by Culp, Leesa
Today, when Lackten looks back at January 4, 1987, he says, without hesitation, “That’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. Bar none.” That day, and his role in the memorial service, set the bar for the rest of his life. “I use that, and I’ve used that, throughout my life as kind of a bar. Nothing I’ve ever had to do has been as hard as that,” he says. “I use that when I come across something that is difficult. I tell myself this isn’t that bad. You know what I mean? I learned a lot of life lessons from that. I appreciate things.
“You know, when you’re young you don’t really … you think you’ve got the world by the tail and everything like that. As you get older, you come to appreciate things more and more. At that moment, there was a bitter lesson of how quickly things can get taken away from you. For me, I really appreciate things that come my way and that I have been able to accomplish … and the chances I get. Without sounding soft or mushy, it really hits home. It has had a big effect on my life and how I make decisions.”
When the Broncos did get back to playing, it was in Moose Jaw against the Warriors. It was ten days after the crash. This was Swift Current’s first game since before Christmas, and a lot had transpired since then. The players, Lackten included, didn’t know how they would respond.
“That was pretty emotional for us,” Lackten recalls. “I think the guys helped each other out a lot and obviously got a lot closer, too.”
In the end, it was that closeness that got Lackten and his teammates through the most difficult season of their young lives. That first game back was even more emotional for Lackten because his WHL career had begun with the Warriors in the autumn of 1984. He still had friends, like future NHLers Theoren Fleury and Mike Keane, on the Moose Jaw roster. It meant something to have friendly faces on the ice with him in that first game, even if they now were on the opposing team.
“I had a lot of friends on the team,” Lackten says. “I had a nice feeling of support there as well. Guys like Keaner coming up — and Theoren and Kevin Herom and Troy Edwards and guys like that — that was pretty important to me and a really nice thing, too.”
Lackten didn’t want any sympathy from those guys once the game started, nor did any of the other Broncos. But with what Lackten had been through, it was reassuring just to see some familiar faces.
Lackten has had a lot of time to think about what happened that blustery afternoon on a highway east of Swift Current. A lot of the memories just won’t return.
“It was a long time ago,” he says. “I try to remember stuff and I just can’t do it.”
Perhaps Lackten is a prime example of someone who has repressed memories, which, according to theory, is how some people deal with memories that are just too painful. He doesn’t know if that’s the case, but is of the opinion that the shock of what he went through during the first few weeks of 1987 had something to do with it. No matter; he no longer tries to figure it out. He does know that he learned quite a life lesson the day the bus crashed and in the days and nights that followed.
“A hockey game is sixty minutes,” he says. “It’s like a life. It’s got its peaks, its valleys … its highs, its lows. It’s life. It’s all right there. Sixty minutes: there’s a whole life, you know what I mean?
“I think being in sports, you learn that you can’t really dwell on things because it’s going to affect the next thing that you have to deal with. So you do move on, especially if there’s nothing that you can affect or change.
“But I’m not a psychologist … I’m just a pilot.”
CHAPTER 11
The Trainer
Gord Hahn wasn’t even on the Swift Current Broncos’ bus on the night of December 30, 1986, but he has never been able to shake what happened.
Hahn, the Broncos’ trainer, and defenceman Dan Lambert were with Team Western, an under-seventeen team that was playing exhibition games against a touring Russian squad in venues across the Prairies. In fact, it was Lambert who broke the news to Hahn, who has long been known by his nickname — he spells it Hahnda.
“I was in Winnipeg at the time with Team Western, me and Danny Lambert,” recalls Hahn, who still lives in Swift Current and is semi-retired. “I heard about it during the first period. Danny called me over and said, ‘We gotta go in the dressing room, I lost a contact.’ We went in the dressing room and he just broke down. I said, ‘Geez, Danny, what’s the matter? What’s going on?’
“Then he told me what happened. He knew. They weren’t supposed to tell me until after the game. The coaches told him. They didn’t tell me because they knew I would just lose it.”
Hahn, the veteran trainer, and Lambert, the sixteen-year-old WHL rookie, spent the remainder of the first period in the dressing room.
“I couldn’t go back on the bench for the rest of the period,” Hahn says. “I was … This can’t be happening. We both sat in there for the rest of the period.”
Hahn was a long-time junior hockey trainer. He had been with the Brandon Wheat Kings in the early 1970s and also had a stint with the Victoria Cougars before moving to Swift Current and working with Pat Ginnell’s junior A Indians. Hahn knew his way around just about every junior hockey arena in western Canada and some in the United States. In the end, he wouldn’t be a junior hockey lifer, but at the time of the bus accident he certainly appeared to be headed in that direction.
In 1984–85, when Regina’s WHL franchise had almost been sold to interests in Swift Current, the Pats were coached by Bill Moores, a long-time University of Alberta Golden Bears head coach who would go on to a lengthy career as an NHL assistant coach, and Bill Liskowich, a veteran of the Saskatchewan coaching wars. As it turned out, Liskowich, a highly compassionate man, was on the Team Western coaching staff.
“Bill Liskowich is a super guy,” says Hahn, who was thirty-nine years of age on December 30, 1986. “He came into the dressing room and talked to us and got us settled down. He said, ‘If you want to go home we’ll fly you home right now. There’s a ticket at the airport.’ I said, ‘No, we’ll stick it out. We’re here for a reason so let’s get on with it.’”
You have to understand the relationship between a trainer — today, they more often are called athletic therapists — and his or her players. Perhaps that relationship is best likened to the bond between a mother cat and her kittens. Often the trainer has been around for a while and has seen most everything; the players, meanwhile, are away from home, some of them for the first time, and may have few, if any, confidants. The trainer, then, does it all, from tending to injuries to offering guidance and taking confession.
And here was Hahn in an arena in Winnipeg, wondering what had happened to his team — his boys — some 815 kilometres to the west.
After the game in Winnipeg, Team Western boarded a bus and headed for Athol Murray College of Notre Dame, which is located just south of Regina in Wilcox. The team would bunk there before playing the Russians in Saskatoon.
“That was a painful ride … something I’ll never forget,” Hahn recalls. “We drove through a couple of storms that night, too. I kept my eye on the bus driver. I told him, ‘If you don’t want to drive, don’t drive.’ He was just shaking all the way [to Wilcox].”
Team Western, including Hahn and Lambert, went on to play that game in Saskatoon, after which it again returned to Notre Dame. By then, Hahn was in a state of near frenzy. He wanted so badly to be with the players who meant so much to him.
“I got everything put away and the players settled in,” he says. It was well after midnight. “I hopped in my car to come home because I wanted to be home to get ready for the memorial service and stuff like that.”
As he approached Swift Current and the site of the bus accident, he fell asleep at the wheel of his car.
He tells the story as if it happened yesterday: “I was driving right by the bridge … I was in the westbound lane. I woke up on the shoulder … I was doing maybe twenty or thirty [kilometres per hour] because I let off the gas when I fell asleep.
These days, Hahn says he stops and visits the accident site almost every time he drives past it.
“When I drive by that spot,” he explains, “I go right down and look up and, you know, say something to myself. It’s tough.”
(In fact, Hahn has worked for some time trying to get a sign in the shape of a four-leaf clover erected at the site. “The Department of Highways has a policy,” he says, “but you see crosses on the side of the road where accidents happen. They’re more concerned about a sign … if somebody sees it they might run off the road or whatever. I’m still working on it.”)
Hahn had been especially close to Chris Mantyka, the rough-and-ready winger from Saskatoon. Mantyka had first arrived in Swift Current to play with the junior A Indians, the team for which Hahn worked as trainer.
“When the Broncos came back that year, I actually asked if he could try out at training camp,” Hahn says. “They weren’t thinking about having him in camp. I said, ‘Just give him a try. He’s tougher than nails and you won’t find a nicer kid.’ He was so mature. So they gave him a try and they really liked him … and that happened.”
“That” has haunted Hahn since it happened. What if he hadn’t asked the Broncos to take Mantyka to training camp? “That haunts me … it’s never-ending,” Hahn says.
Before the bus accident, Hahn had never had problems sleeping. And Hahn wasn’t on the bus when it crashed. “Now I can’t sleep in a car, I can’t sleep in a bus … anything. It just totally hooped me,” Hahn says, a tremor in his voice.
“All four of them … I was really close to them.”
Hahn remembers a team meeting called by Graham James. Assistant coach Lorne Frey says it was held the afternoon of January 3, 1987, the day before the memorial service. The team gathered in its dressing room.
“Graham went around to each guy individually,” Hahn says, “and asked, ‘Would you like to continue the season or would you like to pack it in? It’s your choice and I’ll back you up either way.’ He went to each guy individually, including myself, and we said, ‘No, we want to keep going.’”
Frey concurs. “Whether we continued playing … I don’t think that was ever an issue,” Frey says. “He gave some of the players the option: ‘Whether you want to continue or whether you don’t want to continue, that would be your choice. If this was too much for you and you want to go home, you can go home.’” It was, Frey says, a choice offered to each player as an individual. No one who was at that meeting left the team.
After the meeting, the team headed to a local pizza joint, and that’s when what had transpired over the last while hit Hahn like a ton of bricks. “We went out for a pizza night at one of the pizza places and that’s when I really got close with the players,” Hahn says, the memory of the night as bright as a full moon. “It was like — holy! I couldn’t stop shaking. It was unbelievable.” It was then when Hahn decided that something had to be done so that the memories of the four deceased players would live forever.
Later, Hahn happened to be on the phone with Norm Fong, a long-time friend who was the veteran equipment manager for the CFL’s Saskatchewan Roughriders. That conversation was the genesis of the four-leaf clover that now adorns the Broncos’ jerseys.
After talking it over with Fong, Hahn called a company in Winnipeg and two days later had a package in his hands that included four-leaf clover patches that would be sewn onto the jerseys before the Broncos played their next game. While the patch has since been redesigned, with each petal displaying one of the fallen players’ sweater numbers, it continues to pay tribute on the right shoulder of every one of the Broncos jerseys.
By 1988–89, Hahn was working for the city of Swift Current and volun-teering with the Broncos, who won the WHL championship and advanced to the Memorial Cup tournament, which would be held in Saskatoon. Hahn wasn’t able to get time off work in order to spend a week in Saskatoon, so he drove back and forth in order to work the Broncos’ games.
“I did all the equipment stuff that season, skate sharpening, repairs, all that stuff,” he recalls. And he was on the Broncos’ bench when Tim Tisdale scored the overtime goal that gave the Broncos a 4–3 victory over the host Blades in the four-team tournament’s championship final.
“Was it ever emotional! I broke down after the goal,” Hahn says. “They were out on the ice celebrating. I stayed by the dressing room … I broke down just thinking about the four guys.” Later, the Broncos would get Memorial Cup championship rings. “I was pumped when they made the rings and put the four-leaf clover on them,” Hahn says.
These days, when he looks back at his days with the Broncos, his eyes mist over and there is a catch in his voice.
“It was an honour being a part of the Swift Current organization,” he says, “and working with a lot of great hockey players. We went through a lot together.”
Dan Lambert was known to his teammates as ‘Pepe’ because he is from the French-speaking community of St. Malo, Manitoba.
“Danny had a great sense of humour and could easily make the team laugh at any time,” Bob Wilkie says. “Pepe was another character who was fun to watch as a young defenceman because he could rush the puck from end to end, he was physical and he would fight anybody, and he was a huge asset to the team.”
Lambert would go on to be named the most valuable player of the 1989 Memorial Cup in Saskatoon, where he put up eight points in five games. That included two assists in the Broncos’ 5–4 overtime victory over the host Blades in the championship game.
Danny Lambert (3) was a puck-moving defenceman who wasn’t afraid to venture deep into the other team’s zone.
Rod Steensland.
“When we came back in [to the dressing room], I just sat in my stall and thought things over,” Lambert told Ed Willes of the Regina Leader-Post. “You see it on TV and you dream about it, but you never expect something like this to happen. Today it happened for me.”
Lambert, who played in twenty-nine NHL games with the Quebec Nordiques before going on to a lengthy career in Germany, now is an assistant coach with the Kelowna Rockets.
“Life has been very good to me,” Lambert says. “Hockey has given me everything … the experiences of living all over the world. It’s been great and I don’t want it to end, which might explain why I’m still [involved with] this great game. I am pursuing a coaching career and hope to give back to the game because it has given my family and I so much.”
CHAPTER 12
The Uncle
Lorne Frey is currently the assistant general manager, head scout, and director of player personnel with the WHL’s Kelowna Rockets. In 1986, however, he was the Swift Current Broncos’ assistant coach. Louise “Fanner” Kruger was his sister, meaning Frey had two nephews on the bus that crashed, one of whom didn’t survive.
At the hospital following the accident, it was Frey who informed Louise and her husband, Walt (Scoof), that four players, including their son Scott, had died.
As is standard when junior hockey teams travel by bus, the coaching staff sits up front. That’s where Frey was as the Broncos turned onto the Trans-Canada Highway and headed east to Regina for a game on the night of December 30, 1986.
“We came over the bridge,” Frey remembers. “It was windy and icy and the bus started fishtailing and we drove into the ditch. Everyone was yelling, ‘Hold on! Hold on!’”
There is no bitterness in Frey’s voice as he remembers that ugly afternoon, but he does wonder what might have happened had driver Dave Archibald done one thing differently.
“You can second-guess everything but had [Archibald] gone straight out into the pasture, we’d have been fine,” Frey explains. “But he pulled it back up on the road and it came back down.… You didn’t think anything of it and th
en everybody’s yelling, ‘Hang on! Hang on!’ The killer was hitting the approach.”
At the time, Frey says, “We didn’t think anything of it.” In other words, no one had any idea of the carnage that would follow.
With the bus in obvious difficulty, Frey got out of his seat — he was on the left side, three rows behind the driver — and stood in the aisle. “I grabbed onto the seats,” Frey says. “I figured if we were going to roll, I’m not going to get caught rolling around in my seat. So I stood up in the aisle and grabbed the seats. I remember us taking off and I remember the back coming down. Then the bus rolled on its side … everybody’s yelling, and then it was over … and I didn’t think, Everybody okay? and then the four kids.…”
Three of the players — Trent Kresse, Scott Kruger, and Brent Ruff — suffered broken necks. “Those guys were in the back,” Frey remembers. “The bus went airborne and then the back wheels came down and shot them up [into the roof] and that’s where they broke their necks.”
All four of the players who died ended up outside the bus, two of them well clear and two underneath — something Frey can’t understand.
“I don’t know how those guys got out of the bus. I have no idea to this day how they got out of that bus,” he says. “The windows at the back were this big.” He holds his hands out to form a small circle. “There were four [players] outside. I have no idea how they got out there.”
Frey wasn’t injured. No cuts, not even a bruise, he says. “I was fine. The bus rolled and I was just leaning against the seats.”
Once the bus quit sliding, Frey, along with everyone else, scrambled out the front, where the windshield used to be. “It was totally quiet. The bus rolled and slid — I don’t know how far — and nobody said anything then,” Frey says. “Then after it stopped everyone was saying, ‘Okay, everybody all right, everybody okay, everybody all right.’ We had no idea what was going on outside. We had no idea what was happening outside … that those kids were outside.