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Jim Kelly backs Phila. cause that is close to his heart

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Mike Sielski, Inquirer Columnist

Not long ago, a father could not cry. He had been diagnosed with cancer in his jaw in 2013, and it had returned last year, and the chemotherapy and radiation treatments had cost him his tear ducts. The fluid backed up, infecting his eyes. So in the middle of April, he underwent surgery. The doctors inserted a temporary tube that ran from his eyeballs to his palate and drained the tears away.

"It's always something," Jim Kelly said recently. "But you know what? Oh, well."

He was talking on the phone about the sequence of events, some of them serendipitous, some of them tragic, that would bring him to Philadelphia this weekend, to celebrate good news and a righteous cause.