B00ADOAFYO EBOK (9 page)

Len Stein, then the mayor of Swift Current, also spoke. “This tragic loss has brought to our community solidarity and sorrow,” he said. “A sorrow unbeknownst to us in the past, December 30, 1986, has taken from family, from friends, and from this community four young men just at the prime of their lives. This tragedy and the loss of life shall never be explainable. We shall mourn, but with the passing of time we shall go forward in dedication ever remembering Scott, Trent, Chris, and Brent.”

Mayor Stein also said, “Just as the echo of their voices [is] hardly silent, we will remember [how] they gave of themselves in this very arena playing the sport they so well loved. Now, my friends, we have only our memory to hold onto. Through the founding of their memorial, Kresse, Kruger, Mantyka, and Ruff — these names and their memories shall live on. The players of today and those of tomorrow shall ever be reminded that in this great loss a provision was made. In their memory, there will be rewards. To the players of the Western Hockey League and especially to the Bronco teammates, I can only say for those who are gone, you must play on.”

When WHL president Ed Chynoweth addressed the crowd, he offered the following: “For twenty years, teams in the WHL have travelled across Western Canada and the United States. Millions of miles have been logged by players and management during this time, and the majority of those miles have been by bus. Why this tragic accident occurred at this particular time we cannot answer. Why, with twenty-seven people on the bus, these particular four individuals are no longer with us, again we cannot answer. These young men were doing something they loved and dreamed of, in their apprenticeship of climbing the hockey ladder to what they hoped would be their future. Their strength of performance must now become our strength in preserving their memory and comforting their loved ones during these difficult times. Let us mark them as triumphant in their brief stay with us so their place will be on the top shelf and their minds will rest in peace.”

Graham James took the podium next. He reflected on all four players, and ended his address by saying, “We’ve been known as a comeback team this year, and we’ll come back. This is our toughest challenge.”

Kurt Lackten, the team’s nineteen-year-old captain, stood at the podium and, with courage belying his age, told the crowd that “the team has decided to continue the season, as I’m sure the boys would have liked.”

Lackten certainly hadn’t signed on for this when he stepped in as captain. His voice cracked and there were tears when he said, “We are going to miss them very much.”

A story in the
Swift Current Sun
of Monday, January 5, 1987, made reference to a Canadian Press article that summarized world leaders and other prominent people who had died during 1986. “The world won’t hear about Trent Kresse, Scott Kruger, Brent Ruff, and Chris Mantyka,” the
Sun
’s story read, “but our community will always list them along with the famous who will be remembered in the years ahead.”

The Broncos’ coaching staff ended the memorial service with a message aimed at the other WHL teams in the crowd. “The message,” Wilkie remembers, “was that once we were back on the ice, once we were back competing, we didn’t want to be treated any differently.”

The other teams were urged to “play hard, compete hard, don’t back off.”

James further expanded on the team’s future, stating, “The toughest times may be the weeks ahead. When the schedule begins again and the publicity goes away, depression may start to appear. Alone at home at night, without family and friends, it may be hard for some of us. I don’t know if something like this builds character, but it certainly reveals it. You can’t say to the players, ‘Go out and win it for the Gipper,’ because if they lose, they may feel as though they didn’t try hard enough. Everybody has aged a few years in the past few days. I think we’ve all got a different perspective on life now.”

Rittinger echoed James’s comments about the future, eloquently stating, “Anybody knows that the game of hockey is fifty percent skill, and the rest is determination and intensity. That’s what we need if we’re going to win. A key to our success also comes from the fan support at a time like this. Whether we win or lose should have no effect on the support. We are going to survive. We’re all still stunned, but I’ve been here fifty years and I know this community is probably the closest-knit in the country. We’ll pull through.”

The day before the memorial service, the Broncos had gathered in their dressing room. James addressed the players, telling them that, considering what they had been through, any of them were free to leave the team, no questions asked.

“At that point,” Wilkie says, “I don’t think any of us had even thought about not playing.”

Still, the players were well aware that everything was happening so fast. They also knew that decisions like these had never had to be made before, at least not on any teams on which they had played.

In the end, the players decided that, as Wilkie puts it, “every one of our dead teammates would have played on; they would have had the strength to continue.”

The Broncos, then, would play again.

“But,” Wilkie admits, “we knew it wasn’t going to be easy.”

The Captain

O
n
this particular Saturday, Kurt Lackten is awakened by an incoming call on his cellphone.

He is in a hotel room in Seattle. It’s early afternoon. He arrived from Honolulu about 7:30 a.m. in a Boeing 767. No he wasn’t a tourist; he was flying it. Lackten, the captain of the 1986–87 Swift Current Broncos, is employed by Hawaiian Airlines as a pilot.

Lackten and his wife, Julie, live in the Phoenix area, although Kurt is based in Honolulu. “I do a little bit of commuting,” he says. He flies a number of routes for Hawaiian Airlines; Honolulu to Seattle is just one of them.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Lackten was going to pilot hockey teams from behind the bench. But, as sometimes happens, fate threw him a curve.

As a hockey player, the native of Kamsack, Saskatchewan, was a heart-and-soul guy; a banger who wasn’t a fighter, but would drop the gloves when he felt it was necessary. He prided himself on his conditioning; he was, in the vernacular, “ripped.” He was selected by the New York Islanders in the seventh round, 139th overall, of the 1985 NHL draft. That came after a season in which he put up thirty-one points and 141 penalty minutes with the Moose Jaw Warriors.

During the 1985–86 season, the Warriors traded him to Medicine Hat, and twenty-seven games later, the Tigers moved him along to the Calgary Wranglers. Following the season, the Wranglers dealt him to Swift Current.

“He was a great captain, a great leader,” former Broncos teammate Peter Soberlak says. “He was mature. He was composed. He had a good presence as a leader. He had a good personality … a presence.”

Lackten never did get to the NHL, playing in the American and International leagues, as well as with the East Coast leagues, before ending up in the Netherlands. It was there, with the Den Haag Wolves, that he got his first taste of coaching as a player-coach.

In the early 1990s he returned to Saskatchewan, where he spent a year attending the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon and playing senior hockey in the Wild Goose league. But in early 1993 he got a phone call that took him back to the Wolves.

“I went as player-coach,” Lackten recalls. “I was playing, then would get back on the bench and bark out orders, and everyone would look at me like,
What the hell is he talking about?

“So then we got a translator,” he continues, and now he’s chuckling. “This was the Netherlands: they speak good English, except, for some weird reason, during games they didn’t want to.”

Lackten, who wasn’t married at the time, laughs as he remembers his European adventure. “It was a paid vacation, that’s what it was,” he adds. “It was fun. I met a lot of good people there, made some good friends. The schedule was super easy. Three practices a week; play on weekends. I would jump on a train on a day off, be in another country in a couple of hours. I toured around and I enjoyed that.”

He also caught the coaching bug and decided that would be his life’s work. So he came back to North America and caught on with the Broncos as an assistant coach. Two seasons later, he was an assistant coach in Medicine Hat.

When the Tigers made a midseason coaching change in 1997–98, Lackten found himself as the head coach. By the next season, however, he was an assistant coach with the Red Deer Rebels. He didn’t know it at the time, but that was to be the last chapter in his coaching career, a move that was dictated by happenings in Toronto.

Terry Simpson, a legend in Western Canada coaching circles, had made the Prince Albert Raiders into a junior A powerhouse and was instrumental in bringing the franchise into the WHL in 1982. He was the general manager and head coach when the Raiders won the 1985 Memorial Cup. All told, he spent fifteen years coaching the Raiders.

Simpson went on to coach professionally and, by 1997–98, was an assistant coach with the Toronto Maple Leafs. Earlier, in 1992, Simpson and his brother, Wayne, had purchased a WHL expansion franchise for Red Deer. And so it was that when the Maple Leafs made some changes, Simpson chose to return to Red Deer and coach the Rebels. Which meant that head coach Doug Hobson and Lackten, his assistant coach, didn’t get their contracts renewed.

“So,” Lackten says, “I didn’t have anything to do.”

His unemployment also came at a time when there was little movement among the WHL coaching ranks. That meant that Lackten had to look at other options.

“I thought I would stay in coaching for a while,” he says, “but that one year off in Red Deer when no one was hiring … it was kind of a strange year. It gave me some time to look at things and pursue other things.

“I decided there had to be something else to do … I looked at a whole bunch of different things and thought flying would be pretty cool, so I pursued that.”

Kurt Lackten had arrived back in Swift Current on December 30, 1986, in time to get on the team bus and head to Regina for that night’s game with the Pats.

“It was right after Christmas. I had just got back from driving,” says Lackten, who had spent Christmas in Kamsack, a community of seventeen hundred people located about five hundred kilometres northeast of Swift Current. Darcy Hordichuk, an NHL enforcer, is from Kamsack. So is Tyler Wright, who played for the Broncos before being selected twelfth overall by the Edmonton Oilers in the NHL’s 1991 draft. And so is Harold Phillipoff, who played in the WHL for Ernie McLean’s big, bad New Westminster Bruins.

“I was thinking,
Great. I can go on the bus and have a little snooze and then go play,
” Lackten recalls. “And then everything happened.…”

Lackten was seated by himself — he was the team captain, after all — about halfway down the left side of the bus.

“I was just dozing off and the next thing I remember … I remember kind of waking up and there were seats everywhere. I know I was bleeding and my side hurt a lot.” He was bleeding profusely from a four-inch gash on the top of his head, and found out that he had a couple of broken ribs.

Others who were on the bus tell of Lackten ignoring his injuries in order to help others.

“He was very mature.… Most of the guys were stupid kids getting in trouble,” Peter Soberlak says. “Kurt was more mature. He was a leader and a captain and he acted like that, right through the bus accident. He was out there running around, taking a leadership role and helping out.”

Lackten, however, says he has no memory of that. It isn’t that he hasn’t tried to remember, it’s just that that part of his memory bank is mostly empty.

“There have been lots of times,” he explains, “when I’ve tried to think about things and it’s almost like … I don’t know how to describe it … almost like a dream you’re trying to recall but you can’t. I guess that’s what shock is, I don’t know. Plus, I had a pretty good bonk on the head.

“I remember … getting up and there was a seat and someone was throwing or moving a seat around. I just started walking toward the front.” When asked if he helped people get off the bus or provided aid outside, Lackten responds, “I really can’t say. I really don’t remember helping people out. I know I went through the front, as well. Shock … I don’t really remember a whole bunch.

“I do remember walking on the highway side … around the bus and around … I remember doing that. And then I remember being in a van.” The van took him to Swift Current Union Hospital.

What Lackten remembers more than anything else is the memorial service that was held in what was then known as the Swift Current Centennial Civic Centre. It was January 4, 1987, and Lackten knew that, as team captain, he would have to stand up in front of the crowd — it later was estimated to be larger than 3,500 — and say … something.

He was nineteen years of age. He had survived a horrible accident in which four of his buddies had been killed. And now this kid from Kamsack was going to have to grow beyond his years, get up in front of hundreds of people, and say something.

So much had happened in such a short period of time that Lackten admits his head was spinning.

“That’s maybe part of why you don’t remember a whole bunch of stuff,” he says now. “There was a whole bunch going on, a whole bunch to deal with.”

No one on that team had been through anything like this. And, as Lackten puts it, “It wasn’t like you were breaking up with your girlfriend; it wasn’t that kind of emotion. This was pretty serious stuff.”

So … what to say?

“I don’t think there was any preparation, really,” Lackten says. “I was the captain of the team; I was speaking on behalf of the team. It wasn’t Kurt Lackten up there. I was just a representative … you know what I mean. There was really no preparation.”

When Lackten got up in front of the crowd, he looked down and saw all of the other hockey players out there. All eight of the WHL’s East Division teams were there, and teams from Swift Current minor hockey ranks were there.

Lackten spoke from his heart. Tears rolled down his cheeks as he told the crowd that the Broncos would continue their season.

He does remember the team meeting at which Graham James asked each player if he wanted to continue playing. James told the players that if any of them wanted to leave the team, there would be no repercussions; that everyone would understand.

“Looking back at that,” Lackten says, “that was some pretty heavy stuff. Young players, young guys … I think everybody wanted to play. That was our goal, to be hockey players. In that situation, I think ninety-nine percent of the guys would say they wanted to continue to play. Not only the guys who were there, but if other guys were in the same situation they’d want to play.”

Today, when Lackten looks back at January 4, 1987, he says, without hesitation, “That’s the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life. Bar none.” That day, and his role in the memorial service, set the bar for the rest of his life. “I use that, and I’ve used that, throughout my life as kind of a bar. Nothing I’ve ever had to do has been as hard as that,” he says. “I use that when I come across something that is difficult. I tell myself this isn’t that bad. You know what I mean? I learned a lot of life lessons from that. I appreciate things.

“You know, when you’re young you don’t really … you think you’ve got the world by the tail and everything like that. As you get older, you come to appreciate things more and more. At that moment, there was a bitter lesson of how quickly things can get taken away from you. For me, I really appreciate things that come my way and that I have been able to accomplish … and the chances I get. Without sounding soft or mushy, it really hits home. It has had a big effect on my life and how I make decisions.”

When the Broncos did get back to playing, it was in Moose Jaw against the Warriors. It was ten days after the crash. This was Swift Current’s first game since before Christmas, and a lot had transpired since then. The players, Lackten included, didn’t know how they would respond.

“That was pretty emotional for us,” Lackten recalls. “I think the guys helped each other out a lot and obviously got a lot closer, too.”

In the end, it was that closeness that got Lackten and his teammates through the most difficult season of their young lives. That first game back was even more emotional for Lackten because his WHL career had begun with the Warriors in the autumn of 1984. He still had friends, like future NHLers Theoren Fleury and Mike Keane, on the Moose Jaw roster. It meant something to have friendly faces on the ice with him in that first game, even if they now were on the opposing team.

“I had a lot of friends on the team,” Lackten says. “I had a nice feeling of support there as well. Guys like Keaner coming up — and Theoren and Kevin Herom and Troy Edwards and guys like that — that was pretty important to me and a really nice thing, too.”

Lackten didn’t want any sympathy from those guys once the game started, nor did any of the other Broncos. But with what Lackten had been through, it was reassuring just to see some familiar faces.

Lackten has had a lot of time to think about what happened that blustery afternoon on a highway east of Swift Current. A lot of the memories just won’t return.

“It was a long time ago,” he says. “I try to remember stuff and I just can’t do it.”

Perhaps Lackten is a prime example of someone who has repressed memories, which, according to theory, is how some people deal with memories that are just too painful. He doesn’t know if that’s the case, but is of the opinion that the shock of what he went through during the first few weeks of 1987 had something to do with it. No matter; he no longer tries to figure it out. He does know that he learned quite a life lesson the day the bus crashed and in the days and nights that followed.

“A hockey game is sixty minutes,” he says. “It’s like a life. It’s got its peaks, its valleys … its highs, its lows. It’s life. It’s all right there. Sixty minutes: there’s a whole life, you know what I mean?

“I think being in sports, you learn that you can’t really dwell on things because it’s going to affect the next thing that you have to deal with. So you do move on, especially if there’s nothing that you can affect or change.

“But I’m not a psychologist … I’m just a pilot.”