B00ADOAFYO EBOK

I believe that somehow this tragedy has made us all stronger. Our lives will always be connected. I thank my friends whom I lost that day: Trent Kresse, Scotty Kruger, Chris Mantyka, and Brent Ruff. Without you guys in my life, I don’t know where I would have ended up. Thanks, guys … I love you very much. This book is dedicated to your memory.

Bob Wilkie

Calgary, Alberta

January 2012

I’d like to thank my daughter Maggie and my son Carter, who have had to deal with “not so good” cooking, “not so clean” clothes, and “Not now … I’m working on the book again,” way too much. You are the joy in my life and I thank you for hanging in there when I needed some extra time for me. And, of course, I want to thank my extraordinarily talented husband, Bill, who, with Maggie and Carter, completes me. You have been with me for over twenty-seven years and your encouragement and belief in my ability to reach my goals is infectious and contributes so much to my determination. I dedicate this book to you.

Leesa Culp

Beamsville, Ontario

January 2012

• Foreword: Brian Costello
  
• Chapter 1: The Road Back
  
• Chapter 2: The Crash
  
• Chapter 3: The Broncos Come Home
  
• Chapter 4: The RCMP Officer
  
• Chapter 5: The Hospital
  
• Chapter 6: Leesa’s Ride
  
• Chapter 7: The Invisible Goaltenders
  
• Chapter 8: Sober’s Story
  
• Chapter 9: Saying Goodbye
  
• Chapter 10: The Captain
  
• Chapter 11: The Trainer
  
• Chapter 12: The Uncle
  
• Chapter 13: Just an Ordinary Joe
  
• Chapter 14: The Coroner’s Report
  
• Chapter 15: Back on the Ice
  
• Chapter 16: The 1989 Memorial Cup
  
• Chapter 17: The Coach, Part 1
  
• Chapter 18: The Coach, Part 2
  
• Chapter 19: The Coach, Part 3
  
• Chapter 20: Leaving Swift Current
  
• Where Are They Now?
  
• Statistics
  
• Acknowledgements
  
• Resources
  

Foreword

E
ight
hours after the fact, in the wee hours of the morning, the accident site looked serene. Bathed in snowy darkness, only the bouncing lights from passing transport trucks showed the battle scars left from the previous afternoon.

Who would have believed that a routine Western Hockey League road trip to Regina on December 30, 1986, would turn into a nightmare for the Swift Current Broncos and the tightly knit rural Saskatchewan community of 16,000 citizens?

Four players died that afternoon when the team bus veered off the Trans-Canada Highway a few kilometres east of Swift Current, catapulted off an approach road, and landed on its side.

Why that time? Why that place?

Eight hours later, not much remained at the site. The wreckage of the bus had been hauled away. A couple of centimetres of new-fallen snow masked the tire tracks, the footprints, and the confusion.

As I walked through the wild oats in the ditch, I came across a hockey stick. It wasn’t far from where the bodies of Scotty Kruger and Trent Kresse had been found. Thirty metres ahead was the bruised stretch of ditch where the bus had come to rest. This was where the crushed bodies of Brent Ruff and Chris Mantyka had been discovered.

I didn’t need to see more. I picked up the hockey stick, put it in my car, drove home to my basement rental pad, and spent the night sitting alone in a chair in the dark.

What had happened?

The next day, we didn’t know why it happened. And now, more than twenty-five years later, we still don’t know why it happened to those people at that time in that place. This book isn’t about trying to find answers to those questions. That’s a fruitless exercise.

Weather reports told us there was freezing rain in that location that afternoon. Eyewitness accounts told us the Broncos’ bus had just gone over a railway overpass when it caught a patch of ice, which led to its deadly slide off the road. Police reports told us the impact of the bus with the approach road led to the vehicle becoming airborne and landing on its right side.

A coroner’s report told us the four victims died from spinal injuries when they were either thrown from the bus or crushed beneath it.

Those facts help us deal with the acceptance part of the equation, but do nothing for our quest to seek a greater understanding of why certain events unfold at certain times and in certain places.

Swift Current players Ryan McGill and Dan Lambert hadn’t missed a game all season. But on December 30, McGill was sick and Lambert was at an under-seventeen game in another city. Fate kept them off the bus that day.

Trainer Gordie Hahn wasn’t on the bus because he accompanied Lambert to his game. Hahn has since struggled with personal demons as he tries to understand why he was taken away from the group of players he was paid to take care of. Why that particular game?

In Hahn’s place, Doug Leavins was filling in as trainer for one game. On December 30, Leavins became a hero as he hobbled around with a broken pelvic bone and performed CPR in a vain attempt to revive Kruger and Kresse. Why was he called upon that day?

Free-agent goaltender Artie Feher had joined the Broncos the day before the accident. He survived the crash, removed himself from the team, and went home to Prince Albert. What forces conspired to land him with the Broncos for just those forty-eight hours?

Circumstance puts each of us in a certain time and place on a constant basis. And 99.9 percent of the time, we don’t ask why.

For Leesa Culp, then twenty-one years of age, that day put her in the exhaust fumes of the out-of-control Broncos bus. An uneasy passenger in an eastbound transport truck, Culp was at a crossroads in her life when she witnessed the accident.

Culp was the first person to arrive at the sides of Kresse and Kruger. Just seconds after the accident, she held Kresse’s hand and watched the life drain from his face. Before she even got a chance to digest what was happening, she was back in the truck and eastbound again.

Culp moved on literally and metaphorically. She put on blinders and refused to deal with the personal baggage of the accident. She got married, started a career, began raising a family. It took her twenty years to start asking questions, and when she did, she didn’t stop. Why had fate led her to that particular place at that particular time? She is the driving force behind this book.

Culp tracked me down in the autumn of 2007. The Internet had led her to old stories about the accident and prompted her to find the
Swift Current Sun
reporter who had been on that bus. She contacted me at my office at
The Hockey News
in Toronto and politely uncorked a barrage of questions. The most pressing question was, “Tell me about the dying boy whose hand I held. I don’t even know his name.”

The flood of emotions that came from Culp during that conversation got me thinking about people and time and place again.

Graham James, the Broncos’ general manager and head coach, had intended to return sixteen-year-old Brent Ruff to the midget ranks that season. But it was Ruff’s insistent and passionate plea to remain with the Broncos during their one-on-one meeting that changed James’s mind.

James was a strong advocate of a skill-and-finesse game above all else. But it was Chris Mantyka’s heart, character, and inner will that earned the enforcer a job on a team full of speed and dazzle.

Inseparable off the ice, Scott Kruger and Trent Kresse died side by side when thrown from the bus. In a scene full of horror and grief, one supposes that was only fitting.

Other circumstances led the other players and passengers to be part of that bus journey on that day. And you’ll get a glimpse of them in the pages to come.

For me, Swift Current was a two-year stop on my career in hockey journalism. As much as I would like to trade that one tragic day for a dozen of my second-worst days, I look back fondly on my experiences in Speedy Creek.

My biggest post-accident struggle was dealing with not having done my part to alter the time-place thread.

As Kresse boarded the bus that afternoon, he smiled and sat next to me. I sat in my regular spot behind Dave Archibald, the driver. As we pulled out of town, we talked about Christmas holidays, family, and feasting. Just as I asked about his ice-fishing exploits in Kindersley, he excused himself. A card game with Kruger, Ruff, and Mantyka awaited in the back seat. There would be time to talk later.

There’s no sense in trying to understand the time-place continuum.

In the years since the accident, my career has taken me to hundreds of hockey games in various outposts. The cars I have driven have come and gone, but with me at all times, pressed tightly between the front seats, is that hockey stick, the one I found at the accident site. It may have belonged to Kresse, it may not have. All that matters is that it is my safety net and my link to time, place, and circumstance.

Brian Costello

Senior Special Editions Editor

The Hockey News

January 2012

The Road Back

T
wenty
years.

That’s how long it had been since Sheldon Kennedy, Peter Soberlak, and Bob Wilkie had been together like this. Twenty years.

Oh, two of them may have bumped into each other on occasion, perhaps while chasing a loose puck into a corner of a rink in Adirondack, New York, or the arena in Sydney on Cape Breton Island. Perhaps they had even gone out for a beer or two after one of those games.

But it had been twenty years since the three of them had been together like this. Just the three of them. Nobody else. Riding down the highway of life.

The last time they were together in a situation where they could “shoot the poop,” as one of them would put it, the Tiananmen Square protests were in the headlines and Mikhail Gorbachev was visiting China, the first time a Soviet leader had done that in a long, long time.

But now it was August 2009 and things were different. Each had recently turned forty years of age. They all were married or had been married or were in a relationship. All were proud fathers. To say a lot of water had gone under the bridge would be to understate things in a big, big way.

They had agreed to meet in a Calgary subdivision, at the home of Wilkie’s parents. Wilkie had arrived early, from the Hershey, Pennsylvania, area, in order to spend a day or two with his family. Soberlak flew in from Kamloops, British Columbia, and was met by Wilkie at the Calgary airport.

“As I found myself driving to the airport to pick up Sober, I was nervous,” Wilkie admits. “What was it going to be like? How would it be with the three of us together? What would we talk about?

“But I saw Sober sitting on the curb waiting for me and all of the questions were gone immediately. None of it mattered; it was just us guys, soul brothers together again. After a big hug and some laughs, we were on our way.”

Wilkie and Soberlak visited around the Wilkie home and enjoyed a barbecue as they waited for Kennedy to pick them up.

“While we were having lunch we talked about all of the things we had done over the last twenty years,” Wilkie remembers. “It was like we hadn’t seen each other in a week rather than twenty years. When you connect like we did and went through what we did, what we accomplished together, there is a soul connection, and Peter is one of those guys I am blessed to have that connection with.”

When Kennedy arrived, they clambered into his truck and headed east. Their destination was Swift Current, Saskatchewan, the scene of the triumphs and tragedies that had done so much to shape the men they had become.

Kennedy, Soberlak, and Wilkie had been born within four months of each other in 1969. They were teammates on the Western Hockey League’s Swift Current Broncos in the late 1980s. Calling them teammates really doesn’t do justice to their relationship, though, because not many teammates experience what they did.

They had been on their team bus when it crashed, killing four teammates, just east of Swift Current on December 30, 1986.

They had been teammates on May 13, 1989, when the Broncos, in just the second season after the bus accident, took ownership of the entire hockey world by winning the Memorial Cup.

And those Broncos teams had been under the thumb of Graham James, the franchise’s general manager and head coach, who, as we would come to learn in time, was sexually assaulting Kennedy and at least one other player during the team’s run.

Now Kennedy, Soberlak, and Wilkie were in the cab of a truck headed for Swift Current, where a weekend reunion would celebrate the winning of the Memorial Cup title in Saskatoon more than twenty years earlier.

Wilkie had arrived in Calgary with his wife, Mikey, and children, Sadie and Cy, to visit his parents. Mikey and the kids had then returned home, and Wilkie, at the invitation of Hockey Alberta, had driven to Camrose to speak at a symposium.

It was on the drive to Camrose when the scope of the reunion — and exactly what it would mean for these three men to return to Swift Current — began to sink in.

“The reunion was only a couple of days away and I found myself a little scared and nervous,” Wilkie admits. “I was going to see people I hadn’t seen in twenty years. So much happened when we were together and few of us had talked about any of it … unfinished business, I guess you could call it.”

Once the three were together again, though, it was like they had never been apart.

“Sheldon picked us up in his truck,” a grinning Soberlak says, “and we hit the long, flat road and never shut up for five hours.”

“We just started shooting the poop right off the hop,” Kennedy recalls. “Wilks is Mr. Happy-Go-Lucky … a jolly, laid-back kind of dude. Peter and I … our aspirations were things other than hockey.

“There was some of the hockey talk, but there was a lot of talk about Swift and some of the stuff that went on. There were some pretty deep conversations and we needed conversation.

“And we had a lot of laughs.”

Still, the chatter and the laughs were overshadowed by the dark side of what they had experienced.

“As we headed out of town,” Wilkie says, “the three of us were like we were eighteen again. Only now we were talking about kids, marriage, and careers. That in itself made us all laugh.”

As Swift Current drew closer, the tone of the conversation changed.

“We talked of all the good times,” Wilkie explains, “and then it made a shift over to the dark side as we got closer and started talking about Graham, the owners … Sheldon started shedding some light on things we had no idea about.

“In his journey of pressing charges, Sheldon had hired a private investigator and learned things that made our skin crawl. Peter and I didn’t know what to say, and for me personally it shed light on something that I had wondered about for the last twenty years.”

Kennedy easily was the best known of the trio. An inordinately gifted hockey player, he had been born in Brandon, Manitoba, on June 15, 1969, and had grown up in places like Thompson and Elkhorn, two other Manitoba communities.

Kennedy was selected by the Detroit Red Wings in the fourth round, eightieth overall, of the 1988 National Hockey League draft. Always seen as something of a free spirit, a mustang, if you will, Kennedy never was able to find a professional home, and spent much of his time shuttling between the NHL and the American Hockey League.

For much of the early days of his professional career, he was seen as an enigma, a problem child who could be a solid player if only someone could figure him out and get through to him. As his career wore on, it became more and more obvious that he was a troubled young man. But it wasn’t until the 1996–97 season that the pieces began to come together.

It was then, while he was nearing the end of his professional career, that Kennedy rocked the hockey world by claiming that he had been sexually abused by Graham James for a number of years.

Kennedy, who would tell his story in the book
Why I Didn’t Say Anything: The Sheldon Kennedy Story
, now lives near Calgary and spends his life working toward eradicating abuse and bullying of any kind. Late in 2011, he appeared before a House of Commons justice and human rights committee to speak in support of a government crime bill.

“I believe that we need to toughen sentencing for child sex offences,” he told the committee. “They just don’t seem in line with the damage they leave in their wake. Not even close.”

If children are being abused, Kennedy said, they need to know that if they come forward, justice will be served.

“To me the fundamental reason for change to these laws is simple,” he continued. “We can’t let these perpetrators walk freely among our youth organizations, our schools, our neighbourhoods, and our work places. Children need to feel safe and parents have to trust that the government is playing a role in protecting them.

“Criminals need to be held accountable and be dealt with consistently with clearly defined consequences. In my mind, child protection is paramount.”

All this came from a guy who at one time would offer up more giggles than words when he was in an interview situation. At the time, of course, no one understood the pressures under which Kennedy simply was trying to survive.

Sheldon Kennedy had come a long way, and he was quickly becoming someone who was bound and determined to make a difference in his world.

Later, as October 2011 turned into November, the community of Neepawa, Manitoba, became embroiled in an ugly hazing scandal that involved its Manitoba Junior Hockey League franchise, the Natives. One player, a fifteen-year-old, had blown the whistle and was now being ostracized. Kennedy took it upon himself to contact the young player.

“Sheldon Kennedy gave him his personal cell phone [number] and said, ‘Any time you want to talk to me about this just phone me, doesn’t matter what time of day it is,’” the player’s father said. “My son was going, ‘Wow.’”

Kennedy said he had “just wanted to reach out to him and tell him I think he’s doing the right thing. If I can be there to support and help in any way, I will be.”

Soberlak flew into Calgary from Kamloops, where he is the chairman of Thompson Rivers University’s department of athletics. He also was president of the Kamloops Sports Council, an organization that oversees a lot of amateur sports in the city.

Soberlak was born on May 12, 1969, in Trail, British Columbia, the home of the legendary Smoke Eaters. He played his minor hockey in Kamloops, where he began the serious part of his hockey career with the WHL’s Blazers under head coach Ken Hitchcock.

Early hockey memories are anything but happy ones for Soberlak, who says his first season — he was sixteen years of age — in Kamloops “was hell.”

“It was horrible,” he says. “The way I was treated by the coaching staff and the players.…”

A highly skilled player with a sensitive side that ran contrary to what most, if not all, major junior hockey coaches demand from their players, Soberlak played in an era that was a whole lot different from the one that exists today. In fact, Soberlak admits he lived in fear of being hazed, something that happened to rookies with frightening regularity in the days when the law of the jungle governed the junior game.

Early in his seventeen-year-old season, Soberlak was traded to Swift Current and found himself on a line with Kennedy and future NHL superstar Joe Sakic.

Swift Current Broncos players Sheldon Kennedy (left), Joe Sakic, and Peter Soberlak.
Rod Steensland.

“When I got traded, I got rejuvenated,” Soberlak says. “I was playing on a line with Sheldon and Joe. But you know what? That was temporary; the damage was done. At seventeen, I was still in it, but after that I started to disconnect and distance myself from the love of the game.

Bob Wilkie
Rod Steensland.

“I had lost the love of the game during my sixteen-year-old year in Kamloops.”

Soberlak was a superb physical specimen, at six foot three and two hundred pounds, and with a hockey stick in his hands he was a magician. Because of his size, hockey people assumed he would be a physical force on the ice. But that wasn’t his game, and early in his third professional season, Soberlak shrugged his shoulders and walked away from hockey.

He had been a first-round selection in the 1987 NHL draft, taken twenty-first overall by the Edmonton Oilers. He never played a game in the NHL.

When Soberlak arrived at the airport in Calgary, he was met by Wilkie, who had grown up in Calgary. In fact, Wilkie began his major junior career with the WHL’s Calgary Wranglers. A strong-skating offensive-type defenceman with good size — he would play professionally at six foot two and 215 pounds — Wilkie was always seen as something of a nonconformist. That, in fact, may have led to his being traded by Calgary general manager John Chapman to the Broncos just one game into the 1986–87 season.

Wilkie was a gifted puck-handler, something that Graham James treasured in a player. James would get more than a point per game out of Wilkie over two-plus seasons.

Wilkie, however, is one of those personalities who always seem to be searching for something — the meaning of life, perhaps — and, like Kennedy, he would spend most of his pro career wandering in hockey’s hinterlands.