My last contact with Blue Bomber head coach Mike Kelly was an e-mail exchange Wednesday night, the night before cops showed up at his Philly-area home and charged him with assault.
“Some day,” Kelly wrote. “You’ll actually write an artical (sic) that the professor is not really that bad of a s***.”
Today’s not that day, Professor.
Truth is, the man who just didn’t get it has hit rock-bottom, and that’s saying something.
Wrapping up one of the most memorable seasons in team history with the most explosive day probably in this franchise’s 80-odd years, the Professor got himself fired Thursday.
To the end, he was defiant, refusing a 5 p.m. deadline to resign, forcing the Bomber board of directors to get together for an evening hatchet session.
And to think, early in the week that same board was ready to move into 2010 with both Kelly and president/CEO Lyle Bauer calling the shots.
When Bauer handed in his resignation, though, all bets were off. Kelly had lost his staunchest ally.
Suddenly the board didn’t have to go through the president to get at the coach, either.
There was a better-than-even chance Kelly was going to get the pink slip anyway, even before he allegedly slapped around an ex-girlfriend. The domestic assault charge made the decision that much easier.
I’m not going to say I told you so, because I didn’t. The charges against Kelly surprised me.
But in his 12 stormy months at the helm of the Bombers the man did show a pattern of behaviour that made yesterday’s news just a little less shocking.
A bully, some called him. Belligerent toward fans, and the media. Aggressive. Bite my ankles and I’ll bite yours, he said.
The Professor loved to say he was in a testosterone-fueled business. It’s a man’s game, played by men.
Nothing unusual in that, alone, but Kelly took it further than most. Far enough that even his players lost respect for him.
There was the time, after that ugly, 13-12 win in Toronto, Aug. 1, when he addressed the team by saying victories are “just like b--- jobs (oral sex). There’s no bad b--- jobs.”
When the Bombers brought in a receiver named Hyman mid-season, the Professor had all kinds of fun with it: “We call him busted,” was his favourite line.
During a pre-season luncheon with team supporters, he asked the players to introduce themselves, saying, “No ebonics, please.”
Some players didn’t care. But others said they were shocked by his comments. They didn’t want to go on the record, though.
Last night, veteran D-lineman Doug Brown might have said it best.
“Some of the words he espoused to us in terms of how we should conduct ourselves... he should have taken those words to heart, himself,” Brown said.
There was no need to trot all this out at the time. Heaven knows there was enough off-field carnage to write about. It would have been piling on.
As the season wore on, and the Professor continued to turn people off, it was better to simply let the man hang himself.
Yesterday, he completed the job.
Do I take glee from it? Not at all. I was ready to see if the man could, indeed, change, as he’d promised.
But as one player told me at the end of the season, if Kelly couldn’t learn how to deal with the public, through the media, all season, continually inserting his foot into his mouth or flying off the handle about something, how smart can he be?
Back to that Wednesday night e-mail exchange.
Trying to find out if he thought his job was safe, I asked him if I’d be writing about him in 2010.
“You’ll probably be writing about me when I’m dead!” was his response.
I don’t know about that.
But the Professor won’t soon be forgotten, that’s for sure.
paul.friesen@sunmedia.ca
