Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  “That was their goal,” says Trent McCleary, who at the time was a budding fourteen-year-old allowed to practise with the team and who would ultimately serve as Broncos captain. “That was their Stanley Cup.”

  “I will never be more proud of a group of kids anywhere,” McBean says. “After what they had been through, it was such an amazing accomplishment.”

  Two years later, with Sakic now starring as a nineteen-year-old rookie with the Nordiques but with six of those original Broncos still in the lineup, they went all the way, winning the Memorial Cup in Saskatoon against the local hope, the Blades. Appropriately, it was the goaltending of Trevor Kruger, Scott’s brother, that got them to overtime. And it was a shot from the point by Darren Kruger, another brother, that was tipped in for the victory by Tim Tisdale, who had been on the bus when it crashed.

  When the winning goal went in at SaskPlace, Colleen McBean and her daughter Karen didn’t even cheer. They threw their arms around each other, hugged and wept.

  They were hardly alone. Ryan Switzer was now twelve and even more of a committed fan than he had been at nine. “The crash was the first time I ever cried over grief,” he says. “And then, when they won the Memorial Cup, it was the first time I ever cried out of happiness. Bronco hockey taught me emotion.”

  There has, in the past, been talk of a movie on the Broncos’ remarkable journey from tragedy to triumph and, certainly, all the ingredients are there: the raw emotion, the determination to carry on, the amazing victory in the Memorial Cup, the admirable humility of Joe Sakic, the local boy, Tisdale, scoring the winning goal by tipping in a shot from the brother of one of the players who had died …

  But the whole storyline is hardly so simple. While no one blamed Archibald for the accident, there were some feelings that they shouldn’t even have set out in such conditions, though such risky travel is common experience in the Prairie winter. The Kresse and Mantyka families eventually tried to pursue a civil suit over the accident, but it turned out they were too late for any such claim and the idea was quietly dropped.

  As for the coach who wanted nothing to do with psychological counselling for his team, Graham James was, in fact, hiding something. In 1996, a decade after the accident, James—by now part-owner, general manager and coach of the Calgary Hitmen—was charged with sexual assault against minors. Two players who would eventually testify against him had been Broncos, Sheldon Kennedy and another, unnamed player. James would plead guilty and be given a forty-two-month jail sentence.

  An ESPN Magazine story last year by Canadian writer Gare Joyce opened some old wounds in Swift Current when some of the people Joyce interviewed wondered how those close to the team could not have known what was happening. There had, after all, long been suspicion and innuendo concerning James and his manipulative hold on certain players. Kennedy, who has gone through a very public and brave catharsis concerning the damage inflicted on him by his old coach—and who now runs a foundation dedicated to assisting abused children—thought he had been let down by certain people who may have felt winning hockey games was more important than losing innocence.

  Trent McCleary, the former NHLer who served two years as team captain of the Broncos while James was still coaching, has often asked himself, “What would I have done?” if he had only known. But he did not know. “I didn’t see it,” says McCleary, now a Swift Current investment dealer. “I just did not see it.”

  McCleary is hardly alone. Almost everyone else close to the team says they missed it, too. Some are haunted by their failure—perhaps not realizing that deception is the predator’s greatest tool. “Was there stuff going on?” McCleary says. “Yeah, plain and simple. Everyone has had to make their peace with that.” Some have; some have not.

  When the twentieth anniversary of the Swift Current tragedy was approaching a year ago, the board that controls the team held several discussions on what might be done to mark the occasion. Joe Arling, who served as chair, thought it should be humble, as befits the Canadian Prairie personality. They elected to go with a moment’s silence before the home game against Medicine Hat that fell on the precise date, December 30, 2006. Nothing else. Some thought there might have been more but others, including Joe Sakic, thought simplicity the correct route. He could not have come anyway, being involved in NHL play—and, besides, he didn’t need to be there. “You never forget,” he says. “So it’s not just that one day you want to remember. You remember it every day.”

  McCleary thinks it should be remembered, and by more than the people of Swift Current. “It’s one of the most amazing hockey stories ever,” he says. “A brand-new team, a small town, in the very first year four players are killed in a bus accident and the team continues on to win the Memorial Cup two years later. You look at the last fifty years in hockey—what’s a better story than that?”

  At the moment, little Bathurst, New Brunswick, is one story: a highway crash that killed the coach’s wife, fifty-one-year-old Beth Lord, five seventeen-year-olds—Javier Acevedo, Codey Branch, Nathan Cleland, Justin Cormier, Daniel Hains—a sixteen-year-old, Nickolas Quinn, and fifteen-year-old Nicholas Kelly. The rest of the story remains to be written.

  Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall, who grew up playing street hockey in Swift Current with Scott Kruger, believes Bathurst can take comfort from the Swift Current story. Life has to go on. There is no other option. “It’s what happens in small communities from time to time,” Wall says. “These two towns have a lot in common. We’re places where everyone knows everyone else. And communities rally. They never forget, but they rally. They have to.”

  “It’s tough,” says Joe Sakic from his home in Colorado. “You can’t believe what happened. You just don’t believe it. It’s tough to think about it and it’s something you never forget. You want to overcome it all, but these are your friends. You can’t forget. You don’t want to forget.

  “All you know for sure is that, in time, things will get better.”

  Joe Sakic retired in 2009 as one of the greatest players in National Hockey League history. He stayed away from the game for two years, but has since rejoined the Avalanche as a special adviser and alternate governor. The Swift Current Broncos failed to make the playoffs in 2010–11 and are in a rebuilding mode. An RCMP investigation into the Bathurst tragedy concluded that the van would never have passed a safety test and that six of the seven who died did not have seatbelts properly fastened. A public inquiry produced a number of safety recommendations, several of which have now been put in place. One year later, remarkably, the Bathurst High School basketball team, the Phantoms, won the provincial AA championship.

  GUY LAFLEUR’S NIGHTMARE

  (The Globe and Mail, June 18, 2008)

  POINTE-CLAIRE, QUEBEC

  “Nice gift.” The smile was subtle—the sarcasm, not at all.

  Guy Lafleur was thinking about his and Lise’s thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, which fell on Monday. Next month, their new restaurant, Bleu Blanc Rouge, is scheduled to open in nearby Rosemère. Their first child, Martin, a full partner in the business, is currently building a house, which has his father looking tanned and fit from his new life as contractor, landscaper and manual labourer.

  Life, you would think, couldn’t be better for the fifty-six-year-old hockey legend known in Quebec as the “Flower.” But his wife has not been well. Twice, recently, Lise’s voice mysteriously vanished. Neither of them sleeps well. Guy Lafleur—winner of five Stanley Cups with the Canadiens, one of the province’s greatest heroes since that February day in 1962 when the eleven-year-old sensation from Thurso scored seven goals in a single game in the Quebec International Pee-Wee Hockey Tournament—still in shock from having a warrant issued for his arrest in January. And their other son, Mark, appeared in Montreal court yesterday to plead guilty to fourteen charges, including uttering threats to his now nineteen-year-old former girlfriend who was a minor, forcible confinement and assault.

  “I look back on all this,” says the elder Lafleur, “and
say it’s a nightmare.”

  And it is far from over. There will be more court days, as Mark Lafleur also pleaded not guilty to two charges of sexual assault. And Guy Lafleur will have his own day in court this fall. The police records and newspaper clippings will say the nightmare began a year and a half ago with that long list of charges being laid against the younger son, who has been in custody for the past nine months since he broke the strict conditions of his bail—police say with his father’s assistance.

  More accurately, it is a shared nightmare, and it goes back twenty-three years, virtually to the moment of Mark Lafleur’s birth and a nurse’s comment to Lise that her squirming, squealing second child had a “big personality.” Perhaps too big. The records and the clippings—and now the courts—speak to the demon side, but the family and friends will tell you of a young man who has remarkable people skills, who can be charming and funny when he is not lashing out irrationally.

  Guy Lafleur is not here to argue his son’s innocence in all that he has been accused of, and now in part admitted to. “I have nothing against my son paying for what he did wrong,” he says. But he has agreed to talk so that people know what it is like to have been a child such as Mark Lafleur. And, by extension, what it is like to be a parent of such a child.

  Guy Lafleur tells his friends, “Ton enfant reste ton enfant”—once your child, always your child.

  Three weeks after that squirming, crying baby was born, Mark Lafleur had surgery for a digestive problem. He was not much more than a child when he was diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome, a neurological disorder that is more often associated with curious tics—sometimes in action, sometimes in voice—and less often with sudden outbursts of obscenities and cruel insults. Mark Lafleur is one who has no tics to signal this disorder to others, but has had the outbursts in quantity.

  The outbursts worsened as he hit puberty, the boy screaming terrible threats—including “I’m going to kill you!”—at father, mother, older brother and others from the time he was about twelve right up to his arrest. The strange thing, the father says, is that the son would carry no memory of such moments, claiming “I can’t remember,” and then falling into often-tearful spasms of remorse.

  Compounding all this was the discovery, early on, that Mark suffered from attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. By the time he began elementary school, he was on four different medications, chief among them Ritalin. Before he even made it to kindergarten, he had been kicked out of two daycares that could not handle the whirling dervish and the angry outbursts.

  The Lafleurs took their younger child—Martin, now thirty-one, had no such difficulties—to a long series of doctors, psychologists and psychiatrists, each seemingly with a new idea of what to do. When the ADHD medication kept him awake at night, one added on sleeping pills. At one point, when Mark was fourteen, he spent two months in hospital while doctors tried to find a proper chemical mix for him. By the time he left school, he had attended thirteen different institutions, including two private schools in Ontario especially designed to accommodate children with learning disabilities and behavioural problems.

  “All that medication made him look like a zombie,” Guy Lafleur says. “When you give that to your kid at five, six, seven years old, you’re giving him drugs. I know it’s supposed to be that you’re helping him out, but you’re still giving him drugs.

  “I’m not saying everyone is affected this way. We know people who take Ritalin and are okay with it. But then, if you don’t give them that, what are you going to give them to help out?” The problems with this severe disorder prevented the youngster from finding a place for himself in the same sports world that had been such a sanctuary to the father: hockey. Martin, who had been only mildly interested in his father’s game, had played briefly but preferred skiing. Mark, on the other hand, showed early talent, but his temper was soon the ruin of him.

  “Maybe this is a result of all the rejection he has had in his life,” the father wonders. “I don’t know if he understood from the first moment when we tried to find help. It’s tough. You don’t have the answers of what to do to get them out of trouble. You try to make him understand what’s wrong and what’s right … They are a type of kid who are very—miserable—inside. They’re unhappy. They’re trying to find a way out and they cannot. People who don’t have kids like that, they can’t understand.”

  Guy Lafleur thinks he understands, to an extent. “I truly believe I was ADHD,” he says of his youth in a small mill town along the Quebec side of the Ottawa River. “But I trained a lot. I worked on the farm. I wasn’t on Valium or Ritalin. Nothing.” He threw himself into hockey as there was little else for an active child to do. He worries that today’s privileged youngsters have too much opportunity granted by parents with too much themselves.

  “It’s tougher for them to hear a ‘no’ than it was in our day,” he says. “Because our parents had so little.” Guy Lafleur was never fabulously wealthy by today’s hockey superstar standards—the most he made in a single season was $400,000, and about $5 million for the seventeen seasons he played in the National Hockey League—but he made superb money and was always generous to his boys. As with most parents, perhaps generous to a fault.

  Guy Lafleur believes people can change. He did himself, several times. The hockey star who was once known for his between-period smokes and post-game beers hasn’t had a real beer in more than fifteen years. He sees himself today not as a hockey god, but as a simple restaurateur trying to get a family business off the ground—hopefully, at some point, with all the family involved. He says his son never got in much more trouble than the odd traffic ticket prior to his January 2007 arrest. But that is only officially, as trouble was long brewing. The young girlfriend was one thing, drugs another.

  As yesterday’s plea was tabled, the court was told this had been a highly abusive relationship, and given that it also involved a girl who was a minor at the time, one that most assuredly would have been torturous to the young unnamed girl’s family as well as difficult for the Lafleurs. And the hurt, on all sides, is not over yet.

  Lafleur, rightly or wrongly, believes young people with severe ADHD are more “immature” than their peer group, and he and Lise had always hoped maturity would come for their son before serious trouble. They tried to talk their son and his young girlfriend into going back to school. They tried to give them jobs. But nothing seemed to work.

  When Mark’s bail hearing came up after his arrest, Guy Lafleur agreed to watch over his son and ensure that the court-imposed curfew was kept. He made a serious error, however, when he drove Mark to a hotel rendezvous with the girl last August and allowed the court to believe that Mark had, in fact, been at the family’s home in Île-Bizard. The older Lafleur said the 12:30 a.m. curfew was still being met but, of course, it was the wrong thing to do.

  Since that time, Mark Lafleur has remained in jail—his parents’ best hope now being that, whatever his sentencing and whatever the outcome of the other charges, his incarceration will eventually come to an end. “It’s been hell for her,” Lafleur says of his wife. “She’s been sick ever since Mark got arrested.”

  But then, almost exactly one year later, there was a warrant issued for the arrest of Guy himself. “How do you think she felt?” Lafleur asks. “ ‘My son is criminally charged—now my husband is, too.’ ”

  The warrant for the arrest of one of the province’s most beloved sports icons caused outrage in Quebec. Lafleur’s closest friends—former players Jean Béliveau, Gaston Gingras, Yvan Cournoyer, Stephane Richer, Réjean Houle and powerful sportswriters such as Red Fisher and Bertrand Raymond—were furious.

  Why a warrant? people wanted to know. Why would the police officer involved not simply ask Lafleur to come down to the station? “She phoned me on my cell,” Lafleur says. “So, if I’m tough to reach? … I just don’t know why she would do that.” Lafleur is now suing Montreal police and the Crown for $3.5 million, claiming that the warrant was unnecessary a
nd that it, along with his subsequent arrest, severely damaged his reputation and potential earnings from that reputation.

  That, however, is less important to the father than his son having a chance to one day build a new reputation and a new life. “There’s time for him to go back and think about what he did,” Lafleur says.

  If there is any silver lining to this very dark cloud, it may lie in the fact that Mark Lafleur has had time for some, hopefully, clearheaded reflection. After his arrest, he underwent a month of psychiatric assessment. The family then got him into a detox centre, where he spent four months. Then came the nine months in jail. With luck, the father says, that could soon add up to two years of being away from drugs.

  “I tell him, ‘When you get out, we’ll help you out. But go slow. Be patient. Try to understand what happened and why.’ I will tell him, ‘If you want to do that type of life, it’s your call. If you want to change, fine. We’ll help. But if you choose that life, that’s it. You’re going to have to forget us as a family. There’s not going to be a second time.’

  “We have a life, too. It’s something that if you let it happen, he will ruin his mother’s life, my life, too. So I say, ‘If you want to ruin your life, ruin it on your own.’ ”

  The tension of such talk plays on the familiar face, but Guy Lafleur is determined. “Mark is capable of doing well and changing his life,” he says. “I’m not going to change his life. But he’s twenty-three years old and he’s going to have to do it himself.” It takes a fourth fill of coffee for the smile to return, and even when it does it is small and uncertain.

  “I always say, ‘There’s only one past—but there’s a lot of futures.’ It’s going to be up to Mark to make the best of it. The most important thing is to get him out of there and on the right track. There’s no other choice.”