by Culp, Leesa
Wilkie says that when the Broncos regrouped, they found a different attitude in their dressing room. “Before the accident, there was a feeling that at least some of us were just glad to be in the WHL,” he explains. “Now there was a new feeling taking hold that we were in this together, that we didn’t want any sympathy on the ice, that we wanted to make the playoffs, and that we were determined to do just that.”
While the players eagerly awaited the arrival of January 9, there also was a feeling of dread as the day approached. After all, they were going to have to get back on a bus. With the Broncos’ bus having been totalled, the Saskatchewan Transportation Company provided the team with a bus for use on the trip to Moose Jaw.
“Frankly,” Wilkie says, “I was scared out of my wits.” Still, he kept his feelings to himself as he tried to convince himself that it was good to be back on the bus, that it was good to be heading out to play a game again, that it was good to get back into something of a routine. But deep inside he felt terrible.
“To this day,” he says, “when I go over a hump in a road and get that uneasy feeling like my insides have lifted, it freaks me out.”
On January 9, as the Broncos’ bus drove past the accident site, Wilkie turned up his Walkman, closed his eyes, and tried to lose himself. He was listening to Bon Jovi and the tune was “Livin’ on a Prayer.”
You had to have been in the Moose Jaw Civic Centre that night to understand the raw emotion that was in the building. From the moment you walked into the building, you could feel it. It was as though every person in the arena was aware of just how badly this group of young men needed to feel support and affection. These men, most of them still in their teenage years, had been through a mind-numbing series of experiences over the previous ten days. They needed a hug.
“We were trying hard to make this game just like all the games that had preceded it,” Wilkie recalls. “But we knew that wasn’t the case. And as we got closer to the dropping of the puck, we could feel the anticipation growing. We also could feel an incredible energy from inside the building.”
The 3,146-seat arena in Moose Jaw, a.k.a. the Crushed Can, where the Broncos played their first game after the bus crash. The Crushed Can was replaced by Mosaic Place prior to the 2011–12 season and was demolished in the summer of 2012.
Courtesy of Leesa Culp.
At the same time, some players weren’t sure their minds or their bodies were ready for the rigours of playing again. And whether or not it was because of all they’d been through, there would be more injuries.
Sheldon Kennedy, already with a bruised right shoulder that would cost him a handful of games, would go down with a hairline fracture to an ankle in January. Soberlak, playing with a sore arm, took a whack across a calf in one of his first games back. Jason Proulx had a bad arm. (To make matters worse, Proulx didn’t even want to be with the Broncos. Acquired with Soberlak from the Kamloops Blazers in a trade for forward Warren Babe, Proulx had requested a trade before Christmas. He had returned to Swift Current after Christmas hoping to be moved as soon as possible, and had been on the bus when it crashed.)
And then, in one of those early games, Lackten, who already was nursing sore ribs, went down with a concussion. Later, goaltender Pat Nogier would find himself with a sore arm, Blair Atcheynum a slightly separated shoulder, and Danny Lambert a sore hip and bruised knee.
The hits, it seemed, were just going to keep on coming.
But right now the Broncos were in Moose Jaw and — finally — the moment had arrived.
Goaltender Trevor Kruger stood up in the dressing room and led his teammates out the door and down the hallway to the ice for the pre-game skate. It was a fairly long walk, made even longer by the moment, but they got there. When they did, they were met by a wall of noise.
If you have been in the Civic Centre, you understand the makeup of the building. It wasn’t called the Crushed Can for nothing. It actually had a metal roof, and it did resemble a crushed can. You might say it was a poor man’s — a really poor man’s — Calgary Saddledome. If you were seated midway up on one side of the building, you couldn’t see the stands on the other side. That also meant there was nowhere for the noise to go — and as the Broncos stepped onto the ice, the crowd roared its appreciation.
The Broncos were sporting new sweaters, each one with a newly sewn-on four-leaf clover on the right shoulder. The Civic Centre was jam-packed with a record crowd of 3,463 cheering fans — about five hundred of them loyal supporters from Swift Current — and for two minutes they stood and cheered, showing their respect and admiration for the visiting team. While Moose Jaw regularly drew decent crowds to the Civic Centre — at that time, it was listed as having 3,030 seats and room for three hundred standees — the Crushed Can never had seen anything like this.
By this point, most of the Broncos simply were trying to keep it together. It was a battle they couldn’t win, and it wasn’t long before the tears began to flow.
Somehow the Broncos got through their warm-up and returned to the dressing room so the Zamboni could clean the ice.
In the Broncos’ dressing room, there was silence. There wasn’t any of the talking or kibitzing that usually precedes a game. When the ice was cleared, the Broncos went back out and were met by another standing ovation, this one even louder than the first.
Once the crowd quieted, there was a moment of silence as the crowd honoured the memories of the four Broncos who had died in the bus crash. And, as the crowd burst into “O Canada,” the eyes of the Swift Current players were glistening.
Finally, the game was underway and, like most games, it slipped neatly into that familiar rhythm — the give and take, the back and forth, the banging and crashing, the shots, the saves.
The crowd was into this one, too. The Swift Current fans would begin a chorus of ‘Go Broncos Go,’ only to be greeted by ‘Go Warriors Go’ from the Moose Jaw fans. But it became evident early on that the Broncos weren’t going to be able to put on their skates and slide right back into the routine of playing hard.
“We were going through the motions,” Wilkie says, adding that “at the same time, I just couldn’t believe that the Warriors were playing so hard.” Wilkie admits that he caught himself feeling sorry for himself and his teammates. “Didn’t they know we had been through a horrible time?” he was asking himself. Years later, he admits that he really didn’t want to be in Moose Jaw that night.
“I really wanted to be somewhere else … anywhere else,” he says.
In the end, the Warriors won the game 6–5, but the Broncos didn’t feel like losers. Mainly, they felt relief that the first game was over.
Their next game was against the Pats in the Regina Agridome, and again they received a standing ovation from the home team’s fans. It was a pattern that would be repeated in every arena they visited. Time and again the fans would rise and show their support and appreciation.
The Broncos played their first home game since the accident on January 13 against the Medicine Hat Tigers. The teams were greeted by 2,459 fans who showered the Broncos with noise, love, and appreciation. The Tigers showed no mercy.
“By now,” Wilkie says, “we were spent emotionally and really, really needed a break in order to regroup.” The Tigers whipped them 6–1. This was a young Swift Current team and, in truth, what it had been through since Christmas was catching up with the players.
“We were young,” Wilkie says, “most of us were away from home for the first time, and we had been through a lot in a short period of time. In all honesty, we were lost. Our hearts were heavy and in a lot of ways we had no sense of direction.”
Brian Costello of the Swift Current Sun, who had been on the bus that fateful day, had even described the players in print as “soldiers of misfortune.”
In hindsight, Wilkie wonders if the players weren’t suffering from some sort of post-traumatic stress disorder. After all, they had been involved in an accident that had claimed four teammates. The surviving player
s had only been able to go home for a day or two, if at all. No counsellors had been brought in. There had been four funerals and a memorial service. The season had resumed. All in a matter of ten days.
And now, to make matters worse, Graham James, the general manager and head coach, had become an angry, angry man.
Wilkie recalls: “He never had been shy about showing us his temper and he would rant when we weren’t playing well. But it all seemed more intense after the accident. Even the next season, 1987–88, he didn’t have the tantrums he had right after the accident. Maybe he seemed harsher because we were hurting so much, but it seemed brutal at times.
“He had turned into a short-tempered coach who was quick to yell at and berate his charges. He had never been one to shy away from criticizing his players, but never before had he done it with such anger in his voice and mannerisms. And now he wasn’t shy about berating his own players right on the bench, which meant it would happen in front of the fans.”
Wilkie says he will never forget one home game against Regina when “we got a real ass-whipping. He didn’t do it on the bench — he saved it for the dressing room. He roared into the room after the game, ripped down the dressing-room stereo, and threw it against the wall. The moment the stereo bounced off the wall was the moment I lost all respect for Graham, and I know a lot of the other players felt the same way.”
The Broncos ran hot and cold for the rest of that hockey season, and had it not been for Joe Sakic, who really was starting to come onto hockey’s radar, the season may have been totally lost. Sakic simply was on fire for the season’s second half. He would finish with 133 points, the fourth-highest total in the WHL, including sixty goals.
The Broncos also were drawing a lot of interest from NHL scouts, who were flocking to their games to watch the likes of Kennedy, Sakic, Wilkie, Soberlak, and Ryan McGill. While watching the Broncos and Medicine Hat one night, veteran scout Glen Sonmor said, “I’ve never been to a single game where so many potential first-round draft picks are playing.”
The Broncos — in this case, Peter Soberlak (16) and Tim Tisdale (13) — loved to apply pressure to the opposing goaltender.
Rod Steensland.
In the end, the Broncos qualified for the playoffs, their 28–40–4 record good enough for the East Division’s sixth and final playoff spot.
On the night they clinched a playoff spot, promotions director John Foster hung up the telephone, stuck out a hand, and delivered the news: “Congratulations, Graham, you’re in the playoffs.”
A chorus of whoops and yells followed: “We’re in! We’re in!” Players and management shouted it loudly and proudly in the dressing room. The players were jumping up and down and stomping their feet.
“This is a great tribute to the players,” James told the Swift Current Sun. “It has been a lot of hard work to get this far. It has been a tough grind. There were times when it didn’t look like we were going to make it.”
The Broncos felt a huge sense of relief just to have made the playoffs. But when it came time to restart their engines, they just couldn’t do it. The well finally had run dry. Emotionally, the Broncos were done. At the time of the season when emotion means the most, the Broncos couldn’t find it. The Prince Albert Raiders won the first-round best-of-five series in four games.
“Surviving the tragedy and all it encompassed and going on to make the playoffs, when we could have quit and gone home early, showed the gritty character that was part of each and every one of us,” Wilkie says. “Although we eventually got beat in the first round, we felt pretty good about the season and how it turned out.”
Game 4 of that series was played in Swift Current. The Broncos knew that a loss to the Raiders, who had finished third with a 43–26–3 record, would end their season, and the home team knew the odds were very much against them.
“It was a very emotional night,” Wilkie remembers. “When the game ended, it was almost a relief that it was over. Finally, this season from hell was over.”
The Raiders won that fourth game 7–4, and as it ended the 3,215 fans showed their appreciation with a thunderous standing ovation.
“The fans said it all,” said an emotional John Rittinger, the team’s governor. “That five-minute ovation told the entire story. They were saying, ‘Thanks a lot, we’re mighty proud of you.’”
It was hard to believe that what the Broncos had been through had really happened; that it wasn’t a nightmare. But life, indeed, was moving on.
By season’s end, the Broncos had purchased a new bus; well, a new “used” bus. It was a 1977 model MC8 that was purchased for $100,000 from Beaver Bus Lines of Winnipeg. It had a new motor and a rebuilt standard four-speed transmission with about two hundred thousand kilometres registered. It could seat forty-seven passengers on newly upholstered seats with overhead lights and a washroom in the rear. Unlike the old bus, there was no duct tape anywhere.
The “new” bus was mostly paid for through a fundraising dinner that had been sponsored by the Horseshoe Lodge and had featured Don Cherry as the guest speaker. Grapes even waived his normal fee for such engagements, “to help the Bronco hockey club.” He thrilled the crowd of 285 as he spoke candidly and humorously about his days with the Boston Bruins and Colorado Rockies. When he spoke of the Broncos, he didn’t hold anything back.
“If there was ever a team in the world who could have written off the season, this is it,” he said. “It would have been so easy for them to quit, they’ve had a built-in excuse: losing four friends and teammates. But they didn’t quit.
“It’s an honour for me to be here and do what I can. I get chills thinking about how they made the playoffs through all this. They’ve got amazing character, which is something that can’t be taught.”
The NHL draft was held in Detroit in June. Four Broncos were drafted in the first two rounds. The Quebec Nordiques took Joe Sakic with the fifteenth selection of the first round. Six picks later, the Edmonton Oilers grabbed Peter Soberlak. In the second round, twenty-ninth overall, the Chicago Blackhawks took Ryan McGill. And with the forty-first pick, the Detroit Red Wings took Bob Wilkie. All told, five Broncos were drafted that day, as Ian Herbers was taken by the Buffalo Sabres in the tenth round.
As James would tell the Sun, “This is our finest hour. We have already lived the nightmare. Right now, we’re living the dream.”
CHAPTER 16
The 1989 Memorial Cup
As the 1988–89 WHL season began, the Swift Current Broncos’ roster still included six key players who had been on their bus when it crashed on December 30, 1986.
Joe Sakic, the high-scoring centre, was only nineteen years of age, but already had moved on to the NHL’s Quebec Nordiques. Other players, such as forward Tracy Egeland and defencemen Ryan McGill and Clarke Polglase, had been traded. Defenceman Ian Herbers had used up his junior eligibility the previous season and had left for the University of Alberta in Edmonton.
Some players — goaltender Pat Nogier and forward Lonnie Spink among them — simply had returned home knowing that hockey no longer was the most important thing in their lives.
However, goaltender Trevor Kruger, defencemen Danny Lambert and Bob Wilkie, and forwards Peter Soberlak, Tim Tisdale, and Sheldon Kennedy were back.
The Broncos also had added some promising young players, including four forwards with tremendous offensive skills: Kimbi Daniels, Peter Kasowski, Geoff Sanderson, and Brian Sakic, Joe’s younger brother. As well, Trevor Kruger’s twin brother, Darren, was on the roster. A defenceman with terrific offensive skills, he would get a lot of ice time and would run the power play.
The players knew that this team had the potential to do great things. And they expected to do well. As the season began, there was a real air of excitement in the dressing room.
The previous season, 1987–88, had been something of a success. The Broncos, coming off the season during which four teammates had died, went 44–26–2, for ninety points.
At first glance, that wo
uld seem to be a pretty good record. But it was only good for fourth spot in the eight-team East Division, behind the Saskatoon Blades (ninety-seven points), Medicine Hat Tigers (ninety-four), and Prince Albert Raiders (ninety-one). The Broncos beat the Regina Pats 3–1 in a best-of-five first-round playoff series, but then were beaten 4–2 by the Blades in a best-of-seven series.
Joe Sakic had tied for the WHL scoring title, but he was gone now and people were wondering how the Broncos would make up for having lost his incredible offensive and leadership skills.
The 1988–89 season started with a bang, especially for Tim Tisdale, a home-grown centre who was a quiet, unassuming guy off the ice. On the ice, however, it was a different story: he was a gifted scorer who let his stick do the talking. A back injury that required surgery had limited him to thirty-two games in 1987–88, but now he was back and he was healthy.
The Swift Current Sun reported that Tisdale, then twenty, was “playing the arsonist, burning the Regina Pats and Moose Jaw Warriors for ten points in two games as the Broncos opened the 1988–89 season with a pair of one-goal decisions.”
Obviously, Tisdale was making up for lost time. Still, even he was surprised at his golden touch. “I knew I could go out and help the offence,” he told the Sun, “but I never dreamed it would start like this. I’m shooting the puck better and more often. Last [season], I used to carry it a lot and always look for the open man. Now I am taking the shots. I think I’ve had fifteen in two games, and I had nine against Regina alone.”
Tisdale also admitted that he had felt pressure the previous season, pressure that no longer was there. “There isn’t as much pressure as last [season],” he explained. “That was my first year as a veteran and that’s when I knew I had to be a leader.”