Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  Bob Gainey, in the opinion of long-time Montreal Gazette sportswriter Red Fisher, “played through more pain, I think, than any athlete I have ever known.” But this pain didn’t go away with icing. This wasn’t something surgery and rest could alleviate.

  Gainey, who winces visibly when recognized in the streets and approached by fans, was troubled by this growing sense that so many people were feeling sorry for him. He wasn’t the only person on earth working his way through tragic circumstances, but at times it sure felt like it.

  “I was talking to Ken [Dryden] at one point,” he remembers, “and he said, ‘You know, Bob, people all across the country are thinking of you.’ I said, ‘Well, I wish they’d stop.’ ”

  “There’s a piece of me,” Gainey says on this damp spring day, “that would like to turn out the lights and deal with it on my own.”

  But he knew he couldn’t do that. His children wouldn’t let him. His friends wouldn’t let him. His country wouldn’t let him. The name was too familiar, the story too compelling. “You can do that,” he adds, “or you can decide to stay and turn on that light and get underneath it and take that situation and turn it in another direction.”

  Not long after a very tough Christmas, the remaining family members—Bob, Anna, twenty-eight-year-old Stephen and Colleen, now twenty-two—gathered at the Stoney Lake cottage near Peterborough that has become the Gainey home, even though they are there only on holidays and rarely all together. “We sort of huddled together to try and find some ways that would be positive of going forward with this,” he says. A board of marine inquiry, carried out by officials from the Cook Islands, the South Pacific country where the Picton Castle is registered, continues.

  After Cathy’s death, Bob had established, with the help of Ed Arnold, a small foundation in Peterborough that helped children in need with their education. Cathy had been acutely aware of how limited their own education was and had pushed her children to excel where their parents had not. There might, he thought, be something more they could now do in memory of both mother and daughter.

  “This is our story,” he says, “and it got lots of public attention. Lots of people have these stories and obviously don’t get the public attention, yet they have to deal with the same things.”

  After the loss of Laura, he had been inundated with letters and calls from parents who had lost their own children. A young man lost on a river in Northern Quebec. A young woman lost while kayaking in Europe. So many lost to a variety of accidents. All those families were trying to work through, on their own, what the Gaineys were having such trouble getting through with help.

  “There was an opportunity here,” says Anna, who first talked about setting up something that might help others in similar circumstances. Anna, who had previously worked for the Liberal Party in Ottawa, would go to Montreal and work full-time on this project that is still very much in the formative stages. There were already donations flowing in from the Canadiens and other organizations, including the Ottawa Senators. They set up a website (www.gaineyfoundation.com) and, over the coming months, hope to stage fundraisers for the charity.

  Something happened in those days they gathered at the lake and decided to begin looking forward with hope rather than backwards with all hope lost. “We’ve been close all along,” says Anna, “and we became closer after we lost our mother. But now, after losing Laura, we’ve gone beyond close. I don’t know how to say it, but we have.

  “In a way, you know, we’re very lucky.”

  Bob Gainey’s No. 23 jersey was retired by the Canadiens in February 2008. More than halfway through the 2008–09 season, he fired coach Guy Carbonneau and stepped behind the bench himself before turning over the head coach job to Jacques Martin in the summer of 2009. On February 8, 2010, he resigned as general manager for “personal reasons.” No one had to ask what they were. He wished to spend more time with family and would stay on as a special adviser to the hockey club. He worked with Anna on the foundation, which has become a great success, particularly in the Peterborough area. The investigation into Laura’s death continued, with the Gainey family calling for greater safety precautions on such vessels. In early 2009, he became a grandfather when Anna gave birth to Jackson Robert Pittfield.

  LESSONS FROM SWIFT CURRENT

  (The Globe and Mail, February 2, 2008)

  SWIFT CURRENT, SASKATCHEWAN

  There is no memorial to mark where it happened on that windy, wintry day so long ago now—though the small yellow road sign with the red thermometer dipping below freezing and the fishtailing car says why it happened.

  It is possible to stand on the very first turn in the Trans-Canada Highway heading east out of town and see, on a clear day when the snow isn’t blowing, the welcome sign to little Swift Current: “Where life makes sense.”

  Too often, death makes none.

  They learned all about death here in Swift Current twenty-one years ago when the bus carrying the local heroes, the Broncos of the Western Hockey League, caught black ice and whipping wind in the wrong combination coming out of that very first curve, flew off the Trans-Canada and crashed, leaving four young hockey players lifeless. And they learned it again twenty-one days ago when, four provinces and two time zones away, a van carrying the Phantoms, a high-school basketball team from Bathurst, New Brunswick, slid in bad weather into a transport trailer, killing seven players and the coach’s wife.

  “It hit home, that’s for sure,” says Joe Sakic, the Broncos star who survived that long-ago crash and went on to a spectacular career with the Quebec Nordiques and the Colorado Avalanche of the National Hockey League.

  Even today it is difficult for Sakic to talk about that moment, something he has only agreed to do with the thought that there might be lessons for the Bathurst players who survived and for little Bathurst, population thirteen thousand, in what became of little Swift Current, population sixteen thousand. “Both small towns,” says Sakic. “Both involved their teams. You never do forget. They say time heals, and it does, but you remember everything. You never forget.”

  Sakic can even recall the weather conditions that December 30, 1986: temperature dropping to around freezing, the radio talking about high winds, storm concerns for the game that night in Regina, a 2½-hour ride away on the team’s old Western Flyer. Four of the guys had even arrived early—Scott Kruger and Trent Kresse, the scorers, Brent Ruff, the promising rookie, Chris Mantyka, the enforcer—and had claimed the prized card-playing seats at the very back of the bus.

  Sakic, a rookie at seventeen and already the team’s leading scorer, sat near the front with Sheldon Kennedy, his best friend and fellow billet at the busy McBean house in Swift Current. The third McBean billet, team captain Daniel Lambert, was off playing for the national junior team, the “C” taken over by popular Kurt Lackten, who was going with the McBeans’ daughter, Karen.

  The old bus pulled out of town and onto the Trans-Canada, rising quickly to pass over the railway tracks in a wide loop to the southeast. Sakic felt the bus begin to slide as it went into the long turn, then he felt the wind punch it sideways. He heard volunteer driver Dave Archibald yell “Hold on” just as the bus flew off the rise into the bank of an access road, crumbled over onto its right side and slid through the snow. The driver was thrown out the windshield and, miraculously, pushed to safety by the sliding bus. Sakic and Kennedy were shaken up but that was all. “Neither of us was hurt,” Sakic remembers. “We were both fine. We just walked out where the windshield had been.”

  As Sakic made it back up the embankment, cars and trucks were already stopping. He was placed in one of the first vehicles—he doesn’t remember if it was a truck or a car—and hurried off to the little hospital in town. He didn’t even know if anyone had been hurt. Kennedy, who had walked around to the back of the bus, knew otherwise.

  The four card players had taken the brunt of the blow. Kruger and Kresse had been thrown out the windows and killed instantly. Ruff, the sixteen-year-old rookie and younger
brother of Lindy Ruff, then captain and now coach of the Buffalo Sabres, was crushed under the bus. Mantyka, the tough guy, was frantically trying to push clear of the weight of the bus that had trapped him. He called out for help, but help was impossible. His teammates had to stand there helplessly, watching their most popular player die.

  Sakic was checked at the hospital and declared fine. It was only then that the others came streaming in and he heard what had happened. “I couldn’t believe it,” he says. “I was in absolute shock.”

  How, Sakic wondered, could he simply walk out without a scratch and be oblivious to the carnage behind him? He hadn’t heard Mantyka’s screams. He hadn’t seen the trainer and a travelling reporter trying to resuscitate the players. He hadn’t noticed the blood on so many of his other teammates. “It was all sort of dreamlike,” he remembers. And then, nightmare-like.

  Colleen McBean was the guidance counsellor at Swift Current Composite High School, but also surrogate mother to most of the team who came from other communities. Sakic, Kennedy and Lambert were all billeted at the McBean house. Her lawyer husband, Frank, was on the community-owned team’s board of directors.

  Frank McBean had been part of the group that had spearheaded a movement to get a team in town. Swift Current would be the smallest centre in all of major junior hockey and the doubters thought it too small to support such an enterprise, but McBean and others managed to land a franchise that would be moving from Lethbridge, Alberta. They had the beginnings of a team; they hired a popular young coach, Graham James, who believed in fast, skilled hockey; and they had young budding stars like Sakic, Kennedy and the kid, sixteen-year-old Ruff.

  To no one’s surprise, the first-year team was struggling: by Christmas break an unlikely bet to make the post-season playoffs. December 30, 1986, had already been circled on Colleen McBean’s calendar. She had a dental appointment in Regina. And since she was going there anyway, daughter Karen asked if she might come along and stay for the game. And if she was going to be allowed to watch her boyfriend Kurt play, then would it be all right if the girlfriends of Joe—Debbie, whom he would later marry—and Sheldon also came along?

  McBean agreed and headed out with a full carload—a visiting nephew included—and they all met later at Regina’s Cornwall Centre shopping mall for coffee. One of the girls came along looking ghostly: She had just heard a radio report in one of the stores that tonight’s game between the Pats and the Broncos had been cancelled due to an accident. The girlfriends were frantic with worry. “This was pre-cellphones,” the now-retired teacher remembers, “so I had to go to a payphone. I reached Frank just as he was heading out for the hospital. ‘It’s bad,’ he said, ‘some of the boys have been killed.’ ”

  Her first instinct, of course, was that it might be her boys—the billets. But then she realized it didn’t matter who it was that had been killed, it was a horrible thing. They were all so young. So seemingly indestructible.

  Just before Christmas she had had a long talk with the youngest, Brent Ruff, and heard how excited he was about going home to Warburg, Alberta, for the holidays. He had beaten his early homesickness. “I love it here,” he told her. “I’m so lucky. I’m playing more than I thought I would. Life is good.”

  “I never forgot that,” McBean says twenty-one years later. “ ‘Life is good.’ When he first came here and I saw he was so young I told his parents, ‘Don’t worry: We’ll take good care of him.’ No one knew what to do. Should they head for home? Should they go to the Regina hospital where the more seriously hurt might be sent? In the end we all just sat under the bank of payphones and cried.”

  They eventually made their way to the Regina home of a McBean relative and waited for the call and the list. Kresse … Kruger … Mantyka … Ruff …“The next few days are kind of a blur,” McBean remembers.

  She immediately put to use her grief training and her own personal experience. Only two summers earlier, Frank and Colleen McBean had lost their two young adolescent sons in a car accident near their country retreat. The boys weren’t old enough to drive, and the lake friend at the wheel hadn’t been responsible enough to take care. The car crashed, killing the two McBean boys and injuring others.

  McBean kept her own emotions to herself and threw herself into working with students at the high school and with players who started hanging out at the McBean residence around the clock, endlessly talking about what had happened and why. “Colleen helped,” Sakic says. “She was definitely a big help to everyone.”

  However, the team coach, James, elected not to have psychological counselling for the players as a group, the feeling being that they could deal with this as all teams are supposed to deal with adversity: quietly, and by themselves. No one thought for a moment that he might have his own motives for keeping professional help at bay.

  “The bus accident sent a great wave of emotion through the school,” McBean says. “The shock waves felt in this little community were immense.”

  Three weeks ago, when she heard the news coming out of New Brunswick, she felt it all over again. “You just knew instantly,” she says, “what they are going through.”

  Ryan Switzer’s world fell apart that December day in 1986. He was nine years old when word came that disaster had struck the team he worshipped. The Broncos meant everything to the hockey-mad youngster. He idolized Ruff—“He was like a rock star to me”—partly because of the nifty way Ruff played but also because he was youngest and therefore closest in age.

  But the connection ran deeper still. The man Switzer considered his “adopted father” ran the public relations for the junior hockey club. His mother sang the anthem before the Broncos’ home games. Switzer’s own dream was to grow up and go to work for the team.

  It was vacation time and the Switzers had gone, as so many Prairie families do, to the West Edmonton Mall, the poor man’s Disney World. He was staring into the dolphin tank when another family from Swift Current came along and passed on the news. “That,” says Switzer, now thirty, “was my first experience with death. I just went silent. I didn’t know at all how I should react. All the adults were breaking down and so I started to cry, too.”

  Switzer, who has lived all his life in town and did indeed grow up to work for the Broncos—he does colour analysis during the broadcasts—says that crash changed his town forever. “Strange as this may sound,” he says, “it was our 9/11. It became our city’s identity. It changed people. Suddenly all the usual animosities in a town didn’t seem so important. People seemed friendlier. It was like what you heard happened in New York City. The tragedy had the effect of bringing everyone together. New York changed forever after that. So did Swift Current.”

  The town staged a packed memorial at the hockey rink: mourners included jersey-clad players from the other teams in the league. They held Scott Kruger’s funeral in town and sent off representatives to show a Swift Current presence at the other funerals.

  And then they had to decide what to do. Carry on? Cancel the season? Fold the team? “There was no talk of not going on,” Sakic says. “You keep going. We talked, but it was about when do we want to start again? How long do we wait?”

  Colleen McBean was anxious, for professional reasons, for them to get back to playing again as soon as possible. The fragile youngsters needed it. “Difficult as it was for them,” she says, “all of those kids kept getting up each morning and getting through the day. I think in hindsight that the fact that they made such an effort to get back on track was good for them. Their days were structured. They were busy. I know from our own experience that is what gets you through the day.”

  “The best thing for us was to get back on the ice,” Sakic says. “Once you start playing again, for those few hours you can take your mind off it. You just focus on playing hockey.”

  They started talking about an appropriate memorial, and today the refurbished rink still features a special window in the lobby dedicated to the four players. “Unchanged forever,” the window says. �
��What we keep in memory is ours.”

  First game back was an away game, against the archrival Moose Jaw Warriors, and the Broncos had something new on their jersey arms: a crest with the four lost numbers—8, 9, 11, 22—in a four-leaf clover that trainer Gord Hahn had stitched on. “It was nice to put the uniform back on and just go out and play,” Sakic says.

  At Moose Jaw, the visiting Broncos were given a louder cheer than the home side. At every rink throughout the league it was the same: a long, emotional standing ovation to start each match, cheers of salute to end the games. When they played at home, nearly three thousand fans would pack into the tiny rink that is supposed to hold only twenty-two hundred. “The rink was where we went for our healing,” says Ben Wiebe, the current governor of the Broncos.

  “It was pretty amazing,” Sakic remembers.

  Whatever it was that took hold of the budding seventeen-year-old rookie at this moment—the luck of the clover, a fierce determination to honour his teammates—Joe Sakic became a far more commanding player and, undeniably, the team’s leader. “He was seventeen,” Colleen McBean recalls. “We had lost our two older star players. It just seemed like all the pressure shifted to him. Everyone knew he had the makings of a great player, but he stepped up in a way that no one could have imagined.”

  At the time of the accident, the Broncos were out of a playoff berth. There had been no high expectations for that first season in town. Yet Sakic, playing as if possessed, racked up 133 points as a rookie and carried the team into the post-season. He was named the Western League’s most valuable player and presented with a new trophy named in honour of the four downed Broncos.

  The Little Team That Could had made the playoffs. They would go out in the first round, but they had still made the playoffs. With ten minutes to go in the final game they would play that spring, not a fan in the stands was still sitting, the ovation continuing long after the buzzer had sounded.