the next chapter that seemed worthy of the man.

It became instead the most painful year of his professional life. The Senators finished their inaugural season 10-70-4, one of the worst records in modern NHL history. There were drafting miscalculations. And then there was the moment that seemed to capture everything about those early chaotic days in Ottawa — during the expansion draft, the team's computer, the one storing all their draft information, went dead. No power supply. No batteries. No backup. Three times Bridgman made illegal selections as a result, and three times he was forced to stand up and publicly apologise. Three times. For a man who had spent 14 years earning respect in the hardest league on earth, it was humiliating in a way no fight or forecheck ever could be. He was dismissed after that single season. The day after his firing, one of his sons was bullied at school because of it. Bridgman never took another job in professional hockey.

He went to California instead, worked in finance at Smith Barney, settled with his family in Manhattan Beach. He coached his sons' hockey teams on weekends, still tied to the game that had given him so much, just no longer inside the machinery of it. He had four children — Jamie, Patrick, Geoffrey, and Christine — and he built a life that had nothing to do with standings or GM offices.

Mel Bridgman died of heart failure on November 6, 2025, in Victoria, British Columbia. He was 70 years old. After his passing, his family launched a memorial fund in his name to raise money for CTE research — a quiet, dignified act that speaks to who he was and what the game had cost the men who played it.

He was a first overall pick who became a captain twice. He was a businessman who stepped into the impossible job of building a franchise from scratch, in a city that had never had one, with a computer that ran out of power. He was a father who coached his sons on cold weekend mornings long after the arenas stopped chanting his name. A Thunder Bay kid. A Flyer. A captain. A man who, at the end, wanted the next generation of players looked after better than his had been.

19/06/2026

Fifty Goals. A Career Cut Short. A Voice That Never Left Detroit.

Mickey Redmond was supposed to be one of the great ones. Not in the way people say that loosely, as a consolation for careers that faded quietly. He was supposed to be one of the genuinely great ones — the kind whose name sits on trophy cases and whose records stand for decades.

For two seasons in Detroit, he was exactly that.

When the Montreal Canadiens traded him to the Red Wings halfway through the 1970–71 season — sending him to Detroit in the deal that brought Frank Mahovlich back to Montreal — Redmond arrived as a promising young right winger with two Stanley Cup rings already on his fingers, won in 1968 and 1969 with one of the most dominant teams the league had ever seen. He had scored 27 goals in Montreal in a single season. He was twenty-two years old. The best was ahead of him.

In his first full season in Detroit, playing on a line centred by the veteran Alex Delvecchio, Redmond scored 42 goals. The hockey world took notice. Then came 1972–73.

Here is the number that stops people cold.

Fifty-two goals. In a single season. Mickey Redmond became the seventh player in NHL history — and the first Red Wing ever — to score 50 goals in a season, surpassing Gordie Howe's franchise record of 49 in the process. He finished with 93 points and earned a First Team All-Star selection. The following season, with Delvecchio retired into coaching and a young Marcel Dionne now his linemate, Redmond did it again — 51 goals, including an NHL-leading 21 on the power play, making him only the third player in league history, after Bobby Hull and Phil Esposito, to score 50 goals in back-to-back seasons.

Two rings. Two 50-goal seasons. A Second Team All-Star nod in 1974. An All-Star Game. He was twenty-six years old, playing in Detroit, and the city was starting to believe it had found its next cornerstone.

Then his back gave out.

In 1974–75, a back injury limited Redmond to just 29 games. The following season he managed 37 before the pain became impossible to overcome. He retired at twenty-eight. Not in the way players retire after a long run, with ceremony and applause. He simply stopped, because his body would not let him continue. His single-season goal record at Detroit would stand until John Ogrodnick scored 55 in 1985. The rest of what he might have become stayed locked inside a career that ended twelve years too soon.

But here is where the story turns — because Mickey Redmond refused to disappear.

He became a broadcaster. First on CBC's Hockey Night in Canada, then on ESPN alongside voices like Dan Kelly and Sam Rosen, then through the Fox and ABC and NBC eras of the NHL, and ultimately back home in Detroit for decades of local Red Wings coverage, working alongside play-by-play men Dave Strader, Mike Goldberg, and Ken Daniels. His catchphrases became so distinctly his own that fans began calling them Mickeyisms. In 2011, the Hockey Hall of Fame presented him with the Foster Hewitt Memorial Award, recognising outstanding contributions to hockey broadcasting — the game's highest honour for voices behind the microphone.

He still works Red Wings games today, though his world has grown smaller by necessity. A diagnosis of coeliac disease and two battles with lung cancer mean he covers only home games and short road trips now, with Chris Osgood and Larry Murphy stepping in when the travel becomes too much. He does not complain about it publicly. He just does the games he can do.

His younger brother Dick played thirteen NHL seasons, mostly with the Chicago Blackhawks and the Boston Bruins, a defenceman who had his own long career. Hockey ran through the Redmond family like cold air through an open arena door.

Ask any Red Wings fan of a certain age and they will tell you: Mickey Redmond never really left the building. He stayed in Detroit when his legs and his back could not carry him anymore, found a new way to love the game, and kept showing up. Two Stanley Cups. Two 50-goal seasons. The Foster Hewitt Award. And a voice in the booth that generations of Detroit fans fell asleep to on school nights.

He played only nine seasons. He gave the game everything it asked of him, and the game took more than its share in return. What he built afterward was entirely his own.

19/06/2026

Eight Stanley Cups. Two Cities. One Member of Parliament.

He grew up on a farm outside Simcoe, Ontario, listening to Foster Hewitt's voice crackle through the radio on winter nights, dreaming about the Maple Leafs. Then a Toronto scout watched him play and decided he wouldn't last twenty games in the NHL. That single verdict shaped everything that followed.

Red Kelly spent the next two decades proving it wrong.

The Detroit Red Wings took the nineteen-year-old that Toronto didn't want. Over the next twelve years, Kelly became one of the finest defencemen the game had ever seen — six First Team All-Star selections, the inaugural James Norris Memorial Trophy in 1954, three Lady Byng Trophies, and four Stanley Cups. He was runner-up to Chicago's Al Rollins for the Hart Memorial Trophy in 1954, which tells you everything about the company he was keeping. The Red Wings won eight regular-season championships during his time there. He was the backbone of a dynasty.

Here is the part that stops people cold.

Kelly played most of the 1958-59 season on a broken ankle. Nobody knew. The team kept it secret. Only when a reporter asked him the following year why he had seemed off his game did it come out — and even then, Kelly's answer was pure Red: "Don't know. Might have been the ankle." Detroit GM Jack Adams, furious at the leak, immediately traded him to the New York Rangers. Kelly's response was equally simple. He announced he would retire before he'd report to New York.

Punch Imlach came calling. Kelly disliked Maple Leaf Gardens, and he hadn't forgotten what that scout had said about him thirteen years earlier. He went anyway. And then Imlach did something nobody expected — he moved Kelly from defence to centre, believing he could shadow Montreal's Jean Béliveau. The gamble paid off beyond anything anyone imagined. Kelly, already a masterful playmaker, unlocked Frank Mahovlich. He won a fourth Lady Byng in 1961. He won four more Stanley Cups in Toronto. The scout's twenty-game verdict had become eight championships across two cities — more than any other player in NHL history who never wore a Montreal Canadiens sweater.

But hockey was only one of his careers.

While he was still skating for the Maple Leafs, Red Kelly ran for office. In the 1962 federal election he won the York West riding for the Liberal Party, defeating Conservative incumbent John Hamilton by more than three thousand votes, the first Liberal to win that seat since 1935. He was re-elected the following year, beating his Progressive Conservative opponent — a young Alan Eagleson — by nearly thirteen thousand votes, and took his place in Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson's government. He sat in Parliament and won two Stanley Cups simultaneously. During the Great Canadian Flag Debate, Leafs owner Conn Smythe pressured him over his support for Pearson's new Maple Leaf flag. Kelly held his ground. He left politics after two terms — not because the game pushed him out, but because he wanted more time with his family.

His family was worth coming home to. He married Andra McLaughlin, an American figure skating star, in 1959. Their son Leonard Jr. went on to represent Canada in long-track speed skating at the 1992 Albertville and 1994 Lillehammer Olympics. Two of his grandsons — George Waddell and Bruce Waddell — both compete in ice dance at the international level, one representing Great Britain, one Canada. The Kelly bloodline kept moving on ice long after Red hung up his skates.

He coached for a decade after retiring as a player — the expansion Los Angeles Kings, the Pittsburgh Penguins, and back to Toronto, where his four seasons on the bench brought the Leafs a playoff berth every year. His coaching tenure even produced one genuinely unforgettable moment of folklore: during the 1975-76 playoffs against the Philadelphia Flyers, Kelly hung a plastic pyramid in the dressing room as a supernatural counter to the Flyers' ritual use of Kate Smith's "God Bless America." Captain Darryl Sittler stood under it for exactly four minutes. The Leafs won three straight home games. They still lost the series, but the pyramid entered hockey legend.

In 1,316 regular-season games Kelly scored 281 goals and 542 assists. He was inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame in 1969. Both Detroit and Toronto retired his number four. He is immortalized in bronze at Legends Row outside Scotiabank Arena. He was named one of the 100 Greatest NHL Players in history in 2017, and was made a Member of the Order of Canada in 2001. He published his autobiography in 2016 — and it won the Ontario Speaker's Book Award.

He died on May 2, 2019, at the age of ninety-one.

A farm kid from Simcoe. A defenceman who played a full season on a broken ankle. A centre who unlocked one of hockey's great goal scorers. A Member of Parliament. A Stanley Cup champion eight times over. A man who outlasted every verdict ever made about him.

Jaan drz

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