When you’re a legend, they write about you. When you’re a legendary building, they write about you, too. And when you’re just a kid playing the sport you love and you give up another kid’s first-ever minor hockey goal on a random game day, you likely don’t think they’re going to write about that.
Well, here we are.
The first part of that paragraph could be anyone, but it’s about Wayne Gretzky and how he famously scored his first goal in minor hockey when Brantford was in town to play Stratford. The building, the William Allman Memorial Arena, will be celebrating its 100th birthday this coming weekend when the calendar turns over to December 15.
And the kid who gave up the goal – or, if you want, the goal that helped launch the career of the most prolific scorer in National Hockey League history – his life is pretty much ordinary. Except, of course, for having a story in his back pocket that will pretty much win him every bar bet from now until eternity.
Tim Kelly has been living his life with that story for decades now, but he doesn’t let it change him. He remembers very little of the actual game because, at the time, nobody really knew who this scrawny six-year-old from Brantford was. But Kelly and Gretzky had a connection that, as it turned out, would be a significant starting point.
“Walter Gretzky and my dad, Tom Kelly, both worked for Bell Canada, and Walter was running around the Allman during this game taking pictures of Wayne,” Kelly said. “I didn’t know who Wayne was at the time. He was a good player but there were lots of good players that I’d seen. It didn’t really stand out at the time when he scored, but a few years later it started to sink in.”
It was more than a few years, but Kelly had been given a minor hockey magazine while he was coaching as an 18-year-old. He had simply tossed it on the kitchen table when his dad picked it up and leafed through it. It was there he came across Walter’s picture of Wayne scoring his first goal.
For those of you who don’t know the story, there’s a catch: despite the photographic proof that shows Kelly (who both his father and he identified because of his pads and helmet) in net, a gentleman by the name of Bill Cunningham would also lay claim to being the one to surrender Gretzky’s first tally. But Kelly knows what the picture tells him.
“Dad wanted me to wear a helmet but goalies back then didn’t wear them – I think I wore that thing until I finished bantam,” Kelly laughed. “Plus I had these blue and white pads on, too. So dad points out this picture in the magazine to me and tells me about Walter running all over the rink like a madman. And he’d also saved my goalie stick from back then, sticking it up in the rafters of the garage. All this came up because Wayne was going into the WHA and people started to recognize him for being a great young player.”
It was something Kelly never made a big deal about, even as Gretzky’s star rose and he became a dominant force in the NHL. He would joke about it when he’d get together with his hockey buddies, but then Stratford won the right to host Hockey Day in Canada back in 2010, and Tim and Tom were asked to be part of the broadcast.
The zenith of his 15 minutes of fame? Perhaps – he did get to meet Ron MacLean and the crew, after all. But he kept it in perspective then and he still does now: it was simply one goal in a building that has seen thousands of them in its century-long run.
“You know what I really remember about playing at the Allman is how cool it was that the Warriors played there and we got to be on the same ice as them,” he said, smiling at the memory. “It wasn’t anything you thought of too much at the time. There used to be some great old rinks, like the one in Cambridge; my dad used to play there, but then my son played there as well when he was playing ‘AAA’ hockey. It was pretty cool to think that my dad and son both played on the same rink. But the Allman was just our rink at the time.”
Time can be a great tool to help put things in perspective, and Kelly has done a pretty good job keeping his unintentional brush with celebrity where it belongs.
“He’s just a kid who scored a goal that I didn’t stop, but in fairness he probably is the most famous person who ever scored on me,” Kelly said with a small wink. “Every now and then, I run into someone who knows the story and then the jokes start. It could be the guys I played with or my old boss, but it's fine. I got on Hockey Day in Canada with my dad, and I got my 15 minutes of fame.”
For more stories about the Allman’s storied history, look for a copy of Ian Denomme’s book.
