Authors: Leesa Culp,Gregg Drinnan,Bob Wilkie
B00ADOAFYO EBOK (14 page)
Clockwise, from top left: The 1988–89 Broncos sign autographs during an on-ice session with young fans; a casual team photo; Sheldon Kennedy (left), Graham James, Lorne Frey, and Danny Lambert with the Memorial Cup; Tim Tisdale, who scored the winning goal in overtime in the 1989 Memorial Cup tournament, and Sheldon Kennedy enjoy the spoils of victory — a ride in a convertible during a parade.
Rod Steensland.
Tisdale had been a twelfth-round selection by the Edmonton Oilers in the NHL’s 1988 draft. He played three seasons with their AHL affiliate, the Cape Breton Oilers, before spending some time in Great Britain and more time in the ECHL.
He got his first taste of coaching as a player and assistant coach with the ECHL’s Wheeling Thunderbirds in 1994–95, and by 1998–99 he was an assistant coach with the WHL’s Regina Pats. Less than four months after signing in Regina, he found himself as the Pats’ head coach following the firing of Parry Shockey. Tisdale stuck it out as the Pats’ head coach through the 1999–2000 season, but then returned to Swift Current.
Looking for a more stable lifestyle, he began working at his in-laws’ business, Wiens Agritec, an agricultural products supplier. He began as a bookkeeper, and now manages the business and has part ownership.
He has stayed involved in hockey through coaching and officiating in minor hockey and working on Broncos’ radio broadcasts. He did a turn as president of the Swift Current Minor Hockey Association, and has been the referee association’s liaison with SCMHA. In 2009, Tisdale was honoured as the Saskatchewan Hockey Association’s coach of the year.
“I have coached at all levels … I have also worked with Hockey Canada on coaching manuals,” Tisdale says. “I also do coaching clinics for the Saskatchewan Hockey Association.” And through it all he treasures the memories of his days on the ice with the Broncos.
“Like most,” he says, “I can say that the best experience of my life was junior hockey. The fact that I was able to play at home and have success makes it that much better. Living here, I realize more now than ever what winning the Memorial Cup meant to this community. I don’t go a week without someone bringing up that game.
“You can always look back in hindsight and say, ‘I wish this was different,’ or ‘I should have done this.’ But at the time I had the pleasure of playing on one of the best WHL teams ever.”
Twenty years later, Tisdale would tell writer Gare Joyce that something was missing from that championship Sunday.
“We took satisfaction for our accomplishments,” Tisdale said, “but we just wished those four guys could have been a part of it. You’re going to feel guilty somehow. And I still think a lot more about the accident than I do that championship and that goal.”
As the enormity of Tisdale’s game-winner hit home, the Broncos fans in attendance erupted and the players began celebrating. Wilkie, tears running down his cheeks, skated to Darren Kruger and grabbed him and hugged him. Peter Soberlak, Tim Tisdale, Sheldon Kennedy, and Danny Lambert were right there, too. They didn’t say a thing; they just looked at each other.
Wilkie says, “The same thought was running through our minds:
We had accomplished what only a few years ago had seemed impossible.
”
Yes, they had done it. (On July 28, 2012, the team was among the inaugural inductees into the Saskatchewan Hockey Hall of Fame, which is located in the arena in Swift Current.)
Years later, Wilkie would write, “Together, we had done it, but we had not won this championship alone. We all felt the powerful spirit of the four fallen Broncos — Trent Kresse, Brent Ruff, Chris Mantyka, and Scott Kruger.
“Without a doubt, they were with us in Saskatoon that unforgettable day.”
The Coach, Part 1
I
n
the mid-1980s, the WHL was in the process of turning the corner, turning itself around from just another rough-and-tumble junior hockey league into a business with franchises that had million-dollar budgets and seven-figure price tags.
And before the Swift Current Broncos, who had recently moved home from Lethbridge, would take to the ice late in the summer of 1986, there were numerous decisions to be made, not the least of which were “Who would be the general manager?” and “Who would be the head coach?”
Ultimately, both duties fell to Graham James, a thirty-three-year-old former schoolteacher from Summerside, Prince Edward Island, who was a student of the English language.
“Graham was a tremendous find,” John Rittinger, the man most responsible for bringing back the Broncos, said at the time. “I study the English language as a hobby. Graham has a degree in English literature. We try to trip each other up but Graham is never wrong.” In other words, James was anything but your average North American junior hockey coach.
He had made something of a name for himself in Winnipeg minor hockey circles, where he had coached in the bantam and midget ranks. While he had scouted for junior teams in Saskatoon, Flin Flon, and Winnipeg, he also had three years of junior A coaching experience in Winnipeg with the Fort Garry Blues, and had spent one season (1984–85) as head coach of the WHL’s Moose Jaw Warriors.
(Theoren Fleury, then sixteen, would put up seventy-five points in seventy-one games with the Warriors. Sheldon Kennedy, then fifteen, played in sixteen games with the Warriors but didn’t get even one point.)
James’s coaching experience in Moose Jaw set him up well for the move to Swift Current. The Warriors had spent the first four years of their existence in Winnipeg, moving to Moose Jaw over the summer of 1984. So James, whose Warriors went 21–50–1, knew something about guiding a team through its first season in a new home. He knew all about what went into moving from one city to another and putting together a team.
What made James especially attractive to the Broncos’ owners was the fact that he was a student of the free-flowing European style of hockey. That, James said, originated from a meeting with Bobby Hull, then a star with the World Hockey Association’s Winnipeg Jets.
“I was trying to line up Bobby Hull for a charity hockey game [in Winnipeg],” James told Ed Willes of the
Regina Leader-Post
before the 1989 Memorial Cup tournament in Saskatoon. “He told me to get a couple of players and he’d bring a couple down. I met Hull at the Civic Centre in St. James around midnight. He had Anders Hedberg, Ulf Nilsson, and Lars-Erik Sjoberg with him.”
Hedberg and Nilsson were Hull’s linemates with the Jets, while Sjoberg, a defenceman, captained the WHA team. They were among the numerous Scandinavian players who would help put the Jets on hockey’s map.
Willes reported, “James and his group, which included former NHL defenceman Kevin McCarthy, spent the next few nights scrimmaging with Hull and his new teammates. Actually, they spent the next few nights watching Hull, Hedberg, Nilsson, and Sjoberg create magic with the puck.”
James told Willes: “I was twenty-one. They taught me another way to look at the game.”
While in Winnipeg, James would spend many hours at the Winnipeg Arena watching the Jets go through their practice paces. It was while watching the free-flowing Jets that he came to believe that hockey played properly would be a game of puck possession. Broken down into its
Poem written by Graham James for the 1986 Christmas banquet.
simplest terms, it meant that if you had the puck, the other team didn’t; therefore, you couldn’t be scored upon.
James came to frown upon the dump-and-chase (a.k.a. chip-and-chase) game that had become so popular in North America. James wanted his team to play a puck-possession game. He didn’t see much sense in giving up possession by dumping the puck into the other team’s end and then having to go and try to get it back. Why do that, he wondered, when you already have possession?
Much like so many European teams, then, the Broncos weren’t averse to circling back and regrouping should they reach an opponent’s blue line and find the way into the offensive zone blocked. That, James came to believe, is the way the game is meant to be played.
Whereas the WHL had long been renowned for its rugged, oftentimes brawling, style, James preferred that his teams intimidate others with their power play. Take penalties against his teams and they would beat you with their power play. Over the 1988–89 regular season, the Broncos scored 180 power-play goals in 526 opportunities, an unheard of 34.2 percent success rate.
That isn’t to say that James didn’t understand the value of having an aircraft carrier on his roster. While the 1988–89 Broncos were winning with their power play, eighteen-year-old winger Mark McFarlane piled up 278 penalty minutes as he kept the flies off the team’s five 100-point skaters — Tim Tisdale, Peter Kasowski, Sheldon Kennedy, Dan Lambert, and Brian Sakic. But McFarlane also could play: witness fifty-one points, including twenty-eight goals, in only fifty-eight games.
Having gone through the move from Winnipeg to Moose Jaw, James knew, too, that not all the players who had been with the Lethbridge Broncos would want to make the shift to Swift Current. And while the Broncos certainly provided hope for local youngsters who had dreams of playing in the WHL, their relocation muddied the waters for players who had been Lethbridge’s property but who now belonged to Swift Current. Some would make the move from Lethbridge to Swift Current, while others requested trades and soon were on the move.
With help from the likes of super scouts Paul Charles and Bruce Franklin and assistant general manager and assistant coach Lorne Frey, James would get to work right away on shaping the roster that in the spring of 1989 would bring home the Memorial Cup to the smallest market in all of the Canadian Hockey League.
“What I liked about Graham as a coach was that he appreciated speed and finesse and hockey skill,” said Peter Soberlak, a highly skilled forward who would join the Broncos in a trade from the Kamloops Blazers early in the 1986–87 season. “I played with Sheldon [Kennedy] and Joe [Sakic] and we had freedom to fly. We roamed and skated hard and made nice plays. Graham understood that. That was the way the game was changing to be successful. That was the hockey part I liked about him.
“What I hated about him was he was manipulative. He was volatile. He was angry. He used humiliation and degradation and sheer violence and fear toward young kids.”
The angry, volatile side of James isn’t one that was often in view of the public, although there were times when he would fly into a rage at the bench. Like the night of October 30, 1990, when the Broncos blew a 7–3 second-period lead and lost 9–8 to the visiting Medicine Hat Tigers.
The
Regina Leader-Post
reported that in the game’s dying seconds, “James ran on to the ice and screamed at referee Kevin Muench. He charged the referee relentlessly and had to be restrained by Broncos players and both linesmen. He returned to the bench and threw sticks and water bottles on the ice. James then removed his jacket, tie, shirt, and a shoe before his players escorted him back to the dressing room.”
Muench hit James with a gross misconduct, the same penalty James had received the previous season during a game against the Regina Pats. That night, James had said, “I don’t like the term
gross misconduct
. It sounds like I pulled my pants down or something.”
