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Gord Green (right) during one of his deployments, this one in the summer of 2006.
Courtesy of Gord Green.

Spink and Herbers uncovered Green and they all hugged each other. Bruised and bleeding from facial cuts, they were happy to have survived but blissfully unaware of what had happened in the rear of the bus.

Then they heard someone from the back of the bus yelling for everyone to get out because players were trapped underneath it. They quickly exited and were met by passersby who had stopped and were now getting the players into vehicles and whisking them to the hospital. Once at the hospital, they all phoned their families.

Spink remembers telling his family that he was okay and that no one he knew was hurt. At that point, he still didn’t know who was hurt, or that anyone had been killed. And having been in Swift Current for only three weeks, he didn’t know Kresse, Kruger, Mantyka, or Ruff very well.

It wasn’t until later that night that Spink learned he had lost four teammates in an accident from which he had escaped virtually unscathed.

The next day, Spink and Herbers visited bus driver Dave Archibald. They wanted Archibald to know that this tragedy was an accident, that it was just bad luck, that it wasn’t his fault.

“We sat down with Dave and his wife over sandwiches and told him we still trusted him with our lives,” Spink says. “I will always remember the utter look of sadness on Dave’s face. I wish him the best.

“It was a day that changed all of our lives forever.”

Green, a rugged defenceman, would go on to spend twenty years in the Canadian military. A combat engineer, he would serve in Kuwait, Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.

Through all of that, he said, he never forgot his time in Swift Current.

Green had spent the previous season with the Lethbridge Broncos. The franchise was sold and relocated to Swift Current for the 1986–87 season, and Green moved with it.

“The biggest thing for me about Swift Current was the fans,” Green said. “I played in Lethbridge the season before, and to move to Swift was not something that the players looked forward to the summer before the first season. A lot of the veteran players asked to be traded without even going to Swift.

“That all changed the first time we went to Swift Current. The fans treated us great right from day one. After the crash, they took us in like family. I still have a special place in my heart for the city and the people.”

The Broncos Come Home

S
wift
Current is a community of more than sixteen thousand people, located on the Trans-Canada Highway in the southwestern corner of Saskatchewan. The city gets its name from a creek that meanders across the prairie, eventually emptying into the South Saskatchewan River. The Cree who camped alongside the creek for centuries referred to it as
kisiskaciwan
, which means “it flows swiftly.” Fur traders later named it
Rivière au Courant
, meaning “river that runs,” hence Swift Current (a.k.a. Speedy Creek).

Best known as a farming community, Swift Current is typical of many small towns and cities across North America. Everyone knows everyone. Friends went to school together, and now their children go to those same schools together. It is a tightly knit community in which everyone supports each other, especially in times of need. When everything is running smoothly, there is the usual gossip and chatter about the neighbours. There is some crime, and there are a few skeletons. Oh, and there is a Walmart and a casino.

For the most part, Swift Current, like many places its size, is a stable and supportive community.

What is not typical, though, is the life-altering tragedy that occurred on December 30, 1986.

The welcoming sign outside Swift Current. It reads, “Where Life Makes Sense.”
Courtesy of Leesa Culp.

Despite the town slogan — “Swift Current: Where Life Makes Sense,” which is engraved on a granite slab on the city’s outskirts — nothing about what happened on that day made sense.

When the bus accident happened, the Broncos were in their first season in Swift Current, having relocated from Lethbridge after the 1985–86 season.

The Broncos would rebound from the tragic accident to make the playoffs in the spring of 1987. And two years later they would win the Memorial Cup. This truly is one of the great stories in the history of Canadian sports.

But when you throw in what would come after that — with Sheldon Kennedy, one of the team’s stars, accusing Graham James, the team’s general manager and head coach, of sexually assaulting him more than three hundred times — it becomes a horribly tragic story. It is a story that, when looked at in whole, has more twists and turns than the most imaginative writer could concoct. Even the backroom dealing that resulted in the Broncos returning to Swift Current is a story in itself.

Swift Current hadn’t had a WHL team to call its own since the spring of 1974, when it lost its franchise to Lethbridge. Now, twelve years later, the Broncos had come home.

The Broncos weren’t a chartered member of the Canadian Major Junior Hockey League, later the WHL, when it was born in the summer of 1966. But they came on board for the second season, 1967–68, as the CMJHL morphed into the Western Canada Junior Hockey League. The Broncos would play out of Swift Current through the end of the 1973–74 season. After that season, owner Bill Burton relocated the franchise to Lethbridge.

Now it was 1986, and the Broncos were back in the 2,235-seat Centennial Civic Centre. A group of enthusiastic business people and civic politicians, led by John Rittinger, a local engineer who had long pursued a WHL franchise for his beloved city, had purchased the Lethbridge Broncos from Dennis Kjelgaard.

In the early 1980s, Rittinger was president of the junior A Broncos, who played in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League, but that level of hockey just wasn’t selling. So, even though he didn’t have a franchise, Rittinger began selling shares and season tickets for a major junior team.

(Think about that for a moment and you realize that it’s the same approach taken by Jim Balsillie, the co-CEO of Research in Motion, when he felt in 2008 that he was close to purchasing the NHL’s Nashville Predators and relocating the franchise to southern Ontario.)

“If I knew then what I know now,” Rittinger told the
Regina Leader-Post
during the 1989 Memorial Cup tournament in Saskatoon, “we would have had a franchise then. I wanted it all paid for.”

Rittinger said his group had $200,000 and had sold seven hundred season tickets in 1982, but he “decided it wasn’t enough to go ahead, so I gave it all back.” Later, Rittinger would form an alliance with Pat Ginnell, a veteran of western Canada’s hockey wars, who was operating the Swift Current Indians, playing in the junior A Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League. According to Rittinger, they ended up selling 150 shares, “most of them at $2,000.” A ten-man board, with Rittinger as president, was elected at a shareholders’ meeting.

Rittinger would go on to lead attempts to purchase and relocate numerous franchises, among them the Kelowna Wings, Calgary Wranglers, Kamloops Junior Oilers, Regina Pats, New Westminster Bruins, Seattle Breakers.…

He came oh so close to purchasing the Regina Pats during the first half of the 1985–86 season. So close, in fact, that the Pats actually postponed a home game in preparation for a midseason move to Swift Current. But it was a sale — by Saskatoon’s Pinder family — that never went through.

Remarkably, the genesis of this situation was a $1 parking fee that was about to be implemented by Regina Exhibition Park, which controlled the Agridome, as the home of the Pats then was known. The Pats’ owners and fans were in a lather over the approach of paid parking, even at $1, and it almost cost them their franchise.

“I was building a new home and fell down some stairs and hurt my back,” Rittinger said. “I was in hospital and had a phone in my room. Herb [Pinder Jr.] called and asked if I wanted to buy the team. So we worked on that.”

In fact, two games originally scheduled for Regina were rescheduled for Swift Current just after Christmas.

“Can you imagine all those banners in the [Swift Current Centennial] Civic Centre?” Rittinger said, referring to the many championship banners the Pats have won and which hang in their home arena. “It was preposterous, but it looked like it was going to happen. Then the league bought the team and sold it” to a group that included former NHLer Bill Hicke.

Had the Pats/Swift Current deal gone through, Rittinger said, “Herb would have operated the team in Swift Current for the rest of the season. We would have just come to games and watched.”

And then there were the attempts to purchase all those other franchises.…

With Kelowna, Rittinger said, they did a lot of talking, but “we never did get a signed agreement.”

Which wasn’t the case when it came to the Wranglers. “We had a signed agreement with the Wranglers. Then Brian Ekstrom came along and bought them.”

Late in 1984, the Swift Current group also had a signed agreement with Seattle owner John Hamilton.

“He ended up in Swift Current one night,” Rittinger recalled. “It got to the point where we controlled the [player] list. We sent Kevin Ginnell, one of Paddy’s sons, to Seattle to manage the list. The WHL had to approve the sale. It refused.” The WHL, not wanting a West Coast team to move east, bought the franchise.

That wasn’t the first time the Breakers were almost sold. On June 15, 1983, the
Lethbridge Herald
reported, “The owner of the Seattle Breakers said he has reached an agreement to sell the WHL team. Terms of the sale by Breakers’ owner John Hamilton to Dennis Kjelgaard, former owner of the WHL’s Lethbridge Broncos, have not been disclosed. Hamilton, who has sought a buyer, said Kjelgaard ‘is just waiting to see something in writing.’”

Kjelgaard had purchased the Lethbridge Broncos from Bill Burton and later sold the franchise. Now, it seems, he was trying to get back in. As it turned out, he wouldn’t buy the Breakers. Instead, he bought the Broncos again. All told, Kjelgaard was involved with the Broncos for eleven of their twelve seasons in Lethbridge, but cited sagging attendance — the Broncos averaged 1,600 fans in 1985–86 and drew only 647 fans to their final playoff game — and burgeoning expenses as reasons for his decision to get out.

In the meantime, Rittinger said, “We were buying Kamloops from the Edmonton Oilers. A Kamloops group owned around thirty percent and had first right of refusal. They had to come up with the money by a certain day and got it on the last day. They were selling T-shirts that read, ‘Where the Hell Is Swift Current?’”

Rittinger, who was telling his story after the Broncos had won the 1989 Memorial Cup, added, “I wonder if they know now?”

And then there were the Winnipeg Warriors.

“Winnipeg was supposed to transfer to Moose Jaw,” Rittinger said, adding that it almost didn’t happen after he and Art DeFehr of the Winnipeg ownership group “shook hands at a meeting in Calgary. We went to [WHL president] Ed Chynoweth and said we had bought the team. Moose Jaw had defaulted several times.”

In fact, according to Rittinger, Moose Jaw was to have presented a $10,000 cheque for the bond. However, DeFehr checked with “the bank and the bank said the money wasn’t there.”

The league gave Moose Jaw “a couple more days and they came up with the money. So we lost that one.”

By then, Paddy Ginnell was coaching the New Westminster Bruins, who were owned by Ron Dixon, an old-school operator if ever there was one. If the price was right, he would sell.

“Paddy says we can get this franchise,” Rittinger related. “Dixon calls one day at 3:00 a.m. He says, ‘Give me $300,000 and we’ll leave the team in New Westminster and we’ll run it but you’ll own it.’” Rittinger may have been born at night, but it hadn’t been that night.

There also was an attempt to buy the Brandon Wheat Kings.

“Mrs. [Anne] Ross called and said, ‘I own
x
per cent of this club. I think I can buy up some and own fifty percent. Then you can buy it and move it.’ Paddy went to Brandon and said, ‘We’ll buy your team for $270,000.’ The league would never go for that.

“Oh, and I spoke to Fraser McColl [who owned the Victoria Cougars], but didn’t get too far with that,” Rittinger said.

The WHL, Rittinger had come to believe, wasn’t the least bit interested in returning to Swift Current.

But, before he could get too discouraged, Rittinger began hearing whispers about Kjelgaard and Al Foder perhaps wanting to sell the Lethbridge Broncos, the franchise that had originated in Swift Current. The Broncos had won one WHL championship (1982–83) in twelve seasons in the southern Alberta city.

“Kjelgaard calls Paddy and says, ‘I’ll sell you half a franchise; we’ll have a draft and divide up the players and have two teams, one in Lethbridge and one in Swift Current,’” Rittinger said.

By now, Rittinger said, the Swift Current group and Ginnell had had something of a falling out. But the group’s nest egg had grown to more than $300,000.

“Denny comes down to Swift Current,” Rittinger recalled. “He says $500,000. It was a ten-minute meeting and he went back to Lethbridge.”

As talks continued, Ed Chynoweth became involved as an arbitrator of sorts and helped settle it.

“I think Ed got tired of us,” Rittinger said with a chuckle.

In the end, Rittinger’s bunch paid between $400,000 and $450,000 for its WHL team. (The Edmonton Oil Kings, the last expansion franchise sold by the WHL, cost the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers a cool $4 million. The Oil Kings began play in the 2007–08 season. The Kamloops Blazers, a more established franchise, sold for more than $6 million in the fall of 2007.)

Some of the teams that Rittinger had tried to purchase didn’t stay put for long. The Kelowna Wings became the Spokane Chiefs for the 1985–86 season. The Calgary Wranglers, who had moved west from Winnipeg for the 1977–78 season, ended up in Lethbridge as the Hurricanes in time for 1987–88. The New Westminster Bruins became the Tri-City Americans over the summer of 1988.

In 1988–89, a season in which the Broncos would win the Memorial Cup, there were fourteen teams in the WHL. At one time or another, Rittinger had tried to buy eleven of them. Only the Medicine Hat Tigers, Prince Albert Raiders, and Saskatoon Blades hadn’t heard from him.

But now a sale had gone through; the WHL’s board of governors gave its unanimous approval on April 11, 1986, just three days after the Broncos’ last season in Lethbridge had come to an end. Rittinger’s perseverance and diligence had paid off — Swift Current Tier One Franchise Inc., headed by Rittinger, owned the Broncos. The WHL was back in Swift Current.

Buying the franchise was one thing, of course. It took an untold amount of work to take the franchise from there to the ice, and there was the matter of a budget approaching $600,000, a large sum for a franchise operating in the Canadian Hockey League’s smallest market.

But it all got done in time for the 1986–87 season.