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B00ADOAFYO EBOK

Page 15

by Culp, Leesa


  But the award went to James for doing more than having guided a team to a national championship. In those days, he was championing the cause for goon-free, free-flow hockey. His coaching philosophy, he loved to tell people, had its roots in Winnipeg where, as a twenty-one-year-old coaching neophyte, he formed an association of sorts with a few players from the World Hockey Association’s Winnipeg Jets.

  It all began that late night/early morning when he and some friends played some shinny with some professionals at the St. James Civic Centre.

  Bobby Hull, the Golden Jet, was the face of the WHA with the Winnipeg Jets. On this night, he brought with him linemates Anders Hedberg and Ulf Nilsson, along with defenceman Lars-Erik Sjoberg. Hull, Hedberg, and Nilsson were soon to be the talk of the hockey world for the free-flowing way in which they played the game.

  Up until that point, James had been pretty much ensconced in the dump-and-chase game of junior hockey where, in order to be successful and sell tickets, you had to be able to beat up the other guy on the ice and in the alley. Or so the theory went.

  A few nights of playing shinny with Hull and Co. changed the way James looked at the game.

  In 1989, James was thirty-six and had surrounded himself with highly skilled players like Kimbi Daniels, Peter Kasowski, Sheldon Kennedy, Darren and Trevor Kruger, Dan Lambert, Brian Sakic, Peter Soberlak, and Bob Wilkie. God, they could play. Five players finished the regular season with at least one hundred points. Seven players, three of them defencemen, had at least eighty-five points. The Broncos scored a WHL-high 447 goals (only two teams scored more than three hundred in 2011–12), with a league-record 180 of those coming via the power play. That season, the Broncos scored those 180 power-play goals on 526 opportunities, an astonishing 34.2 percent success rate. (In 2011–12, two teams in the WHL didn’t even score 180 goals in total in seventy-two regular-season games. Portland led the WHL in power-play goals with 108; Medicine Hat was next with eighty-seven.)

  Knowing what we know now, it’s easy for hockey people to look at everything that has happened and wonder how it was that they bought what James was selling. But in the late 1980s, James was swimming against the tide in terms of fighting and obstruction and all of the stuff that was so pervasive in hockey. And he was most persuasive.

  “I lived in St. James for fifteen years but I’m not trying to be a saint or a martyr,” James, an English major who never was at a loss for words, told Ed Willes of the Regina Leader-Post in a 1989 interview. “I’m just trying to provide a voice of reason. I’m not comfortable doing this. But I think we have a choice. Do we say what we believe or do we keep quiet so everyone in the league likes us? The easiest thing to do is remain neutral, but I don’t think that’s right.”

  James loved nothing better than to paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., who once said, “The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.”

  James would put it this way: “The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who, in times of moral crises, remain neutral.”

  The way he saw it, the game of hockey was facing a crisis, and he wasn’t prepared to stay neutral. At the same time, however, the roster of the team that won the 1989 Memorial Cup included a winger named Mark McFarlane. He had fifty-one points, including twenty-eight goals, in fifty-eight games. He also had 278 penalty minutes. He was a great equalizer. His presence on the team was just one of many contradictions that surrounded Graham James.

  “I went from Ken Hitchcock coaching all systems to Graham’s coaching of no systems,” said right winger Lonnie Spink, who was traded from Hitchcock’s Kamloops Blazers to the Broncos in November 1986. Spink found it intriguing that players on the Broncos were allowed to be “as inventive as you wanted.” And, as he pointed out, it actually worked, at least with this team, because the Broncos did win the 1989 Memorial Cup. By that time, however, Spink was no longer with the Broncos — he had exhausted his eligibility the previous season.

  That freedom also extended to off-ice activities, at least with some players.

  “I can’t recall ever having more than a two-sentence conversation with that man,” Spink said, adding that he and defencemen Ian Herbers and Gord Green, who were close friends, were pretty much left to themselves. “We were all older — nineteen or twenty— and he left us to ourselves, even having us phone curfew,” Spink said.

  This was in an era when there were a lot of initiation and hazing incidents that involved sports teams, and junior hockey teams in particular. While some coaches were of the opinion that such behaviour was good for team bonding, Spink found it interesting that James wasn’t one of them.

  “I had spent my rookie year [in Kamloops] loading the bus and helping the trainer,” Spink said, adding that it was something of a shock to arrive in Swift Current and “see everyone treated as equals, even unproven rookies.”

  Ian Herbers (left) and Lonnie Spink.

  Rod Steensland.

  In the end, and knowing what he knows now, Spink said, “I had no idea what was really going on and wish somehow I could have made a difference. Sheldon [Kennedy] and the people of Swift Current deserved better.”

  There also was the matter of James’s temper. It’s something that was never in evidence during his often lengthy conversations with the media. But it was there, especially in the Broncos’ dressing room.

  “Graham was famous for his temper,” Spink said, “and I never knew a coach as volatile. We never had a dressing-room stereo for more than a month because he would get mad at practice, leave the ice, and beat our ghetto blaster with his stick.”

  Kurt Lackten, a grinding forward who was the Broncos’ captain in 1986–87, didn’t have any problem with James the coach. At the same time, however, Lackten recognized that manipulation was a big part of James’s game plan.

  “I thought he was a good coach. I got along really well with him,” Lackten said. “I thought he knew the game well. As I got older and looked back at that, at the time I thought, ‘This guy is really good with people.’ Now I look back and I’m like, shit, no kidding. He has to be for his goals and why he wants to be good to people. You know what I mean?

  “Looking back is hindsight, but I thought he knew people well. I thought he was really smart in the game. He could get a lot of response out of people. He was very manipulative but, of course … he was a really smart guy in that regard. Unfortunately, he used it the wrong way.”

  And when “all that stuff came out … I was totally shocked,” Lackten continued. “I lived with Sheldon in Moose Jaw … and I didn’t know any of that stuff was going on. When it all came out, I was like, What! I was in disbelief. I couldn’t believe it. Really?”

  Barry Trapp, who had forced James out in Moose Jaw, believes he was, at the time, a lone voice in the wilderness. “When I was in Moose Jaw I never heard it come up,” Trapp told Keith Bradford of the Calgary Herald late in 2009. “I was the first one that raised the flag. If anybody was aware of it or had suspicions, nobody came to me and told me.”

  Trapp isn’t about to point fingers at anyone else, either. As he told Bradford, “Other people probably had suspicions, but nobody wanted to come out. [James] could have run for mayor. He was a media darling. He had people just completely fooled.”

  The facade, however, had cracked inside the Broncos’ dressing room. Defenceman Bob Wilkie remembers early in 1987, when James bounced the team’s stereo off the dressing-room wall.

  “Looking back now, as an adult and after all that transpired from that moment on,” Wilkie said, “I realize that what Graham James was missing was the ability to feel compassion for other people. Most of us were teenagers. We were lost and struggling as we tried to deal with a catastrophe that in many instances was the first time we had dealt with loss of life.

  “Remember, too, that this wasn’t a case of losing a distant aunt or uncle or a grandparent; we lost four of our best friends, teammates who dressed beside us, who went to war with us, who laughed
and cried with us. Hell, some of us were still expecting the four of them to walk through the dressing room door, slip on their gear, and join us on the ice.

  “So freaking out and berating us, bouncing a stereo off the wall, all because we had lost a hockey game, was totally inappropriate behaviour. I responded to his tantrum by turning away from him and turning him off.”

  Brian Costello, the Swift Current Sun sports writer who was on the Broncos’ bus when it crashed, perhaps has described James better than anyone. “Graham was different ways with different people,” he once said. “With reporters, he always had time to talk and always tried to help out. He was a very bright man and he was aware how the media could keep his image as an educator.”

  CHAPTER 19

  The Coach, Part 3

  While some players may have recognized Graham James for what he turned out to be, none of them would speak out until well after Sheldon Kennedy went public with his accusations of sexual abuse.

  No one was closer to James and to the Swift Current players than Gord Hahn, the veteran trainer. And yet, according to him, he was shocked when it all came crashing down. “I never saw it coming,” he says. “I didn’t see any warning signs at all, and I was around the team more than anybody.”

  Many of the former Broncos, Peter Soberlak among them, will tell you that James was a brilliant coach; that he understood the game, especially on offence, as well as, or better than, anyone. Others, like Bob Wilkie, gradually lost respect for James and prefer not to discuss that side of him.

  “Without a doubt,” Wilkie says, “Graham had developed a core group of talented players and that says a lot about his eye for talent. Unfortunately, it was the way he managed the team that made it rough for players like me. Graham was very blatant about who his favourites were and was extremely negative to the ones he did not care for personally … and that included me. I was constantly berated and belittled by him, and the three years I played for him seemed like ten years. I didn’t want special treatment, but I did expect fair treatment.

  “In every game, I would play a minimum of thirty minutes in all situations, and yet even after that I don’t feel I got any respect from Graham. In my view, respect is a two-way street and I certainly did not extend to him any respect once I had been mistreated in this manner. Obviously, I do not have fond memories of Graham James.”

  Hahn, for one, understands both sides. “I agree with Peter. I agree with Bob in a way, but more so Peter,” Hahn says. “The finesse and that that he had here as a coach … he brought out the best in everybody, I thought. I think the players really respected him for that. And, yes, he was very smart.”

  After James was arrested and charged on November 22, 1996, Hahn says he couldn’t believe the reaction around him. “It was wild,” Hahn recalls. “I couldn’t go to a restaurant, I couldn’t go to work. The phone was ringing or somebody was calling.

  “I went to Calgary and someone asked, ‘What do you do?’ I said, ‘I work for the Broncos.’ The response was, ‘Oh, Graham James.’

  “There were times when I actually got up and walked out of a place because I just couldn’t take it.”

  Wilkie, meanwhile, says he wasn’t surprised when the news came out that Sheldon Kennedy had accused Graham James of sexually assaulting him. “No, I wasn’t surprised,” he says. “I called Bob Harriman, my former billet, and we both found ourselves saying, ‘I knew it.’”

  During his time with the Broncos, Wilkie lived with Harriman, then an RCMP officer, his wife Janine, and their children. Now, more than twenty years after he played with the Broncos, Wilkie says he “had a feeling something was going on, but when you’re young sometimes things just don’t add up or click.”

  He also admits not knowing what good it would have done had he realized what was going on. “I was already on Graham’s wrong side, and players who crossed him quickly got sent away,” Wilkie says. “We were a group of teens away from home, living with strangers, riding a bus, and doing everything to pursue our dream of playing in the NHL. We needed a strong, well-balanced mentor, not a child-molesting, degrading, controlling monster.

  “What people don’t seem to realize is that we were compromised. Our youth was tainted, regardless of Graham’s brilliant ability to spot talent, and he scarred all of us. We saw what was going on, but wouldn’t allow ourselves to believe it could be true. To me, it is clear that Graham James was a master manipulator, and that’s why he got such great results from his hockey teams. However, in the end, this same characteristic ultimately destroyed his life and others.”

  At the time of the bus accident and in the months afterward, little, if anything, was said or written about the fact that the Broncos players never were provided the option of counselling to help them deal with the deaths of four teammates. In the immediate aftermath, much was said about all that James had done to get his team through the wreckage of what followed.

  Speaking at the memorial service after the accident, James had said, “You’re alone and … at night it gets dark and you’re in your bedroom and the show comes on over and over again, the same thing, and you can’t get it to stop. I don’t know if we’ll ever shake that.”

  Years later, it became quite apparent that James was the reason why there wasn’t professional counselling.

  “The idea that Graham James got us through the bus crash is insulting,” Kennedy would say later. “We didn’t rally around him. The players rallied. He had nothing to do with it. And he kept the professional help from the team because he didn’t want anyone to know he was a sexual predator — keeping out professional help was his idea, not the players’. The idea of keeping the dressing room door closed came from him.”

  Wilkie mostly remembers James as a manipulator. “Graham certainly had his favourites,” Wilkie says. “He would call everyone when Shelly would go missing. He would have Shelly, Danny [Lambert], Kimbi [Daniels], and some others over to his house to watch movies on a regular basis. Some of us, as the outcasts or rebels, would joke about it, but later came to realize what a manipulator we had in control of our lives.

  “He always was playing mind games with us. He gave no respect so we gave no respect. I remember Shelly and Danny screaming at him on the bench calling him a fat fuck and telling him to shut his mouth, what did we need him for … all of that kind of stuff.

  “We knew what we had the ability to do and we did it. Not because of him but because we wanted it. He was not a motivator, unless you want to call getting everyone pissed at him motivating people.”

  Wilkie’s relationship with James bothered the defenceman enough that there were times when he simply went home. “I did quit a few times,” Wilkie says, “thinking, What the hell am I doing this for?”

  But he always came back to chase the dream of an NHL career. And it’s a career that Wilkie, who was drafted by the Detroit Red Wings in 1987, sometimes wonders if James didn’t work to sabotage.

  “Detroit used to come and see me play every so often and, always when we sat down, the reports from Graham got me in trouble,” Wilkie recalls. “Was it all his fault? No, it wasn’t. But he never stood up for any of the ‘other guys.’ If we were going to do anything, it was up to us. Most other coaches at that time were great at really helping their players. Graham helped who he liked, and left the ones he didn’t like to fend for themselves.”

  Kennedy says, “There was fear. Graham holds that hammer over them. Power … it’s all about power. These guys are master manipulators. He loved the media attention.”

  And then there was the case of Ed Brost, who left the Broncos on his own during the 1986–87 season. Before leaving Swift Current, Brost gave his side of the story to local media, saying that his heart no longer was in it.

  “I told Graham I’d be hurting the guys if I stayed,” Brost told the Swift Current Sun’s Brian Costello at the time. “The simple reason is I wasn’t happy. I decided this a long time ago. I wanted it to work out … I really like Swift Current, the people. That’s
what kept me around for so long. I told Graham it’s hard for me to leave. I almost started crying.

  “Graham wasn’t getting through to me. There was a barrier between us. I felt because I was an older player … it seems he kind of pushes older players aside. I can’t let that happen. This is my last year in the league. I have to prove myself elsewhere.”

  This wasn’t the first time a player had left a team, nor would it be the last. This time, though, James, for whatever reason, chose to publicly address the issue. And he did so with guns blazing.

  “We talked and it was clear he wanted to leave,” James said. “We were going to let him part without any rancour. Everything seemed to be settled. When I heard what he said on the radio, I couldn’t believe it. It’s garbage.

  “Every coach has players he knows better than others. If they don’t admit so, they’re lying. I treat all my players equal. I give them the same consideration and each receives the same reprimands for missing curfew, et cetera. I haven’t talked to the players about it, but I invite you to ask anyone of them how they feel.”

  In the spring of 2001, twelve years after the Swift Current Broncos had won the Memorial Cup, and four years after Graham James was sentenced to jail, James was found to be living in Spain.

  On January 2, 1997, James had pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting two players — Kennedy and one whose name was protected by a publication ban — on 350 occasions. James was sentenced to three and a half years in prison; he received day parole in 1998 and was fully paroled on July 1, 2000.

  “The man who shook Canadian hockey to its core by committing more than 350 sexual acts on two teenaged players is back in the game and once again coaching,” wrote Allan Maki of the Globe and Mail in the April 26, 2001, edition. It was a story that would earn Maki a National Newspaper Award nomination.

 

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