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The Coach, Part 2

G
rowing
up in Winnipeg, Graham James played minor hockey at Sturgeon Creek Community Club, where he found himself on teams coached by John (Jack) Charles Nelson.

About a dozen years after James played there, three teenagers complained to police. Nelson was subsequently charged with and convicted of two counts of sexual abuse and one of indecent assault.

James has never spoken, at least not publicly, of any relationship he may have had with Nelson, who died in 1995. At this point, then, no one has any idea how much influence, if any, Nelson’s lifestyle may have had on James.

James got his coaching start in Winnipeg, and was involved with community and Armed Forces teams, as well as bantam and midget clubs, in St. James. His stint with the bantam team ended in 1977 when, during a tournament in Minneapolis, he and some of his players were discovered playing video games in their hotel after curfew.

By the summer of 1983, James was ensconced as the head scout for the WHL’s Winnipeg Warriors. They finished 1983–84 — their fourth season in the Manitoba capital — with an abysmal record (9–63) and promptly relocated to Moose Jaw. James made the move west with the Warriors, but he didn’t go as a scout. In the summer of 1984, James was named the Warriors’ director of hockey operations and head coach.

Originally, Leon Devoin was the general manager; however, he resigned on August 10. Ten days later, the void was filled by Bryan Raymond, a Regina resident who went on to scout for the NHL’s Columbus Blue Jackets for a few seasons. Raymond’s stint in Moose Jaw was a short one — he was fired on October 21, and James added the title of acting general manager to his portfolio.

The Warriors went 21–50–1 in that first season and, by the summer of 1985, Barry Trapp was the general manager.

Trapp has an extensive hockey resumé, having later worked as Hockey Canada’s head scout and the Toronto Maple Leafs’ head amateur scout. He also has scouted for the Phoenix Coyotes. Trapp has said that James’s relationship with the Warriors began to come apart in August of 1985. It was then when Trapp tried to arrange a meeting with James.

Trapp has said he called James, only to have the head coach tell him he was unavailable because he was going to Minneapolis with some friends to watch baseball’s Minnesota Twins. When Trapp found out that the friends actually were junior hockey players, the general manager said he told the head coach that, in his opinion, that behaviour was inappropriate.

“I had no proof [of anything untoward]; only suspicions,” said Trapp, who chose not to speak publicly on the issue until 1997, when he spoke with author Laura Robinson, who would write the book
Crossing the Line
. “My antennae went up that day. Something just didn’t sit right with me.

“Graham didn’t say, ‘I’m going to Minnesota with a couple of our players.’ As far as I’m concerned, he lied to me. Everybody had concerns, but until you have proof, it’s hard to accuse a guy.”

After finding out that James was travelling with players, Trapp approached the Warriors’ board of directors — the Warriors are a community-owned franchise — and told its members that either he or James had to go.

The board chose to keep Trapp, who also took over as head coach and guided the Warriors to a 25–44–3 record. At the time, with Trapp choosing not to talk and James more than happy to, Trapp frequently was portrayed as a man who wanted to coach and thus had torpedoed James.

“I took a lot of heat for that,” Trapp told Robinson. “And I never told anyone else why I really did what I did. I just kept telling everyone, ‘It’s in the best interests of the Moose Jaw hockey club.’ I didn’t want to be around the man. I wanted nothing to do with him.”

In Winnipeg, James tried to laugh it all off by telling people he had been “Trapped.”

No longer a WHL coach, James spent 1985–86 as head coach of the junior A Winnipeg South Blues of the Manitoba Junior Hockey League, while also scouting for the WHL’s Kamloops Blazers. In fact, James had struck up a friendship with Kamloops head coach Ken Hitchcock and thought at the time that his immediate future in the game might well be with the Blazers. In the meantime, James and the Blues won the MJHL championship that season. They went on to lose the Western Canadian title to the Penticton, B.C., Knights.

By now, the Broncos were on the move from Lethbridge to Swift Current, and they were in need of a head coach. On May 1, 1986, James was introduced as their head coach. He would stay in Swift Current through 1993–94, when he left to help set up an expansion franchise — the Hitmen — in Calgary.

In eight seasons under James, the Broncos went 310–226–22 (.575). They experienced a bus accident in which four players died, and later won the Memorial Cup championship. They also got to the 1993 Memorial Cup tournament after going 49–21–2 in the 1992–93 regular season and 12–5 in the WHL playoffs.

They were, in a word, successful.

And everyone loved Graham James. He was named
The Hockey News’
Man of the Year for 1989, a year in which the Broncos had done the improbable and won the Memorial Cup.

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.