B00ADOAFYO EBOK (7 page)

“They called and I told my story to them,” he says. “But they didn’t air the story because right after that the Sheldon Kennedy story broke.”

On January 2, 1997, Graham James pleaded guilty to 350 sexual assaults: three hundred on Kennedy, and fifty on an unidentified player.

When Feher was with the Broncos, few people were aware that he was even there. And even ten years after the fact, his story wasn’t told, pre-empted by another story.

Indeed, Feher was an invisible Bronco.

So, too, was Bob Crockett, who had been scheduled to be on the Broncos’ bus for that trip to Regina. However, he didn’t make it.

Born in Pitt Meadows, British Columbia, Crockett was two months past his sixteenth birthday during Christmas 1986. He had been the property of the Lethbridge Broncos, so his rights went to Swift Current when the franchise was sold to John Rittinger and his group. Crockett had been in a couple of Lethbridge training camps prior to reporting to Swift Current in the fall of 1986.

“In Lethbridge,” he remembers, “I was a highly touted goalie — but in Swift Current they didn’t know who I was. I knew I had potential, but I had to prove myself all over again.”

Graham James, the Broncos’ general manager and head coach, would spend much of the 1986–87 season’s first half searching for a dependable goaltender. It wouldn’t be Bob Crockett.

“I was sent home right after main camp, and I was brought back a few weeks later,” Crockett recalls. “But I never got to play and prove myself. I guess Graham had his reasons.… I don’t think Graham knew what he wanted in a goalie.”

As Christmas approached, Crockett made plans to return to British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, where he would spend the holidays with his family. He knew Joe Sakic — a Burnaby, British Columbia, native — from Lethbridge training camps and from Sakic’s minor hockey career on the Lower Mainland. So Crockett caught a ride with Sakic to Calgary, and the two of them flew west to spend some holiday time with their families.

When it came time to return to Swift Current, however, Crockett missed his flight because, he said, he “was delayed at home.” In the end, he chose not to go back at all. Instead, he played for the junior B Burnaby Bluehawks of the West Coast junior league.

Still, when the
Swift Current Sun
printed a list of accident survivors, Crockett’s name somehow ended up on it, although he wasn’t even in the city. According to Crockett, when some people heard reports of a sixteen-year-old having died in the bus crash, they thought it was him. Of course, it would turn out to have been forward Brent Ruff.

Crockett learned of the accident from his girlfriend’s parents. At first, he says, he didn’t believe the news. And then he became quite upset — after all, these were his buddies. He may not have been a part of the Broncos, but he had spent some time with them and he knew most of the players. He was, he says, particularly fond of Chris Mantyka. Crockett remembers Mantyka weighing in for training camp.

“I remember thinking,
Who’s that Fu Manchu? He’ll never make it.
But then Chris got on the ice and kicked the snot out of three guys. Off the ice, he was the nicest guy.” Crockett also remembers Mantyka’s trademark: “He would put his elbow pads on loose so that if he got into a fight he could easily pull them off and throw them at his opponent, and while his opponent was trying to pull them off his face to see, he could beat the guy up.”

Even though Crockett never played for the Broncos, he remembers the feeling he got from being part of the team, even for such a brief time.

“They were superheroes,” he says. “The whole community loved them. The high-school students all had Broncos binders … and even the third-string goalie was a star.”

Crockett returned to the Broncos for training camp in August 1987 but, by his own admission, he was thirty pounds overweight. For one reason or another, Crockett never would play in the WHL. He says he had opportunities to play with junior teams in Richmond and Merritt, British Columbia, among others, but always said no because he was trying to understand how he had gone from being “highly touted” to this.

In the end, just when he thought his career was over, Crockett joined the Williams Lake Mustangs of the Peace Cariboo junior league. It was Pat McGill, an uncle of Swift Current defenceman Ryan McGill, who convinced Crockett to keep playing. Pat was coaching the Mustangs and said he needed a goaltender. Crockett reported and sat for two weeks until, he says, an injury took out another goaltender. Given an opportunity, Crockett played and played and played, even helping the Mustangs to a league championship in 1988–89.

But when he was done with the Mustangs after his twenty-year-old season, Crockett was done with hockey. While with the Mustangs, he proved to himself that he “could be a good goalie, and that was enough for me.”

He never played again, and says he has no regrets.

When asked about the Broncos and Graham James, and what they were able to accomplish after the crash, including winning the 1989 Memorial Cup, Crockett replies, “Graham had help putting the team together. There were other scouts. It wasn’t all him.”

Now in his early forties, Crockett lives in Maple Ridge, British Columbia, with his son, Luke, and works for Avcorp Industries, a company based in nearby Delta that designs and builds airframe structures for aircraft manufacturers.

Sober’s Story

B
ob
Wilkie spent the evening of December 30, 1986, in hospital. The Swift Current Broncos defenceman wasn’t going anywhere, and the way he felt, he really couldn’t think of a place he would rather be.

While he and team captain Kurt Lackten shared a hospital room, many of their teammates ended up at the home of Colleen and Frank MacBean. Sheldon Kennedy, Joe Sakic, and Dan Lambert billeted with the MacBeans.

Frank was a local lawyer who found time to serve on the Broncos’ board of directors. He had been involved with the numerous attempts to bring a WHL franchise back to Swift Current. Colleen was an English and history teacher and guidance counsellor at Swift Current Comprehensive, a local high school.

Sheldon Kennedy (left), Joe Sakic, and Danny Lambert, sporting Cooperalls.
Rod Steensland.

The players who showed up sat in the MacBeans’ basement and cried and laughed and cried and laughed some more. They were awake until the early hours of December 31 as they tried to make at least some sense of what had happened, trying to understand how it was that four teammates had been killed in the crash of their team bus just a few short hours earlier.

Of all the places to be in Swift Current, the MacBean home likely was the best place for everyone, considering the circumstances. Colleen and Frank had first become billets when a hockey friend of their son Nick’s needed a place to stay. The MacBeans would go on to provide a second home to more than forty players. But most importantly, if anyone knew the trauma these Broncos players — all of them teenagers, most of them away from home for the first time — were going through, it was Colleen and Frank. Not only was Colleen a guidance counsellor, but she and Frank had been through the tragedy of losing two of their sons in an automobile accident. Kevin and David, both of whom had been adopted and were just thirteen years of age, had been killed two years earlier.

Colleen said of the night of the bus accident, “Many of them just huddled up right here on the floor, staring off into an unknown future, while Frank and I simply listened. We listened to their passions, their dreams … and encouraged them to do what the guys would have wanted them to do: finish the season, be positive and reach for their goals.”

Colleen would later be honoured with the WHL’s Distinguished Service Award, in 2006. This award is presented annually to an individual associated with the league who has made an extraordinary contribution over an extended period of time. But on the night of December 30, 1986, it was Frank who said “Life must go on,” and how true that was.

One of the players huddled in the MacBeans’ basement on that blustery night was Peter Soberlak, who had been acquired from the Kamloops Blazers earlier in the season. Soberlak doesn’t remember a lot about what he refers to as “post-accident,” but he remembers being in the MacBeans’ home. And he remembers a New Year’s Eve party in someone else’s home the next night, only because Darren and Trevor Kruger, whose brother Scott had been killed, were there.

At the time, Soberlak wasn’t far removed from being considered the best player in his age group in the West, if not all of Canada. But, unknown to anyone but Soberlak, he was struggling with his own demons. Soberlak was only seventeen, but he was quickly losing his love for the game and he knew it. He just wasn’t sure how to deal with it.

And now, on top of that, he was in an unfamiliar home, trying to understand what had happened to him and his friends only a few hours before.

In the aftermath of the accident, grief counsellors were never provided for the players or anyone else in the organization. In Sheldon Kennedy’s book,
Why I Didn’t Say Anything,
which was published in 2006, Kennedy writes that he suspects general manager and head coach Graham James rejected counselling for the team members in an effort to prevent anyone from finding out about the abuse to which he was subjecting Kennedy.

Bob Wilkie and Colleen MacBean in July 2007.
Courtesy of Leesa Culp.

“You would have thought that someone in charge would have arranged for the survivors to receive therapy to help them deal with the shock and grief following the accident,” Kennedy writes, “but none of us received any kind of professional help. Nobody seemed to want to talk about what had happened.…

“So how did we deal with the tragedy? We got back to our lives and tried to move on. We played hockey. And, as men are prone to do, we drank. Only after a few beers, or more than a few, could we talk about how the crash made us feel. Some of us wondered why we had survived while others died. We were plagued by a lot of what ifs.”

Everyone — players and staff alike — was left to deal with their grief alone or with each other.

Soberlak, who was seated on the bus in close proximity to the four players who died, says, “We had nobody to deal with — nobody to talk to or turn to — other than my parents on the phone.” At the time, Soberlak says, the fact that counselling wasn’t made available wasn’t seen as a big deal, at least not to him.

“It didn’t seem strange to me because everything I’d gone through in Kamloops and Swift Current … really, I had to suck it up myself anyway,” Soberlak says. “I could tell my folks and they would always be supportive, but they didn’t know … they had no idea the stuff that went on.”

As a fifteen-year-old playing in Kamloops, Soberlak was seen by scouts as a wonderfully talented player. The following season, he joined his hometown Blazers. But what should have been the start of a promising career was actually the beginning of the end.

“My sixteen-year-old year shaped the way I felt about hockey,” he says. “In order to be a pro, you have to live it right through to your bones. After that season, there was a drastic change in my love for the game.”

There were many times when Soberlak found himself thinking,
This isn’t what I thought it was going to be
. Today, in his early forties, with a wife and child, Soberlak is the chairperson of physical education at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops. He has a bachelor of arts in psychology, with a minor in sociology, from the University of British Columbia, and a master’s degree in sport and exercise psychology from Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. And now, when he looks back, he is especially proud of one thing in his junior hockey career.

“I’m proud that I stuck it out — fought through it,” he says.

His stint with his hometown Blazers should have been a proud time for him. Having the opportunity to play in front of family and friends should have been a real thrill. It wasn’t.

“It was really horrible,” he says. “In a lot of cases, I feared going on the bus, feared going on road trips … just because of the humiliation and constant verbal abuse. And then the physical abuse in practice.… I remember trying to do a practice drill [with Kamloops] and [one veteran player] swinging his stick as hard as he could at me and slashing me. If I try to fight him, what am I going to do? I got eighteen guys wanting to kick the shit out of me because I’m a sixteen-year-old hotshot hometown boy.”

There was more, too. There was hazing and what Soberlak says was physical abuse.

“What I went through in Kamloops destroyed my confidence,” he says. “I can deal with that now, but it was just horrific for me. It sucked the life out of me … I was physically assaulted.” The anguish in his expression is painful to witness as he recalls what he went through as a sixteen-year-old.

“You think I have not suffered — have not had repercussions from what I went through there — serious, absolutely long-term, continuous major repercussions of what happened to me in that situation. I guarantee you I have.”

Those were the days when a lot of coaches felt they had to break down players completely and then build them up. That wasn’t going to work with Soberlak, who admits that the treatment he received in Kamloops broke his spirit and destroyed his love for the game.

“That’s the only thing I am bitter about in my hockey career,” Soberlak says. “My first year in Kamloops … it was the worst year of my life.”

Still, he stayed in the game until he was twenty-three years of age. As he says, “I slugged it out for three years in the minors.” Eventually, he ended up in camp with the Philadelphia Flyers. It was the autumn of 1992. Soberlak had broken an ankle while with the Broncos — it was during a game in Calgary — and was starting to realize that he would never be healthy.

“I’m coming back into my own zone,” he recalls of the game in which he was injured. “I curl through the middle of the ice. Wilkie or Darren Kruger fired a beautiful pass up on my stick. I one-touch it across the ice and Joe [Sakic] picks it up and goes down and scores. In the meantime, as I deflected that puck, who’s coming right at me to run me from the other side of the ice but the biggest guy I’ve ever seen on skates, Mark Tinordi. My leg gets caught between a checker from behind and him coming through.

“I’m sitting on the ice and they’re all saying, ‘Get up.’ I know my leg is busted. It was busted in my skate.”

Were that injury to occur today, there is no doubt but that Soberlak would undergo surgery and by the following season would be as good as new. But that’s not the way it was in the spring of 1987.

“There was talk of me having surgery,” Soberlak says, “but all I got out of Graham [James] with the doctors was, ‘We’ve got to get it in a cast because he has to be back for playoffs.’”

There wasn’t any cast and there weren’t any playoffs for Soberlak. He would never again be the superb skater he had been.

“There was an NHL scout, I think for Buffalo, who was there that night, and a few years later he said to my dad, ‘Peter was never the same after that injury,’” Soberlak says. “And he was right.”

Soberlak came out of it with one leg slightly longer than the other. “It just got worse and worse,” he says. He had taken power skating from the age of four, he had been a figure skater, and now he couldn’t edge properly, couldn’t take off properly.

“I was just never the same skater,” he says. “Even [Kamloops head coach Ken Hitchcock] and those guys said I was probably the best seventeen-year-old in the country. And I was. But I was never, ever the same skater.”

The injury occurred during his draft season. While it had been speculated that he might go early in the first round, he was taken twenty-first overall by the Edmonton Oilers.

“Right before the draft,” he says, “I was getting all kinds of phone calls. ‘How’s your leg? Is your leg okay?’ I was rated higher in the first round; I thought I was going to go higher.”

He ended up with the Oilers’ AHL affiliate, the Cape Breton Oilers, who played out of Sydney. He had twenty-three points in sixty games his first season and thirty-six in seventy games in 1990–91. The next season, he played in only twenty-two games.

“It was a tough one because a lot of people didn’t understand,” he says. “I would say to them, ‘Now my back is getting sore, my groins are sore.’” Trying to compensate for his leg meant he was beginning to struggle with hip and back problems.

During the summer of 1992, he had surgery on his foot in Vancouver and then walked on with Philadelphia.

“In my last stint in Philadelphia,” he remembers, “I almost made the Flyers … if my injury hadn’t been bad I would have had a good chance.”

Still, Soberlak says, his stint in Philly’s camp was the “most exciting part of what I thought was going to be my pro career.” The Flyers wanted to sign him to a two-way contract — meaning one salary in the NHL and a much lower stipend in the AHL. He says he told then–Flyers general manager Russ Farwell that “it was one-way or I don’t play.” Soberlak adds, “I wasn’t going to play in the American league anymore. I wasn’t going to play for thirty-five grand and fight.…”

There was one chapter left in Soberlak’s hockey career. He signed to play with Canada’s national team under head coach Tom Renney.

“I went there for about a month, but it just wasn’t getting any better physically,” Soberlak says. “I couldn’t edge or turn properly.”

And so one morning in the autumn of 1992, Soberlak woke up and admitted to himself that it was over. The guy who just eight years earlier was perhaps the best fifteen-year-old hockey player in Canada was finished, without having played even one NHL game.