B00ADOAFYO EBOK (8 page)

“I just woke up, packed up my stuff, and drove home. And that was it,” he says. “I still remember driving from Calgary thinking,
I’m done, I’m not going back, what the hell am I going to do with my life now?
” He also says he felt “huge relief.”

“Huge relief that I had actually committed to myself and that I had decided,” he says. “A huge relief … a huge sense of freedom and relief.”

From the age of eighteen or nineteen, he says, “I had played without enjoying it, not really having fun with the game.” Looking back, Soberlak says his future as a hockey player was determined when he was sixteen years of age. It was a season during which he totalled twenty-one points, ten of them goals, in fifty-five games with the Blazers. Then, as he would now were he playing, he heard a lot about mental toughness.

These days, Soberlak also works in the area of sports psychology and has addressed WHL players about that very thing.

“What is mental toughness? You have to be mentally tough. What the hell does that mean?” Soberlak says. Then he provides the answer: “You have to be self-confident. Nobody can break you.”

He pauses and thinks back to 1985–86.

“Ken Hitchcock, his coaching staff, his veteran players … they broke me,” he says. “I never rebuilt myself from that.”

A handful of games into his second WHL season, Soberlak was dealt to Swift Current. At first, he was relieved because he was going to get a new start. It wasn’t long before he found out that wasn’t going to happen.

“I thought it couldn’t have been worse than it was in Kamloops, but it was,” he says. “It wasn’t worse for me [as a player], but the whole context and culture of it was worse.”

He kept telling himself to give it time; that things would get better. “That was always the underlying thought: it’s going to get better,” he says. He kept trying to convince himself that “I just have to get through this next thing and then it’s all going to be great, I’m going to be a great pro and I’m going to have a great life.”

That never happened, of course. The bus accident, he says, helped push him in the direction he eventually took.

“I was absolutely headed that way and this gave it a good nudge,” he says.

Sadly, after he left the game, he found that he didn’t miss it. Not at all. There were things he missed, but the game wasn’t one of them.

“What I really missed, and what I still miss, is the guys,” he says. “I miss the dressing room, I miss the guys, I miss the hotels, I miss the dinners. I didn’t miss the game at all.”

What about the injuries? “That’s a minor piece of why I didn’t continue to play,” he responds.

During his playing career, he never did confide in his parents. He never did attempt to unburden himself. He never tried to tell them that he no longer loved the game of hockey. He never said a word, despite the fact that his father, John, was a well-known minor hockey coach in Kamloops.

“If I had told them, they likely would have believed me and got me out of there,” Soberlak says. “But in that context you suck it up and you turn it inside and you deal with it. Some guys deal with it in different ways and, unfortunately, some deal with it with drugs and alcohol.”

Soberlak dealt with it, as he says, by “sucking it up.”

“To this day,” he says, “I’m proud of the fact I stuck it out and even got through those situations. I held my head up … what it affected later on was my love for the game. I didn’t love it anymore and therefore I wasn’t successful.”

During his struggles with the game of hockey, music may well have kept Soberlak together. He had long played guitar, but he didn’t really get serious about it until the early 1990s when he was in Cape Breton. From that point on, he always had a guitar with him.

Today, he will tell you, “Music is my number one — that’s my love. That is my passion in life. That was the difference between hockey at that point. I loved music. I’ll always love it.”

Later, he would play Billy Miner, the legendary bank robber, in a touristy stage production that involved two shows a night, three nights a week, for eight months of the year. He did this while working full-time at Thompson Rivers University.

He’s been in bands — he admits a band can be a substitute for a team — and he writes songs. “Music is something I have always loved,” Soberlak says. “It’s in my blood, whereas hockey wasn’t the same. There’s not the same emotional connection.

“I couldn’t survive having to be intense and mean and aggressive … I just couldn’t do it. It was work for me from the time I was sixteen.”

Understand that at the age of sixteen, Soberlak may have been the prototype for the perfect hockey player. He was big, he was strong, he could skate, he could shoot, and he was tough — when he had to be.

“I did it … I think the [Regina]
Leader-Post
rated me one of the top five fighters in the Eastern Division one time,” he says, with a rueful chuckle. “I could fight but I didn’t want to. I didn’t like it. That just wasn’t me.” He did it out of self-preservation.

“That was the worst mistake I made,” he says now. “I clobbered a few guys and it was like, ‘Why aren’t you doing this all the time?’ But I didn’t play hockey so I could punch guys in the face. Some guys can do that, and good for them. I just can’t.”

About twenty years after watching teammate Chris Mantyka die underneath the overturned Broncos’ bus, Peter Soberlak sat down and wrote “Secrets Safe with Me,” a song that is included on the Pete Soberlak Band’s
Thrill of the Chase
CD. To hear Soberlak sing the chorus to “Secrets Safe with Me” is to hear a young man still trying to come to grips with that December day in 1986. Here, courtesy of Soberlak, are the lyrics to “Secrets Safe with Me”:

Sometimes you feel your life is a moment

Disguised by all you felt it could be.

Hold tight, no more dreams in the window.

Goodbye, your secret’s safe with me.

Can you hear me calling out for you?

Can you see me reaching out? There’s nothing I can do,

And I know that I left there without you.

Goodbye, your secret’s safe with me.

Sometimes you feel your life is a moment,

A flash of light, it changes instantly.

Hold tight, no more dreams in the window.

Goodbye, your secret’s safe with me.

Can you hear me calling out for you?

Can you see me reaching out? There’s nothing I can do,

And I know that I left there without you.

Goodbye, your secret’s safe with me.

You keep coming back into my life

Ever since the day we said goodbye, and if I said to you

Can you hear me calling out for you?

Can you see me reaching out? There’s nothing I can do,

And I know that I left there without you.

Goodbye, your secret’s safe …

Goodbye, your secret’s safe …

Goodbye, your secret’s safe with me.

Saying Goodbye

F
ollowing
the accident involving the Swift Current Broncos’ bus, WHL officials met in Calgary. They had to work on scheduling a memorial service and, as ugly as it may have seemed, they had to decide when the Broncos would return to game action.

A decision was made to postpone four games, which would give the Broncos’ management and players — and their fans — an opportunity to grieve, to attend funerals, and to catch their breath.

Players were told they could return to their homes for a day or two, but they were asked to return for a memorial service that was to be held January 4 in the Broncos’ home arena, the Centennial Civic Centre.

Defenceman Bob Wilkie went home to Calgary, but found it anything but easy.

“I found it really hard to see my friends and family,” he says. “Mom was dead set against me going back to Swift Current. From her perspective, she had just about lost her oldest son, so she continually asked, ‘Why would you want to go back?’”

Which, from a mother’s perspective, seems like a reasonable question.

Her son’s response was, “I have to … for them and for me.” Wilkie felt he was close to his goal of playing in the NHL, and he wasn’t about to stop at this particular point in time. “I have to continue on,” he told his mother.

But before he could do that, there was a memorial service and funerals.

Three of the players who died in the accident were from Saskatchewan and one was from Alberta. Chris Mantyka’s funeral was in Saskatoon, Trent Kresse’s in Kindersley, and Scott Kruger’s in Swift Current. Brent Ruff was from Warburg, Alberta, which is where his funeral would be held.

Management split up the Broncos players to ensure that there were players at each of the funerals.

Tracy Egeland, the second-youngest player on the Broncos, had grown up on the family farm near Lethbridge. During his minor hockey career he had been coached by Randy Ruff, older brother of Lindy Ruff, the long-time head coach of the NHL’s Buffalo Sabres. Brent Ruff, Randy and Lindy’s younger brother, sometimes visited Lethbridge, which allowed him and Egeland to become friends. When they found themselves teammates on the Broncos, it was inevitable that the two sixteen-year-olds would become the best of friends.

“From day one,” Egeland told the
Buffalo News
, “we really hit it off. It wasn’t too often we were apart. Without a bus accident, I’d be talking to Brent quite a bit today regardless of where our careers and lives had taken us.

“We were going to develop into something where we would push each other and just know we had a friend to rely on no matter what. You don’t meet too many people in hockey you stay friends with, because you always go from city to city. But I know Brent would have been one constant friend I always would have had.”

Instead of living out those dreams, Egeland was in Warburg, a pallbearer for his best friend’s funeral.

Meanwhile, Wilkie attended Scott Kruger’s funeral in Swift Current.

“It was one of the saddest things I have ever been a part of,” he recalls. “The church was packed and many people, including me, were sobbing uncontrollably. Scotty had been my little buddy.”

Wilkie was not yet eighteen years of age. He had survived the bus accident and now he was going to view a friend in an open casket. It wasn’t easy. And when he looked into the casket, he didn’t see his pal.

“It wasn’t the Scotty Kruger I remembered,” Wilkie says. “His hair was a different colour – it was pale, kind of rose-coloured. He was all made up, not natural-looking, and he was in a suit and tie. He certainly wasn’t dressed the way he usually dressed.”

Scott Kruger was a little man playing a big man’s game. There was no getting around it — he was only five-foot-four and 135 pounds. But, as they say, he played a lot larger than that and, naturally, he was a fan favourite.

A local boy, Kruger had put up 148 points, including 111 assists, for the junior A Swift Current Indians in 1984–85. In 1985–86, he totalled 106 points, eighty of them assists, with the Prince Albert Raiders, who dealt him to the Broncos. With his effervescent personality, Kruger quickly became a favourite among his teammates. Wilkie says Kruger was always smiling; he had one of those smiles that often resembled a smirk.

Referring to Kruger’s mother Louise by her nickname, a chuckling Wilkie says, “I remember Fanner always telling him she would ‘smack that smirk off your face’ if he didn’t stop.”

Remember that this was in an era when the game of hockey was all about size, and smallish players in the NHL — and the WHL, for that matter — were few and far between. It was no secret that NHL scouts tended to look for bigger players; it was the same with the WHL, which really is a mirror image of the NHL.

Kruger knew full well that the odds were against him. That’s why he would do almost anything to cut those odds down by a bit. For example, early each season, when NHL Central Scouting would send one of its scouts to visit each WHL team in order to weigh and measure individual players, Kruger would put pucks in his shorts — anything to add a few ounces to his weight. He would also put pucks in the bottom of his socks to look taller.

“He had the heart of a lion and skills that were second to none,” Wilkie says.

A lot had happened in the days before Kruger’s funeral, which was just another shock to Wilkie’s system. After the funeral, Wilkie left the church, climbed into his car, and discovered he had no place to go. So he drove around aimlessly until, for some reason he can’t explain, he found himself at the accident site.

Courtesy of The Hockey News.

“I pulled over and just stared at the torn-up ground and cried,” he says. “I was shouting, ‘Why? Why God? Why?’ I was not in a good place, and remember feeling darkness, emptiness … soulless.”

Next was the memorial service. It was held on Sunday, January 4, with at least thirty-five hundred people filling the Centennial Civic Centre. The north and south parking lots were packed with a number of buses; each of the WHL’s Eastern Division’s other seven teams was in attendance. Inside, the ice surface had been covered with plywood, and a huge stage was set up on the west end of the ice. The stage held flowers, a microphone, and a table on which were displayed pictures of Kresse, Kruger, Mantyka, and Ruff. To the left of the table hung the Broncos jerseys of Kresse and Kruger; those of Mantyka and Ruff were hanging to the right.

Trent Kresse was well known in southern Saskatchewan as much for his ability on a baseball diamond as his hockey skills. He was described as sweet, sensitive, sentimental, and romantic.

Doris Kesslar, the mother of Trent’s fiancée, Kari, said, “I knew if I could have hunted the world over for a perfect son-in-law, he was it. The most important thing in his life was Kari, more than hockey, more than anything. His life revolved around her.”

On the ice, Kresse was the guy with the golden hands. A natural athlete, he had starred on Saskatchewan baseball diamonds since he was a kid. Like Kruger, Kresse had spent the previous season with the junior Indians, picking up eighty-two points, including fifty-four goals, in just thirty-nine games. That was enough to earn him an invitation to the Broncos’ training camp, where he quickly made an impact. He was quick, he saw the ice well, and, obviously, he could score. The
Swift Current Sun
often referred to Kresse as the K-Man — he was the K-Man, and scoring goals was his assignment.

On the ice, Kresse and Kruger became the Broncos’ version of Gretzky and Kurri or Bossy and Trottier. Soon, it was hard to imagine one without the other.

“They had a bond that no one else had,” Wilkie says.

Kresse also made an impact on one of the Broncos’ youngest players. When Tracy Egeland and his wife, Tara, welcomed a bouncing baby boy into the world in 2008, they named him Trent. The Egelands wanted to maintain the
T
theme in the family, and the name Trent just jumped out at them. Egeland says it had something to do with the fact he has fond memories of former teammate Trent Kresse.

“He was just one of the really nice guys on the team,” Egeland says of Kresse, who, he adds, always treated him with respect and the utmost kindness.

Despite playing in the tough-as-nails WHL, Chris Mantyka, whose nickname was Chief, was remembered as a warm and kind-hearted individual. He was from Saskatoon, and while in Swift Current he lived with Broncos president John Rittinger, who said, “Mantyka was so timid he almost apologized for being alive. He never had a harsh word to say about anyone, even those who may have doubted his presence on the ice.”

Graham James, the Broncos’ general manager and head coach, added, “He was a player of tremendous, tremendous character. Every team needs that element to be successful and he provided it for us.”

“He normally had a smile on his face,” Wilkie says, “but it would disappear as soon as he strapped on his skates. He would fight in almost every game and he rarely lost a battle. Since we were a small, quick team, many of our rivals tried to intimidate us. But Chief got us the on-ice respect we needed, game in and game out. He loved being part of the Broncos and he understood his role. To me, it was plain to see that Chris Mantyka was truly happy being a Bronco.”

In the words of Graham James, Brent Ruff was “the ghost of hockey’s future. A player overflowing with potential, Brent was fast becoming a dominating player as a mere sixteen-year-old, perhaps the best in the country. In the future, he would’ve been a hundred-point man in this league.”

Ruff had scored 125 goals in sixty games with a bantam team in Leduc, Alberta, the previous season, so there wasn’t much doubt what his role would be down the road.

James also said, “He had that intelligence and tremendous Ruff character. It’s totally numbing losing a player whose future seemed so bright. Brent loved to talk about his older brothers — Lindy, Marty, and Randy — and how proud he was of them and how he, too, had a dream of making it to the National Hockey League.”

Known to his teammates as Ruffles, Wilkie remembers Ruff as a wise-cracking, confident sixteen-year-old forward who carried himself like a seasoned veteran. He obviously had grown up watching his older brothers — Lindy, who was playing in the NHL at the time, and Marty and Randy, both of whom played in the WHL — and had paid attention.

“He was healthy, happy, and talented,” Wilkie says, noting that Ruff was so beloved by his teammates that he was treated more like a veteran than a rookie. There was a hierarchy with the seating on the bus — veterans sat at the back; rookies, coaches, and staff sat at the front. However, when it came to sixteen-year-old Brent Ruff, the veteran players made an exception.

“It didn’t matter that he was a rookie … he carried himself like a veteran and was welcomed as such,” Wilkie says.

Peter Soberlak, who was acquired by the Broncos from the Kamloops Blazers with the season seventeen games old, couldn’t believe that Ruff was only sixteen years of age.

“He was a rock-solid kid,” Soberlak says. “He was seriously focused. He was going to be a pro … I think, a great pro. No question. He was sixteen and he was on the number one line and on the number one power play. He was awesome.”

The floor seats in front of the table at the memorial were occupied by members of all eight East Division teams: the Broncos, Brandon Wheat Kings, Calgary Wranglers, Medicine Hat Tigers, Moose Jaw Warriors, Prince Albert Raiders, Regina Pats, and Saskatoon Blades. Local minor hockey teams — including the midget Legionnaires and Saints, bantam Raiders, peewee Kings, and atom Lions — all were in attendance.

“It was at least a little awkward,” Wilkie says of looking around and seeing so many players from other WHL teams. “Instead of fighting on the ice to defeat each other, we were on the ice to show our support as friends and family.”

Indeed, the on-ice battles would have to wait.

Broncos president John Rittinger, the man who was more responsible than anyone else for the franchise having returned to his city, spoke during the service.

“We have all suffered a great loss,” he said. “For many of us the grief could not possibly be greater even if our own blood families were involved.”

Rittinger also spoke about the bond between the community and the team: “The people in Swift Current and the surrounding area love our Broncos. Why are they so popular? Is it because they are physically strong? Is it because they entertain us with such great skill? Certainly that is part of it, but there is much more. I think we see the young players and we see in the young players qualities we would all like to have. We have seen young people set a goal for themselves.”

The crowd was moved to tears when Rittinger spoke of the fallen four: “We see dedication, determination, and intensity. Our departed teammates exemplified these qualities to the highest degree. Out of respect for these four players, no Swift Current Bronco will be permitted to wear Trent Kresse’s sweater number 8, Scott Kruger’s sweater number 9, Brent Ruff’s sweater number 11, and Chris Mantyka’s sweater number 22.”

Mantyka had lived with Rittinger and his wife, Marguerite. Later, the licence plate on Rittinger’s vehicle would read 8911–22; his wife’s would be 22–1198.