A Coward that Would Apall the Devil Is Bid Farewell.
By Mike Alexander
I had just finished putting memories of this years’ season down for a long winters’ nap when my inbox suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree yesterday around noon. I thought that Tee Martin and others might have been trying to pull a fast one on me for reasons that didn’t make very much sense. But a couple of clicks later and I almost swallowed my tongue. It was like reading the end of Macbeth for the first time. My copy of it even had a picture of Macbeth’s decapitated skull on a stake in it for good measure and intellectual enrichment. How bizarre indeed to discover that the Mike Kelly era of the Winnipeg Blue Bombers was in the process of grinding to a full stop before my very eyes.
The details will emerge and they will be brutal. Moral compasses no longer work, civilizations have literally evaporated, parents are refusing to let their children out anymore and I have never heard the expression “community owned football team” uttered so many times in my life. Very soon now, jubilant mobs will fill barstools across the city as a savage, vindicating celebration takes over, placing every car on the road in serious jeopardy of being torched tonight. There is a corpse that needs to be ripped to pieces and everyone wants a slice of the action.
Last night, Bombers chairman Ken Hildahl look like a man blacked out drunk on the blood of a murder victim as he announced that Mike Kelly had been relieved of his duties. Anyone on Maroons road must have been cowering under desk tables as a grizzly massacre took place. Long time CEO and President Lyle Bauer was the first to go and before nails could even be hammered into his coffin, word got out that Mike Kelly had been arrested outside of Philly as a result of pounding on his ex girlfriend who was in the process of getting her things out of his place.
It’s an obvious breach of contract and the actions of a desperate failure of a man. A man who gutted a team, threw in an unqualified quarterback, who benched veterans, who was unable to find any answers offensively all season long and who fielded a team that somehow managed to fare worse than the utterly dismal 2008 season.
It was a terrible year with a terrible human being at the helm.
I gave him a chance to win my heart. For four games (maybe more), I listened to the skeptics who accused guys like me of drinking Mike Kelly’s Kool-Aid. The team almost showed promise today, I told myself. I kept looking for signs of life and if there were, it wasn’t long until the flat line could not be ignored any longer. Being that people in Philadelphia boo Santa and cheer when hockey players break their necks on the ice, I got a kick out of Kelly’s outbursts. I think local media and fans of sports in general all need to be told to eat a piece of shit from time to time. But the play on the field got worse and worse. Pre-game shows became things of dark embarrassment for your humble narrator as sportscasters took turns summing up another week of dismal failure as Winnipeg prepared to get torn to pieces and then stomped on the field. There were threats, bad feelings, and angry rogue bands of drunks with weapons in Bomber jerseys making life in this town terrible for everyone. Who could blame us? We were confused, clinically depressed and we saw no way out of this terrible leg hold trap that Mike Kelly had snapped on us. We drove around town drinking beer in the back of pickup trucks and the only answer that ever made sense to anyone was to fire Mike Kelly. It became a mantra. In their desperation, some people even had the nerve to mention Jeff Reinbold as a valid replacement to Kelly. There was no joy and no future in the hearts of Bomber faithful. We were horrible to be around because we looked so goddamned sad all the time.
People wanted him gone but I would always pipe up with the news that no one wanted to commit to their memory. Kelly had been given a three year contract and there was no way in hell he was going anywhere. We are still paying for Doug Berry’s hookers and drugs for crissakes, thanks to Lyle Bauer. Firing him just wasn’t an option.
Who could have possibly guessed that Kelly’s days here would end this way? That deep inside that useless skull, resides an angry and cowardly bully with no control? Apparently plenty of people. When they threatened to blow up Portage and Main if Kelly wasn’t fired, I thought they were over-doing it a bit. But there has been more than one voice asking aloud if Kelly was the wife beating type over the last few months. A football team does not get chewed to pieces and then thrown up on as bad as the Bombers did without a dangerous fat-headed idiot running the show.
We live in dark days. Saskatchewan has made it to the Grey Cup twice in the last three years and we don’t have a quarterback. Like Macbeth who did not have a natural propensity to murder, Mike Kelly had bold ambitions for the club. They were strange and wrong and for reasons unknown to me, his evil actions placed him in a downward spiral of evil that could only be resolved with him finding himself with his skull now removed from his body and placed on a stake, hopefully in place of the Christmas tree outside of city hall. But we can finally rest a bit now that the king is dead. Another board meeting has been scheduled for Saturday on Maroons Road and there are many more sharp turns on this lonely, savage road for Bomber brass in the days ahead. Still, for those long suffering few that are reading this, who are somehow still walking after bearing witness to this terrible year, raise a toast to Hildahl and 2010 and enjoy the moment.
And Merry Christmas.
