George Kennedy (sports promoter)

George Washington Kendall (aka George Kennedy) (December 29, 1881 - October 19, 1921) was a Canadian sports promoter best known as the owner of the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey team from 1910 to 1921. [See Sports E-cyclopedia [http://www.sportsecyclopedia.com/nhl/montreal/canadiens.html] ]

An Anglo-Quebecer, George W. Kendall was born in Montreal, the son of Jane McClosky, an Irish Roman Catholic and George Hiram Kendall, a Scots-Quebecer and a prominent Baptist who owned a successful manufacturing business. At the time of his parent's marriage, the Catholic Church would only recognize it if her non-Catholic spouse agreed to raise the children in the Catholic faith. As such, George W. Kendall was educated at the High School of Montreal and then attended the Saint-Laurent College.

While still in his teens, George W. Kendall embarked on a career as a wrestler and by age twenty was the top wrestler in his weight class in Canada. Because such activities were something his family frowned upon, he wrestled using the name George Kennedy. An entrepreneur at heart, in 1908 the fluently bilingual, "George Kennedy" and friend Joseph-Pierre Gadbois founded the Club Athletique Canadien to promote sporting events in the city of Montreal. On November 12, 1910 he paid J. Ambrose O'Brien $7,500 for the Haileybury Hockey Club, which was moved to Montreal and renamed the Montreal Canadiens.cite web|url=http://www.biographi.ca/009004-119.01-e.php?&id_nbr=7823
title=Canadian Dictionary of Biography online|publisher=Government of Canada Library and Archives|accessdate=2007-04-30|year=2007]

In 1916, Kendall's hockey team won its first Stanley Cup, but a hockey franchise was only part of his operations. He had already opened a first-class gymnasium and sports club in the east end of Montreal and had set about promoting wrestling and boxing matches that culminated with the staging of the world wrestling heavyweight championship. In 1915, Kendall purchased the rights to distribute the film of the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship in which Jess Willard dethroned champion, Jack Johnson. [imdb title|0159130|Willard-Johnson Boxing Match (1916)] Now, the city's major promoter, Kendall scored another coup for Montreal boxing fans when he arranged a promotional visit to the city by France's wildly popular champion Georges Carpentier who, a few months after his visit, won the World Light Heavyweight Championship.

During the 1918 pandemic, George Kendall contracted the Spanish flu from which he never fully recovered and died at age thirty-nine on October 19, 1921. On November 3, 1921, his widow, Myrtle Kendall, sold the Canadiens hockey team for $11,000 to businessmen Joseph Cattarinich, Leo Dandurand and Louis A. Letourneau.cite web|url=http://www.legendsofhockey.net:8080/LegendsOfHockey/jsp/LegendsMember.jsp?mem=b197703&type=Builder&page=bio&list=ByYear#photo |title=Legends of Hockey|publisher= Hockey Hall of Fame|accessdate=2007-04-30|year=2007]

References

"Deceptions and Doublecross: How the NHL Conquered Hockey" by Morey Holtzman and Joseph Nieforth

Notes