B00ADOAFYO EBOK (2 page)

Like Kennedy, Wilkie was a draft pick of the Red Wings, taken in the second round, forty-first overall, in 1987, the same draft in which Soberlak was selected. (In fact, five Broncos were taken in that draft. Sakic was selected by the Quebec Nordiques with the fifteenth overall pick; defenceman Ryan McGill went twenty-ninth overall to the Chicago Blackhawks; and, defenceman Ian Herbers was selected by the Buffalo Sabres with the 180th pick.)

Wilkie’s career would end up reading like a Hank Snow country tune — Adirondack, Detroit, Adirondack, Fort Wayne, Adirondack, Hershey, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Hershey, Augsburg, Cincinnati, Fresno, Las Vegas, Fresno, Pensacola, and Anchorage — before he called it quits. For a few years after, he lived near Hershey working as an “attitude coach,” consultant, and speaker.

Kennedy, Soberlak, and Wilkie hadn’t been together like this, they agreed, since the late spring — actually, hockey playoffs going on forever the way they do, it was early summer — of 1989, when they were celebrating that improbable Memorial Cup championship.

“It was probably at the parade … after the parade,” a laughing Kennedy would say twenty years later. “What was it, Peter? A three-week party.”

To which Soberlak replied, “I remember playing golf in my bare feet about the third day. I was real sick and missed the banquet.”

Yes, those Broncos knew how to throw a party — they played hard and lived harder — and that was a legacy that would live on in Swift Current for a long time. But now they were, in the words of Buck Owens, “together again.”

If only getting together had been that easy.…

Kennedy hadn’t been the least bit reluctant to join up with his old buddies again. In fact, he was looking forward to the drive and the chatter that would be involved. He just didn’t know whether he wanted to go back to Swift Current, and he had spent a lot of quiet time arguing with himself: “Should I go or should I stay? Should I stay or should I go?”

“I was very hesitant about going,” Kennedy admits. “But I needed to face it. Christ, I’ve been running away from everything my whole life. The difference is that I’ve dealt with that stuff.… I’m not — and I hate the word
victim
— I’m not held hostage by Graham or what happened. I feel it’s part of my life. It did happen. It’s not that it didn’t change certain things of the way I live my life.”

In time, Kennedy chose to make the trip. And, in the end, he was glad that he did.

“It was just a real good closure piece for me,” he admits. “I had always had this inner fear of going back there. I don’t have that anymore.”

When pressed, Kennedy admits that he really didn’t know whether he would find closure. After all, what he had undergone during his time in Swift Current was unspeakably horrific. Who knew what might happen upon his return for the first time in twenty years?

“The reality of what came out of there was just real good closure for everybody,” Kennedy says. “It was about just being able to shoot the poop and express views that … I think people had wanted to express for a long time.”

Kennedy, who is prone to speaking in the majestic “we,” also admits to having felt huge relief at “actually being able to leave there and close the door and know that we never had to go back there.”

Sheldon Kennedy (left) and Bob Wilkie at a Broncos’ Booster Club skate.
Courtesy of Bob Wilkie.

Wilkie felt pretty much the same way. He was excited about spending some time with Kennedy and Soberlak on the drive to Swift Current, but he had his doubts about what awaited them.

“I was going to be with my buddies again,” Wilkie says, “but I did not know what was going to happen. We had been through so much together but never talked about so much of it.”

Earlier in 2009, Wilkie had made a business trip to Calgary and had been able to hook up with Kennedy.

“It was such a powerful meeting,” Wilkie recalls. “We shared insights we had not ever talked about.”

They talked about the Broncos and their pro careers and what had followed.

“Shelly and I had been together for a couple of years in Detroit’s organization after we left Swift,” Wilkie says. “Things had gone downhill for both of us after we left. Sheldon had gotten in trouble for drinking … as had I.”

They both were known, as Wilkie puts it, “as troubled players [who] liked to party … that type of thing.”

The truth, however, was something else. It wasn’t that the two of them liked to party. It wasn’t that they liked the taste of the copious amounts of booze they ingested.

“The truth was,” Wilkie now admits, “we were numbing ourselves. We had been through things no one could comprehend, and because we were not allowed to talk about it, we dealt with it the only way we knew how: by drinking.”

The Crash

D
ecember
30, 1986.

When the day dawned in the southwestern Saskatchewan city of Swift Current, it brought with it a taste of January. It would turn into one of those wet winter storms that you have to live through to understand. Biting winds. Wet snow — or is it rain, or sleet? — blowing at you in a horizontal fashion, stinging your face like so many wasps.

But no matter how hard it tried, the storm that day couldn’t do anything to dash the optimism that surrounded the Swift Current Broncos, the city’s brand new and oh-so-popular Western Hockey League team. The players had just reconvened after going home for Christmas. They had returned full of hope and exuberance; they were bound and determined that the second half of this season was going to carry them into the playoffs.

While the weather, which had been so good the day before, had turned nasty, the Broncos skated that morning and the vibe was good. They were flying around the ice surface, eager for that evening’s game against the host Regina Pats. The team bus was scheduled to leave at 2:30 p.m., but with a two-hour drive ahead of them and because the roads were bad, it was decided they would leave a little earlier.

But one thing led to another, and the bus didn’t roll out of the Civic Centre parking lot until 3:35 p.m. A couple of minutes later, the bus, with veteran driver Dave Archibald behind the wheel, turned onto the Trans-Canada Highway and headed east.

The bus would never reach its destination. In fact, it wouldn’t get too far from its home base.

As often happens in these situations, one can look back and see fate’s finger. Was that an omen? And what about this other incident?

The night before the accident, a few of the Broncos — including defenceman Ed Brost, a nineteen-year-old Calgarian, and forward Tracy Egeland, a sixteen-year-old from Lethbridge — had gone to a movie. In order to make curfew, they got Egeland home first, and Brost then borrowed Egeland’s car and drove himself home.

Egeland, one of the team’s youngest players, looked up to Brost and trusted him enough to let him take his first sports car, a red Pontiac Fiero that his parents had bought him.

Unfortunately, the weather turned during the night. As Brost was returning the car that morning, he was broadsided by another vehicle while attempting a left turn. Brost remembers having two thoughts: “The first thing … was how bad I felt for this old guy who just hit me, because I could see how shaken up he was. Second, I kept thinking, ‘What am I gonna tell Tracy?’”

Although the Fiero was badly damaged and would require extensive repairs, Brost managed to drive it to Egeland’s place.

“I felt like such a schmuck,” Brost recalls, “and I remember the walkway to the front door seemed like it was two miles long.”

When Egeland answered Brost’s knock, the words spilled off Brost’s tongue: “We gotta go, but I gotta tell you something.”

Egeland recalls, “He felt real bad about wrecking my car, but I wasn’t mad at him. I could never be mad at Ed. He was too nice a guy.”

Brost and Egeland were still able to make it to the arena in time for the morning skate, after which the players ran the arena stairs for a workout. There was a lot of chatter about how important it was to start the second half of the WHL season with a bang.

The team gathered at Thumpers, a local restaurant, for lunch, then it was back to their homes for a pre-trip rest.

As the players napped, the weather got progressively worse. Bob Wilkie, who was a defenceman on the team, recalls that “many of the players felt that maybe we should stay home.”

“By then,” Wilkie remembers, “there was a travel advisory in effect. But, regardless of the warning, the coaches told us we were going. So we started to load the bus and prepared to depart.”

However, there was a delay.

Scott Kruger, a nineteen-year-old centre who was from Swift Current, had forgotten his dress clothes, so the entire team had to wait while he hurried home to save himself a fine. Like most teams, the Broncos had a rule that required players to wear dress clothes on road trips. Players would change into track suits on the bus and then change back into their dress clothes as the bus neared its destination.

By the time Kruger returned, it was 3:30 p.m., meaning things were behind schedule. And the weather wasn’t getting any better. When the bus rolled out of the arena parking lot, it was 3:35 p.m. Despite the weather, the players were excited. This would be their first post-Christmas game and they really wanted to play well.

As the bus hit the road, the talk was about that night’s game and recently received Christmas gifts. The Sony Walkman was a popular item that Christmas; many of the players had received one and were preparing to listen to their favourite music.

As winger Trent Kresse, one of the team’s twenty-year-olds, boarded the bus, he stopped briefly at the front to talk with
Swift Current Sun
sports writer Brian Costello about the Christmas holiday. Once the bus left the parking lot, Kresse, who was from Kindersley, Saskatchewan, excused himself, explaining that he heard a card game calling from the back.

Five minutes later, the bus turned onto the Trans-Canada Highway and began the short — well, short for the WHL — drive to Regina.

Egeland tried to sit in the back with the veterans, but a pre-Christmas episode involving vomiting and a jacket meant the veterans, led by Wilkie, put the run on the fresh-faced rookie. Egeland ended up closer to the front of the bus, seated with Brost, who was being razzed about his misfortune with Egeland’s car.

Wilkie was seated in the last row of the bus, taking up the four seats on the driver’s side. On the other side, directly across the aisle from him, were Kresse, Kruger, and two others. One was Chris Mantyka, a hard-nosed nineteen-year-old from Saskatoon who was known affectionately by his teammates as “Chief,” and the other was Brent Ruff, a sixteen-year-old from Warburg, Alberta, who was a member of hockey’s Ruff family.

As they did on virtually all trips, the four got out a deck of cards and started a game of Kaiser, a four-player game that involves partners.

And then it happened.

“You know how when you cross from one side of the road to the other, there’s that little hump?” Wilkie asks. “If you close your eyes, you feel like your insides have lifted, if only for a second or two. I felt the bus moving like we were changing lanes.”

The RCMP later determined that the bus was travelling at thirty-three miles per hour — fifty-three kilometres per hour — when it began its long skid.

Wilkie was plugged into his new Walkman and was reading
The Long Walk
, a book by Stephen King. To this day, Wilkie remembers that the book’s cover “features an eerie picture of a windy road and a skeleton off to the side.” He also remembers that he was listening to the Canadian rock group Trooper. “I had the volume turned up — the track, which I remember like it was yesterday, was ‘We’re Here for a Good Time (Not a Long Time)’ — but not loud enough to drown out the noise of the bus.”

Kresse was the first person to say anything.

“Hold on,” he yelled. “It’ll be okay.”

And then the noise started.…

“I had no idea we were going off the road. But we did,” Wilkie says. “The bus left the road, rolled onto one side, bounced back to its wheels, hit the approach road, flew into the air, came crashing down on its rear tires, tipped, and skidded to a stop on its right side.”

More than anything, Wilkie remembers people and things — suitcases, pillows — flying through the space inside the bus. He hit his head on the luggage rack and momentarily lost consciousness.

It was, he said, “like a war movie. Everyone was screaming, everything was everywhere. Jackets, luggage, seats, glass … everything was all over the place.”

Peter Soberlak had been seated near Wilkie. “Wilks … Wilks … you okay?” Soberlak called.

Wilkie had a sharp pain in his right hip and a numbness in his head.

“I think so,” Wilkie answered. “But my hip really hurts and my ears won’t stop ringing. Are you okay?”

“This is bad, Wilks,” Soberlak replied, as he began to survey the carnage.

Soberlak had been seated against a right-side window, right in front of the four card players. Clarke Polglase, a seventeen-year-old Edmontonian, was sitting with him. They had been talking about how enjoyable the Christmas break had been. Soberlak was in mid-sentence when he realized something was wrong.

He would end up with a severely bruised right arm, the result of the bus’s right side twice being hammered against the ground. To this day, he has no idea how he survived while four teammates who were seated in such close proximity didn’t make it.

“Sore. I wasn’t injured; just sore,” Soberlak says. “I couldn’t even get out of bed the next morning. I wasn’t injured and this far behind my head” — he holds his hands a foot apart — “four guys are dead. So I wasn’t really injured at all.”

Soberlak helped Wilkie get to his feet. When they looked around, what they saw was total chaos.

The bus was on its right side. People were screaming. Debris was everywhere.

Soberlak took a look at Wilkie and said, “Your face is bleeding pretty bad. You sure you’re okay?”

A bitterly cold wind was howling through what had been the rear window. Wilkie, who always wore shorts and flip-flops on the bus, suddenly was cold. He wanted his coat and shoes. So he reached down and started to pull up the seats that were lying on the ground. What he saw would haunt him forever.

“There was a pair of legs there but nothing else,” he says. “The rest of the body obviously was under the bus.”

Wilkie dropped the seat and started to scream, “Get off the bus! Get off the friggin’ bus! Someone is underneath the bus!”

Soberlak and Wilkie then heard a noise from behind them. When they turned, they saw Mantyka. He was under the bus, lying on his back, and the bus was crushing him. Mantyka was still alive; he was gasping for air and had blood trickling from one side of his mouth.

Soberlak and Wilkie held each other in an attempt to gain control of their shaking. They continued to yell for everyone to get off the bus.

“Chief [Mantyka] was reaching out for help, but there was nothing we could do,” Wilkie says. “Never in my life had I ever felt so helpless or scared. We just kept screaming and screaming and screaming, and when we looked back again, Chief was gone.”

Soberlak remembers Kurt Lackten, the nineteen-year-old team captain, helping players get out of the debris-filled bus.

“He was probably the last one to leave. They were getting all of us out of there,” Soberlak says, adding that because he and Wilkie had been seated in the back of the bus, they knew what most of their teammates didn’t.

“We had to go out the front,” Soberlak explains. “In that time, when everyone was moving up to the front, that’s when me and Bob watched Chris. We knew how serious it was but nobody else did. Nobody up front really knew what had happened or what had gone on.”

Before moving to the front and exiting, Soberlak and Wilkie looked through the gaping rear window and noticed people gathered around what looked to be two more bodies.

Wilkie’s system, however, couldn’t take it. His face was a bloody mess. He had just watched one teammate die. Now there appeared to be two more bodies near the bus.

He was stressed, cold, and in pain and shock.

He blacked out.

Leesa Culp wasn’t yet married in 1986, and was returning to Moose Jaw after spending Christmas with her family — the Krafts — in Penticton, British Columbia. A student at a bible college in Moose Jaw, she had caught a ride with a trucker and, as fate would have it, was right behind the Broncos’ bus.

The trucker had slowed down in order to allow the bus onto the Trans-Canada Highway as it left Swift Current.

Culp witnessed the crash and, in fact, left the truck to survey the damage and see if she could be of any help.

“As I walked quickly toward the back of the bus,” Culp recalls, “I noticed a body maybe fifteen to twenty feet to the right of the rear of the bus, face down in the field of snow.”

It was Scott Kruger.

“To the left of that body, a little closer to the bus, was another body lying on its back. His one leg pointed toward the open field, and his other leg was all twisted up — bent badly at the knee. His head was pointed toward the bus. His eyes were open wide and glassy looking. I walked around to the left side of his body and knelt down to take his left hand, thinking I might be able to get a pulse.”

It was Trent Kresse.

“Seconds later, other people were gathering around both bodies in the field, trying to revive them. I stood up and backed out of the way and was looking around. It was then that I saw someone’s head sticking out from under the bus. Beside that head there was a pair of legs sticking out from the bus. It was obvious that they were the head and legs of two different people because of the distance between them.”

They were Chris Mantyka and Brent Ruff.

Lonnie Spink, a nineteen-year-old right winger from Sherwood Park, Alberta, who had been acquired from the Kamloops Blazers in November, had been seated near the front of the bus. Defenceman Gord Green, also nineteen, from Medley, Alberta, was beside him, and Ian Herbers, another nineteen-year-old defenceman, was across the aisle. Spink, Green, and Herbers, who was from Jasper, Alberta, knew each other from playing together in Sherwood Park.

Spink remembers hearing someone yell, “Hold on!”

After that, he says, it was like everything was happening in slow motion. But it wasn’t until after it was all over that he realized the bus had actually become airborne and had ended up on its right side.

“It was like a shotgun had blown out the windows,” Spink says.

As the bus flew through the air and landed hard, Herbers was thrown across the aisle. Somehow, he ended up in the luggage rack. Once he extricated himself, he and Spink frantically searched for Green. It turned out that they actually were walking on him — a dazed Green had ended up buried under some luggage.