Boland, Mike

BORN DECEMBER 16TH 1949 in Montreal, QC, Canada, his father was an air force man and so the family moved around. His formative years in Ottawa were spent with the Ottawa East team and as a Winger with St Michael's Buzzers in the Ontario Junior B League in the 1960s. It wasn't long before he was noticed, the only minor midget to make the minor all-star team. In Grade 13, he had 9 scholarship offers to play in the United States. He turned them down to attend the University of Toronto and play for the Varsity Blues, the best college hockey team in North America. Eventually invited to a LA Kings training camp, he turned down an offer he considered inadequate, but the lure of pro hockey remained, and he quit the college team, though not the university itself. He only dressed for 21 games during his 4 years there (1968-71).

In 1971 he turned pro with the AHL's Springfield Kings, "We were the worst team in the league in February. We were champions at the end." The Kings remain fondly remembered as a charismatic Calder Cup champion that year and Springfield was the LA Kings' farm club. He distinguished himself in his second tryout by scoring goals and fighting Bob "Battleship" Kelly.

The arrival of the World Hockey Association (WHA) in 1972 presented him and many other minor league players with new opportunities, and he was selected by the Ottawa Nationals in the 1972 General Player Draft on February 13, 1972. During his eighth game against the Quebec Nordiques, he fell backwards and crashed into the boards dislocating his shoulder. Out of commission for a month, his game was never the same. He played a season (41 games) there and was signed to a free-agent contract by the NHL's Philadelphia Flyers in September, 1973. He was dispatched to the Richmond Robins for an entire season.

He played two games with the Flyers in 1974-75, which was the extent of his NHL experience. He remained in Philadelphia and skated for the Firebirds of the NAHL and was selected for the NAHL Second All-Star Team (1975). Midway through the 1975-6 season he was traded by Philadelphia (NAHL) to the Cape Cod Codders for Mike Penasse. He played for Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds and the London Knights in the OHL, then a season for FoPS Forssa and HIFK Helsinki in the Finnish League. That led to another hockey gig in Australia in 1977 where he played mid season for the Demons IHC in the Victorian league alongside other quality import players such as Fred Denischuk, Ken Guyzk, Mike Pierce, Ian Cameron, and Daniel McIvor. He won the A-Grade Premiership with the Demons that year, scoring hat tricks (4 goals) in both the first and second semis. He also represented Victoria in the Goodall Cup, won by Queensland.

He returned to the Demons in 1978 where he was the state's A-grade top point scorer and coach of the state's Brown Trophy Team. He scored a total of 43 goals and 30 assists for the Demons in just 34 games, an average of over 2 points a game. He enjoyed the Victorian league but he needed an income and that led to his first job in media with GTV9 Melbourne as an assistant cameraman. He played in the National Ice Hockey League and Paul Rice recalls "A member of the “Embassy”, Mike displayed incredible talent even within the group we already had on our list at that time!! His exceptional balance and low centre of gravity, being short in stature and solid of frame, helped him enormously at our level of hockey. Mike's career did not last very long in Australia, but those who saw him play often describe his abilities as unparalleled compared to what we had seen from any other overseas player who had come to Australia to play up until this time".

He eventually traded-in his hockey stick for a video camera, immersing himself in the world of documentary cinematography. Mark Messier pays Boland special credit as the cameraman in the seminal Oilers doco The Boys On The Bus. This behind-the-scenes look at the young Oilers team captures the battle through the 1986-87 NHL season to their third Stanley Cup in four seasons. [3] Boland's work has since taken him to every continent and he eventually returned to Canada. Now considered one of Canada's foremost documentary cinematographers, he has won Gemini Awards, a Primetime Emmy, and his work has featured on the Fifth Estate, The Nature Of Things, National Geographic, the BBC and Discovery USA. Author of Through The Lens Of My Eye: Adventures Of A Documentary Cameraman, some here remember Mike Boland as the best hockey player they have ever seen. Today, he is co-founder of Scéal Creative Ltd, a new TV production company in Dublin.