George Kennedy (sports promoter)

George Washington Kendall (December 29, 1881 – October 19, 1921), known professionally as George Kennedy, was a Canadian sports promoter best known as the owner of the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey team from 1910 to 1921. Kennedy was a wrestler himself and after the end of his wrestling career turned to wrestling promotion. Kendall along with other investors, formed the Club Athletique Canadien, and promoted wrestling, boxing, hockey and other sports. He would contract the Spanish flu during the pandemic of the late 1910s and never fully recovered from it, causing him to eventually succumb to complications from the illness in 1921 after the pandemic ended.

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 Kendall was educated at the High School of Montreal and then attended the Saint-Laurent College. In 1907, Kendall married Myrtle Agnes Pagels and they had two daughters, one who died before the age of one.

While still in his teens, George 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 1905 the fluently bilingual "George Kennedy" and friend Joseph-Pierre Gadbois founded Le Club Athlétique Canadien (CAC) to train and develop amateur wrestlers, later adding boxing matches to their promotions.

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