Molony, Ted

BORN EDWARD JAMES MOLONY ON MARCH 28TH 1900 in Melbourne, to George and Ada (Maltby), he inherited his father's flourishing business at King Street in Melbourne, supplying equipment for ice skaters, winter sports in general, and made-to-measure skating boots. A century after it had first been established by his grandfather in 1854, the boot shop moved to Elizabeth Street, opposite the GPO, where it became the leading ski shop in Melbourne.

From about 1917, when he was old enough to play senior ice hockey, he joined Yukons and then Thistles. He first represented Victoria in 1921 when he was state secretary, at the start of a long association with Victorian ice hockey. He went on to play a large part in shaping the destiny of the sport in Australia for forty years or more. Captain and coach of Victoria from 1925 to 1936, excepting 1926 and 1934, he was also captain and right wing of Essendon Ice Hockey Club from its inception in 1923. An accredited ice hockey referee, he usually played right wing in State teams, and wore jersey No 1.

Melbourne IHC, formerly Melburnians, one of the original four ice hockey teams in Australia, dominated the first VIHA Premierships, winning seven of the first eight contests between 1909 and 1923. He won with Yukons in 1921, then three back-to-back VIHA Premierships with Essendon in 1924, 1925 and 1926, permanently ending the Melbourne club era. Essendon took over from Melbourne, becoming the third Premiership club in VIHA history, and the most successful of its time, winning eight of thirteen Premierships from its inception in 1923 until 1935, the year before he retired. It was the most successful Victorian club of all time until 1973, when Monarchs won their ninth Premiership.

He married Maffie Scrivener in 1924 and she played right wing like him and represented Victoria in the second national women's ice hockey game on record that year; the Gower Cup. They were the first husband and wife pair to represent Victoria in ice hockey. Daughter Patricia married ice hockey player Alf Massina, captain of the VIHA Wildcats. He was Manager of the Australian Olympic Skating Team in 1952 when Adrain Swan Nancy Burley and his daughter Gweneth Molony competed. Gweneth married Melbourne-born ice hockey player, Geoff Henke AO, the driving force behind the Icehouse, Australia's first twin-rink in Melbourne's docklands. She and Nancy Hallam (Burley) were the first ever Australian Olympic ladies individual competitors. His granddaughter, Joanne (McDougall), was born in 1958 at Falls Creek in Victoria and represented Australia in three alpine skiing events in the 1976 Games at Innsbruck in Austria.

He was association treasurer in the 1920s and 1930s and president from 1938 to 1940. He coached and managed Victoria's Goodall Cup teams, and became a major ice rink operator and developer. By 1959, he and his business partner, Jack Gordon, simultaneously operated rinks in Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide and Hobart. Hobart was short-lived, but the others were the only three rinks surviving in Australia when Reid's Melbourne and Sydney Glaciaria closed in the 1950s. They extended Reid's vision more than any other builder of ice sports and, in terms of longevity, their achievement was still unequalled six decades later. His association with ice sports in both Melbourne and Sydney continued into his late sixties.

In that time, he had been captain of one of the two most successful Victorian ice hockey clubs of all time; captain of Victoria nine times; a veteran of fourteen Goodall Cups, champion of some, winner of one (plus a tie); a State speed skating champion; a National skating champion; operator of six ice rinks; and an ice sports builder for over half a century in four States. Molony and his two daughters were three of twenty-two inaugural inductees to the Ice Skating Australia Hall of Fame in August 2004. Since the 1920s, until whenever it lapsed, the the "Best and Fairest" trophy in the VIHA league was named in honour of the sport's best and fairest, longest-serving State captain and builder.