Ellison Kelly

Ellison Lamar Kelly (born May 17, 1935 in Butler, Georgia) is a former American and Canadian football offensive lineman for the Hamilton Tiger-Cats from 1960–1970 and the Toronto Argonauts from 1971-1972 of the Canadian Football League. He also played in the National Football League for the New York Giants. Kelly never missed a game in his thirteen seasons in the CFL. He won three Grey Cups for the Tiger-Cats and played in another for the Argonauts.

Kelly was drafted in the fifth round of the 1959 NFL Draft by the Giants after a stellar career at Michigan State University, but he opted to go to Canada to play in the CFL in his second season. In that first season he only played one game for the Giants.

Kelly is one of the few football players to have a race horse named after him. "Wildcat Kelly" was a gelding pacer in the stable of Yellow and Black farms of Hamilton, a partnership of Dill (Pickles) Southwick, a former quarterback for the Hamilton Tigers, and businessmen Bruce Woodward and George Ridpath. (Yellow and Black were the colours of the Tiger Cats.) As of 1970, the six-year old "Wildcat Kelly" had won $14,000 in its lifetime.

Kelly was inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 1992.