Shelley's made the most of his unlikely life in hockey

None of this should have happened, and Jody Shelley is well aware of it.

A hockey player who had never been in a fight until major junior shouldn’t have become of the most respected enforcers in NHL history. Someone who had no professional offers after junior hockey shouldn’t have had a 12-season NHL career. A kid whose childhood stretched from an island in the Pacific to one in the Atlantic shouldn’t have found a home in Columbus, Ohio, where he’s become one of the top television analysts in the NHL.

Yes, Shelley is aware just how unlikely and magical his ride has been. He worked hard, sure, and loved the game, but he also freely admits that he never expected anything like a life in the sport.

“It’s amazing,” Shelley said. “I’ve been waiting for a tap on the shoulder for a long time. I’m telling you – it wasn’t even a fantasy for me. It wasn’t a dream, it wasn’t a fantasy, it wasn’t a goal to achieve. It’s nothing. It’s like none of those. It’s beyond anything that was in my world at any time.”

And it all started, at least at the NHL level, 25 years ago today. Shelley made his NHL debut with the Blue Jackets on Feb. 17, 2001, and produced one of the most memorable, unlikely and downright humorous stat lines in the organization’s history – 1:33 of ice time, two fights, 10 penalty minutes and a couple of standing ovations in Nationwide Arena.

He left the arena that night a fan favorite, a role he’s continued to fill for the next quarter century. If the old adage maintains that enforcers, the toughest guys in hockey, are also the nicest in the sport, then Shelley might have been who they were thinking of.

He’s a Hall of Famer in his own province, the head of the Blue Jackets alumni association, a familiar voice each night on the team’s FanDuel Sports Network broadcasts, a face of the franchise as a team ambassador and someone fans would still kill to have a beer with 25 years after he showed up in Columbus.

And he has the stories to prove it.

A Wild Ride

Let’s start here.

Jody Shelley was a heck of a hockey player.

You don’t lace up the skates and put the jersey on 627 times at the NHL level if you don’t have a certain hockey ability.

Shelley finished his NHL career with 18 goals, 54 points and 1,538 penalty minutes, but he made a living doing the hardest job in hockey, knowing he’d have to drop the gloves against the toughest men in the sport – sometimes three times in a game, like he did with Bob Probert on Jan. 10, 2002.

But he first fell in love with the game playing as a kid like most Canadians do – with the caveat he did from ocean to ocean. The son of a miner who often had to move from one spot to another for work, Shelley was born in Thompson, Manitoba, lived in Port Hardy, British Columbia, until he was 12, spent a year in Newfoundland – the home province of his parents Ned and Doreen – and eventually settled in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia.

"Ned was always my coach, and my mom was always just a great hockey mom," Shelley said. "There's four kids in my family, so we were all about sports and having fun at sports and trying our best. Ned and Doreen were great, supportive parents. My dad was a miner, my mom was a teacher. Like any small Canadian boy, we didn't have a lot, but I made it work whatever was available."

He’d play hockey in the winter, then put the bag away in the summer. While he had some talent – his midget B team won a championship when he was 17 years old, “and I like to think I was a pretty good factor,” Shelley quips – a hockey career didn’t appear to be in the cards when he was a senior in high school playing with “teammates that would smoke cigarettes and eat French fries between periods.”

But luck arrived in 1994 when the then-Quebec Major Junior Hockey League – one of the three leagues in Canada that serves as the top incubator for top talent north of the border – arrived in Halifax. Needing homegrown players, the Mooseheads extended an invitation to the big but raw forward from across the island in Yarmouth.

Not that Shelley believed it when the call came.

“I was mowing the lawn and the phone rang, and I went in and answered the phone,” Shelley said. “And they said, ‘Jody, we’d like to invite you to the Halifax Mooseheads inaugural training camp.’ I said, ‘Well, I got to ask my mom and dad. You’ll have to call back.’ Hung up the phone and walked away. They call back a few weeks later, and I went up to camp and ended up getting in a fight and doing OK and somehow made the team.”

Around 90 players were invited to the Mooseheads’ inaugural camp, but with his size, Shelley had a unique edge on some of the others. He’d never been in a fight to that point in his life, he said, but he quickly realized that physical play was his ticket to success.

He went on to score 48 goals and post 98 points over three seasons while racking up 933 penalty minutes, and Shelley was a force his final season, racking 25 of those goals and 420 PIMs. He was captain of the Mooseheads that season, as a Halifax team that featured Alex Tanguay up front and Jean-Sébastian Giguère in net made it to the league semifinals before falling to a Chicoutimi team with future CBJ teammate Marc Denis between the pipes.

Shelley tore his ACL near the end of the season but played through it in the playoffs, and there weren’t any offers from pro teams forthcoming. He chose to continue playing at Dalhousie University in Halifax while watching some of the guys he fought in the QMJHL – Peter Worrell, Georges Laraque and Gordie Dwyer – having success at the pro level.

The itch remained, and while Shelley had a scholarship to Dalhousie provided by the QMJHL, he admittedly wasn’t fully in on school. Then the phone rang again, and this time, the Saint John Flames of the AHL were on the line. Doreen wasn’t the biggest fan, but the tryout opportunity Shelley received was something he believed he couldn’t pass up.

“I got offers to go to the American Hockey League,” Shelley said. “Saint John offered me a 25-game tryout. They were with the Flames, and I could turn that into an invite to camp and an American Hockey League contract. I called my mother Doreen, and there were two things she was worried about – my teeth and my education.

“As soon as you sign a professional contract, you lose the scholarship, so I called her to let her know I was pursuing a dream and I was going to leave school to go sign this tryout, which meant nothing. The tryout could have been one day. The max is 25 games. She was in tears. I said, ‘Well, I have to do it if I can play one game in the NHL,’ you know? These guys are playing. I have to try it.”

He ended up playing 18 games with Saint John that year, then signed a deal to return – or so he thought. Shelley ended up playing just eight games in Saint John the next season and 52 with Johnstown of the ECHL, where he met a young radio broadcaster named Bob McElligott.

Shelley spent two seasons in the same situation, then was a free agent. With an expansion franchise coming to Columbus, Blue Jackets assistant general manager Jim Clark reached out to add some muscle to the team's affiliate in Syracuse, and suddenly Shelley found himself in the CBJ system.

Again, fate would smile on Shelley. Columbus traded enforcer Krzysztof Oliwa to Pittsburgh midway through the season, leaving the Blue Jackets without a pure fighter, and the Penguins were set to return to Nationwide Arena on Feb. 17 with Oliwa in tow and revenge on his mind.

Shelley signed an NHL contract with the Blue Jackets on Jan. 31, then worked with Syracuse coach Gary Agnew on his game. He studied videos of Oliwa knowing what was coming, and finally the call came in the days before the game against the Penguins.

Shelley knew the assignment, but he also was aware of who was on the other side of the ice. The Penguins weren’t quite the juggernaut that won Stanley Cups in the early 1990s, but it was still a star-studded squad headed to the Eastern Conference Final with a lineup that included such names as Mario Lemieux, Jaromir Jagr, Kevin Stevens and Alex Kovalev.

Nine minutes into the game, Shelley finally got the call from head coach Dave King and stepped on the ice for a faceoff in the neutral zone. We’ll let Shelley take it from here.

“I came out to this dot right here in front of the penalty box,” Shelley said, pointing from a spot in the Nationwide Arena seating bowl. “I was here to fight Krzysztof Oliwa. I didn’t see Steve McKenna, who was on the other side of the ice. I didn’t even know he was on the roster. It’s like, this is the Pittsburgh Penguins. Mario was there! I couldn’t believe it. I floated around warmups, I floated on the ice, I heard the cheers, but it was like, it wasn’t me. It was like I was in another land.

“And the puck drops, I look at Oliwa, and here comes 6-foot-whatever Steve McKenna. I’m like, ‘Wait a second, this isn’t supposed to happen!’ So I fought him, and I had a short trip, three steps to the penalty box, and the crowd was going bananas. Somehow, I got four seconds of ice time with that.

“The next shift, Dave King put me out on a faceoff in the offensive zone. I wasn’t thinking defense at the time, (so he put me) as far away from my own net as possible. The puck hits the ice, I fight Oliwa. The place goes crazy. I did my job.

“He gave me one more shift in the offensive zone, I think. I don’t even remember that. I just remember the crowd, the buzz, the atmosphere, the team, the organization, talking to Geoff Sanderson and Luke Odelein and thinking, ‘Is this real? Is this really happening right now?’”

Pittsburgh ended up coming back to win 3-2 in overtime, but Shelley made the most of the 93 seconds of action he saw.

The only problem? His parents weren’t able to watch the game.

“I was so excited, I called Ned and Doreen, who for the first time in their life had won a raffle to go to Las Vegas, Nevada,” Shelley remembers. “I couldn’t get a hold of them because they were two Newfoundlanders, like kids in a candy store, in Las Vegas for free. I got to Columbus and still didn’t get a hold of them.

“I play the game, and I’m like, ‘I had the greatest night of my life. I played in the National Hockey League.’ I finally got a hold of them after the game, I said, ‘Did you see the game?’ My dad said, ‘No, we couldn’t get the game, but we saw the highlights. You did a great job.’ I said, ‘Well, jeez, it would have been great if you guys would have seen it.’ He said, in Ned Shelley fashion, ‘You’ll just have to play another one, won’t you?’”

With the Blue Jackets heading to California after the game against the Pens, Shelley was hoping that second game would happen sooner rather than later. Unfortunately, that hope was dashed in the locker room when he was presented with a plane ticket back to Syracuse.

That debut might have been when the legend of Shelley was born, but it took until the next season for him to stick in Columbus. He played 52 games with the Blue Jackets during the team’s second season, then was in the NHL for good.

Shelley spent seven seasons in Columbus, totaling 11 goals, 29 points and 1,025 penalty minutes, before being traded to San Jose in January 2008. He’d go on to play three years with the Sharks, one with the Rangers and three as a Flyer before retiring in 2013.

“I remember the moment I retired,” Shelley said. “I was in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, at my golf tournament, and I looked at my family and I mentioned I was gonna retire. My mom and dad were there. I just remember crying a little bit of joy. There was a pressure that was taken off my shoulders, which I didn’t know I had with the job I did.

“It was just the biggest relief of my life. I did it. I played until 38 years old. The game told me, my mind told me I didn’t want to have another fight, and I retired and walked into this business.”

A Second Act

While Shelley has great memories of playing in San Jose, New York and Philadelphia, when he stepped off the ice, he knew he wanted to be in Columbus.

His first hope was to move into a front office role, and he made a call to Blue Jackets then-president of hockey operations John Davidson. The message wasn’t exactly what he wanted to hear, but it worked out.

“I wanted to be in hockey operations and help like every former player, be a part of the process of helping the organization,” Shelley said. “(Davidson) said, ‘I got nothing for you but broadcasting.’ I was like, ‘Come on. I just came from Philly. I don’t want to have an opinion and get beat up on social media.’ He was like, ‘Come back in two weeks.’ I came back and said, ‘I want to be in hockey operations.’ He said, ‘Broadcasting.’ I’m like, all right, I’ll try it.”

In many ways, Shelley has proved to be a natural. He worked on both radio, where he had a natural connection with his old friend McElligott, and television broadcasts until finding a permanent home on TV, and he credits such people as McElligott, Jeff Rimer and Bill Davidge for showing him the ropes and helping him along.

He has connections all over the game, and Shelley’s ability has earned him the chance to work on Canada’s Amazon Prime package as well as TNT national games in the U.S. He has an astute eye for the small details of a game that other analysts might miss, as well as the enthusiasm to draw viewers in and the ability to explain what’s happening to a broad audience.

The job also has allowed him to stay in the game, and a man known to many as “Hawk” is always a popular figure among current players, former players and league broadcasters. For a kid who never had an inkling he’d be in the NHL, he’s become in many ways one of the characters that’s part of the fabric of the game.

Coming from a blue-collar background, Shelley can hardly believe things have worked out this way.

“I’ve worked in a fish plant,” Shelley said. “I’ve worked as a carpenter’s assistant. My dad would make me chop wood and shovel dirt and dig ditches. I’ve done labor. I’ve done work. This isn’t work. My dad was a miner. He would come home with a metal lunchbox and Thermos and clang it on the table. That’s how I knew he was home. He would be full of grease and take pride in working in the coldest days of the year turning a wrench as a mechanic.

“I think about that sometimes. I haven’t had grease on my hands unless it was an accident or a bike chain came off for one of my kids. It’s embarrassing. I’m soft.”

All jokes aside, at the end of the day, Shelley wouldn’t trade his career for anything. He’s been a Columbus institution since he arrived 25 years ago, and he’s found his home as a Blue Jacket.

“I love being in Columbus,” Shelley said. “I love it. This is a guy who’s lived everywhere, all over Canada plus San Jose, New York and Philadelphia. I love Columbus. I love what it’s about. I love the organization. I love everything about it. It’s been very good to me.”