B00ADOAFYO EBOK (11 page)

Just an Ordinary Joe

T
here
isn’t much doubt about who was the best player on the 1986–87 Swift Current Broncos. That would be Joe Sakic, the quiet, unassuming, soon-to-be superstar who put up 133 points as a rookie the season the bus crashed. For that, he was named the East Division’s rookie of the year.

Sakic would play only one more season in Swift Current — he put up 160 points in 1987–88 — so he wasn’t part of the team that won the 1989 Memorial Cup. The Quebec Nordiques selected him with the fifteenth pick of the NHL’s 1987 draft. He was on his way to a sixty-two-point rookie NHL season when the Broncos were on the road to winning the Memorial Cup.

Sakic was born July 7, 1969, to Marijan and Slavica Sakic, Croatian immigrants who had settled in Burnaby, British Columbia. Growing up as the son of immigrants, Sakic developed a strong work ethic, and it was that, along with an abundance of skill, more on-ice patience than any player should have, and an ability to see the ice and read the play, that helped him carve out quite a niche in the NHL.

“We never had it easy growing up,” Sakic told Larry Wigge of
The Sporting News
for a January 2002 story. “Dad worked for everything we had. He never let me off the hook. In hockey it was the same thing: ‘Get out there and work.’

“Even today, after a bad game, there are times when I won’t answer the phone. I know who it is. Even though I’m all grown up, I know it’s my dad calling to tell me he had seen the game, and he’s going to tell me I didn’t work hard enough.”

By the time Sakic retired after the 2008–09 season, he had recorded 1,641 points in the NHL, including 625 goals, in 1,378 regular-season games. He also was one of those rarities in today’s game — a one-organization man. He had been drafted by the Nordiques and made the move to Denver over the summer of 1995 when the Quebec franchise became the Colorado Avalanche.

In fact, he played for only two organizations in his career, from major junior through his NHL days.

Sakic began his WHL career with the Lethbridge Broncos — he was pointless in three games with them in 1985–86 — and was one of the players who at first wasn’t interested in moving when the franchise was sold to Swift Current interests.

But move he did, and he wound up playing a starring role in Swift Current. In his second and final season there, he finished with 160 points, including seventy-eight goals, in sixty-four games. He ended up tied atop the WHL scoring race with Theoren Fleury of the Moose Jaw Warriors, who also had 160 points. Sakic was given the scoring championship on the basis of having scored more goals than Fleury, 78–68.

Sakic rarely has spoken publicly about the bus accident. He and frequent linemate Sheldon Kennedy were seated near the front of the bus, chatting about the Christmas each had experienced. In 2002, Sakic told Wigge, “Clearly, you grow up in a hurry after something like that. It changes your whole outlook on life and makes you appreciate what you have even more. That matured us all, I think.”

When interviewed by Brian Costello of
The Hockey News
for a story that appeared in the December 27, 1996, issue, Sakic said, “You never forget that day. It makes you realize that it could end at any time for anybody. Sometimes when I drive around, I think about it. It makes you careful.”

Sakic told writer Debbie Elicksen, “The best thing was during practices and games — that was the best time to get away. You just focused on hockey.

Trevor Kruger (left), Peter Soberlak, Bob Wilkie, Sheldon Kennedy, Chris Larkin, and Darren Kruger get ready for a round of golf the day following the twenty-year reunion dinner for the team that won the 1989 Memorial Cup.
Courtesy of Leesa Culp.

“It was the first time a tragedy happened in my life. Kind of reality checks in. You’re a little more careful about the things you decide to do. You weigh the options, I guess.”

Roy MacGregor of the
Globe and Mail
spoke with Sakic in February 2008. “It’s tough,” Sakic told MacGregor. “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.”

When writer Gare Joyce was researching a story that would appear on
www.ESPN.com
, Sakic agreed to talk to him. But, according to Joyce’s story, only “on the condition that no questions would be asked about the details of the crash.”

When the authors of this book requested an interview with Sakic through his agent, Don Baizley, the NHL star chose to take a pass.

“He is a class act and always has been … a future Hall of Famer, a Stanley Cup champion, and a gold-medal winner in the Olympics,” former teammate Bob Wilkie says of Sakic. “He was a blast to play with and to watch and he was a huge part of the success we had over the two seasons.… He was a quiet guy who never really said much. His actions spoke louder than words.”

Peter Soberlak, who was traded to the Broncos by the Kamloops Blazers early in the 1986–87 season, frequently played on a line with Sakic. Soberlak says that Joe has always been, well, Joe.

“He is absolutely a good guy,” Soberlak says. “He has never changed.”

Because Sakic was in the NHL when the Swift Current team won the 1989 Memorial Cup, he wasn’t officially a part of the 1989 reunion celebration that was held in Swift Current in August 2009. That doesn’t mean Sakic wasn’t there, though. His wife, Debbie, is from Swift Current, so they and their three children are frequent visitors to the city. Whether by coincidence or good management, the Sakics were there when the 1988–89 team was holding its twentieth anniversary celebration. Part of the celebration involved a golf tournament.

“Myself, Sheldon [Kennedy], Danny [Lambert], and Wilkie were in the last foursome,” Soberlak says, adding that Sakic made a non-playing appearance early in the proceedings. “He drove around with us from the third hole on.… It was like we were seventeen again. He was just Joe.” It didn’t matter, Soberlak says, that Sakic had made “$100 million or something like that” in his career. He was just Joe.

“Sheldon was giving it to him about his dogs and stuff,” Soberlak says. “And it wasn’t long before it was just, ‘Ah, shut up Sakic.’

“He really was just Joe.”

The Coroner’s Report

I
t
wasn’t long after the accident involving the Swift Current Broncos’ bus that Swift Current coroner d’Arcy Morrice called an inquest into the tragedy. At the same time, the
Swift Current Sun
reported on January 12, 1987, that the vehicle standards and inspection department of Saskatchewan Government Insurance (SGI) was also going to investigate the accident.

By February 9, Morrice had completed his report, in which he made four recommendations:

1. Teams should allot more time for travel when weather is inclement;
   
2. The WHL should encourage teams to postpone or cancel road trips should weather conditions result in dangerous driving conditions;
   
3. Teams should use buses that feature some form of restraining devices, and should enforce the usage of such devices; and
   
4. The province of Saskatchewan should enact legislation requiring buses carrying teams within the province to be equipped with adequate restraining devices, and the use of these devices should be enforced.
   

According to Morrice’s report, the Broncos’ bus had been in good operating condition. No charges were ever laid.

Morrice also released the cause of death for the four deceased players. They had been seated in the back of the bus, in pairs across from each other while playing cards.

Trent Kresse, Scott Kruger, and Brent Ruff died due to dislocation of the cervical spine. They had been thrown upwards, and their heads had hit the roof of the bus. Chris Mantyka died of traumatic asphyxia — he was crushed after he somehow ended up under the bus.

Immediately following the accident, the
Swift Current Sun
printed a list of survivors. That list included twenty-four names — six adults and eighteen players. While researching this book, it was learned that one of the people whose name was on the list — goaltender Bob Crockett — had not been on the bus. Here is the list, as it appeared in the
Sun
:

Adults:

Graham James, general manager and coach

Lorne Frey, assistant coach

John Foster, public relations director

Dave Archibald, bus driver

Doug Leavins, assistant trainer

Brian Costello,
Swift Current Sun
sports writer

Players:

Ed Brost, defence, 19

Gord Green, defence, 19

Ian Herbers, defence, 19

Sheldon Kennedy, forward, 17

Tim Tisdale, forward, 18

Joe Sakic, forward, 17

Pat Nogier, goal, 18

Clarke Polglase, defence, 17

Bob Wilkie, defence, 17

Kurt Lackten, forward/captain, 19

Tracy Egeland, forward, 16

Trevor Kruger, goal, 18

Peter Soberlak, forward, 17

Lonnie Spink, forward, 19

Jason Proulx, defence, 18

Artie Feher, goal, 20

Bob Crockett, goal, 16

Todd Sceviour, forward, 19

Back on the Ice

I
t
was an emotionally exhausted group of Swift Current Broncos who returned to the ice following the January 4 memorial service honouring the four players who had been killed in the crash of the team’s bus.

The surviving players’ heads were spinning with all that had transpired since the accident on the afternoon of December 30. But they knew they had to get on with their lives.

The Broncos had missed four games, but they would make those up as the season progressed. In the meantime, their first game post-accident was scheduled for January 9 in Moose Jaw against the Warriors.

Obviously, most of the players were still nursing bumps and bruises to one degree or another. Defenceman Bob Wilkie’s right hip, which originally was thought to have been broken, wasn’t, but it was stiff, and his face still showed evidence of having been banged around.

Forward Kurt Lackten, the team captain, was nursing tender ribs. Peter Soberlak, another forward, had a sore shoulder. And on and on.…

Meanwhile, Graham James had been busy working the phones because his roster had been left with four holes — the spots that had belonged to the players who had died in the crash.

“It’s a very difficult situation where things are not clear cut,” James told the
Swift Current Sun
. “You can’t look in the phone book and find ‘dial-a-tragedy’ because nobody really has the answers.

“We’re going to try and stick with the players on our list and help ourselves. I don’t want to downplay the assistance of other teams, but the players offered to us would have to go back next [season] or simply be borderline players. By reaching into our own list, we can develop better as a team. And you don’t want to bring strange players into a difficult situation like this, have them help you and then shake their hand goodbye two weeks later. How can you do that? How can you even cut a player who had to go through this?”

In the days immediately after the accident, the WHL developed a plan whereby each of the league’s other thirteen teams would offer up one player. A list of those players would be compiled and the Broncos then would choose two or three of them.

Erin Ginnell, who had played with the junior A Swift Current Indians the previous season, and Swift Current native Garth Lamb were the chosen two. Ginnell, one of coaching legend Pat Ginnell’s sons, already had played that season with the Seattle Thunderbirds and Regina Pats. Lamb had been with the Victoria Cougars.

(Erin Ginnell, today a scout for the NHL’s Florida Panthers, is convinced that the Pats offered him to the Broncos fully expecting to hear, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Ginnell’s theory is that the Pats, knowing full well the animosity between John Rittinger and Ginnell’s father — animosity that had developed while both men pursued a WHL franchise for Swift Current — expected the Broncos to turn down their offer of help. The Broncos, however, were glad to welcome the younger Ginnell aboard.)

James was also able to acquire some other help. He got left-winger Blair Atcheynum, a seventeen-year-old who had asked the Saskatoon Blades for a trade. Later, James would deal him to Moose Jaw for veteran defenceman Tim Logan.

Right-winger David Aldred, a sixteen-year-old who had been playing junior A in Grande Prairie, Alberta, was brought in and put right onto a line with Joe Sakic and Sheldon Kennedy. Another right winger, Terry Baustad, who had played in Moose Jaw and Calgary, also was added.

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 players 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.