Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (42 page)

Switzer, who has lived all his life in town and did indeed grow up to work for the Broncos—he does colour analysis during the broadcasts—says that crash changed his town forever. “Strange as this may sound,” he says, “it was our 9/11. It became our city's identity. It changed people. Suddenly all the usual animosities in a town didn't seem so important. People seemed friendlier. It was like what you heard happened in New York City. The tragedy had the effect of bringing everyone together. New York changed forever after that. So did Swift Current.”

The town staged a packed memorial at the hockey rink: mourners included jersey-clad players from the other teams in the league. They held Scott Kruger's funeral in town and sent off representatives to show a Swift Current presence at the other funerals.

And then they had to decide what to do. Carry on? Cancel the season? Fold the team? “There was no talk of not going on,” Sakic says. “You keep going. We talked, but it was about when do we want to start again? How long do we wait?”

Colleen McBean was anxious, for professional reasons, for them to get back to playing again as soon as possible. The fragile youngsters needed it. “Difficult as it was for them,” she says, “all of those kids kept getting up each morning and getting through the day. I think in hindsight that the fact that they made such an effort to get back on track was good for them. Their days were structured. They were busy. I know from our own experience that is what gets you through the day.”

“The best thing for us was to get back on the ice,” Sakic says. “Once you start playing again, for those few hours you can take your mind off it. You just focus on playing hockey.”

They started talking about an appropriate memorial, and today the refurbished rink still features a special window in the lobby dedicated to the four players. “Unchanged forever,” the window says. “What we keep in memory is ours.”

First game back was an away game, against the archrival Moose Jaw Warriors, and the Broncos had something new on their jersey
arms: a crest with the four lost numbers—8, 9, 11, 22—in a four-leaf clover that trainer Gord Hahn had stitched on. “It was nice to put the uniform back on and just go out and play,” Sakic says.

At Moose Jaw, the visiting Broncos were given a louder cheer than the home side. At every rink throughout the league it was the same: a long, emotional standing ovation to start each match, cheers of salute to end the games. When they played at home, nearly three thousand fans would pack into the tiny rink that is supposed to hold only twenty-two hundred. “The rink was where we went for our healing,” says Ben Wiebe, the current governor of the Broncos.

“It was pretty amazing,” Sakic remembers.

Whatever it was that took hold of the budding seventeen-year-old rookie at this moment—the luck of the clover, a fierce determination to honour his teammates—Joe Sakic became a far more commanding player and, undeniably, the team's leader. “He was seventeen,” Colleen McBean recalls. “We had lost our two older star players. It just seemed like all the pressure shifted to him. Everyone knew he had the makings of a great player, but he stepped up in a way that no one could have imagined.”

At the time of the accident, the Broncos were out of a playoff berth. There had been no high expectations for that first season in town. Yet Sakic, playing as if possessed, racked up 133 points as a rookie and carried the team into the post-season. He was named the Western League's most valuable player and presented with a new trophy named in honour of the four downed Broncos.

The Little Team That Could had made the playoffs. They would go out in the first round, but they had still made the playoffs. With ten minutes to go in the final game they would play that spring, not a fan in the stands was still sitting, the ovation continuing long after the buzzer had sounded.

“That was their goal,” says Trent McCleary, who at the time was a budding fourteen-year-old allowed to practise with the team and who would ultimately serve as Broncos captain. “That was their Stanley Cup.”

“I will never be more proud of a group of kids anywhere,” McBean says. “After what they had been through, it was such an amazing accomplishment.”

Two years later, with Sakic now starring as a nineteen-year-old rookie with the Nordiques but with six of those original Broncos still in the lineup, they went all the way, winning the Memorial Cup in Saskatoon against the local hope, the Blades. Appropriately, it was the goaltending of Trevor Kruger, Scott's brother, that got them to overtime. And it was a shot from the point by Darren Kruger, another brother, that was tipped in for the victory by Tim Tisdale, who had been on the bus when it crashed.

When the winning goal went in at SaskPlace, Colleen McBean and her daughter Karen didn't even cheer. They threw their arms around each other, hugged and wept.

They were hardly alone. Ryan Switzer was now twelve and even more of a committed fan than he had been at nine. “The crash was the first time I ever cried over grief,” he says. “And then, when they won the Memorial Cup, it was the first time I ever cried out of happiness. Bronco hockey taught me emotion.”

There has, in the past, been talk of a movie on the Broncos' remarkable journey from tragedy to triumph and, certainly, all the ingredients are there: the raw emotion, the determination to carry on, the amazing victory in the Memorial Cup, the admirable humility of Joe Sakic, the local boy, Tisdale, scoring the winning goal by tipping in a shot from the brother of one of the players who had died …

But the whole storyline is hardly so simple. While no one blamed Archibald for the accident, there were some feelings that they shouldn't even have set out in such conditions, though such risky travel is common experience in the Prairie winter. The Kresse and Mantyka families eventually tried to pursue a civil suit over the accident, but it turned out they were too late for any such claim and the idea was quietly dropped.

As for the coach who wanted nothing to do with psychological counselling for his team, Graham James was, in fact, hiding something. In 1996, a decade after the accident, James—by now part-owner, general manager and coach of the Calgary Hitmen—was charged with sexual assault against minors. Two players who would eventually testify against him had been Broncos, Sheldon Kennedy and another, unnamed player. James would plead guilty and be given a forty-two-month jail sentence.

An
ESPN Magazine
story last year by Canadian writer Gare Joyce opened some old wounds in Swift Current when some of the people Joyce interviewed wondered how those close to the team could not have known what was happening. There had, after all, long been suspicion and innuendo concerning James and his manipulative hold on certain players. Kennedy, who has gone through a very public and brave catharsis concerning the damage inflicted on him by his old coach—and who now runs a foundation dedicated to assisting abused children—thought he had been let down by certain people who may have felt winning hockey games was more important than losing innocence.

Trent McCleary, the former NHLer who served two years as team captain of the Broncos while James was still coaching, has often asked himself, “What would I have done?” if he had only known. But he did not know. “I didn't see it,” says McCleary, now a Swift Current investment dealer. “I just did not see it.”

McCleary is hardly alone. Almost everyone else close to the team says they missed it, too. Some are haunted by their failure—perhaps not realizing that deception is the predator's greatest tool. “Was there stuff going on?” McCleary says. “Yeah, plain and simple. Everyone has had to make their peace with that.” Some have; some have not.

When the twentieth anniversary of the Swift Current tragedy was approaching a year ago, the board that controls the team held several discussions on what might be done to mark the occasion. Joe Arling, who served as chair, thought it should be humble, as
befits the Canadian Prairie personality. They elected to go with a moment's silence before the home game against Medicine Hat that fell on the precise date, December 30, 2006. Nothing else. Some thought there might have been more but others, including Joe Sakic, thought simplicity the correct route. He could not have come anyway, being involved in NHL play—and, besides, he didn't need to be there. “You never forget,” he says. “So it's not just that one day you want to remember. You remember it every day.”

McCleary thinks it should be remembered, and by more than the people of Swift Current. “It's one of the most amazing hockey stories ever,” he says. “A brand-new team, a small town, in the very first year four players are killed in a bus accident and the team continues on to win the Memorial Cup two years later. You look at the last fifty years in hockey—what's a better story than that?”

At the moment, little Bathurst, New Brunswick, is one story: a highway crash that killed the coach's wife, fifty-one-year-old Beth Lord, five seventeen-year-olds—Javier Acevedo, Codey Branch, Nathan Cleland, Justin Cormier, Daniel Hains—a sixteen-year-old, Nickolas Quinn, and fifteen-year-old Nicholas Kelly. The rest of the story remains to be written.

Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall, who grew up playing street hockey in Swift Current with Scott Kruger, believes Bathurst can take comfort from the Swift Current story. Life has to go on. There is no other option. “It's what happens in small communities from time to time,” Wall says. “These two towns have a lot in common. We're places where everyone knows everyone else. And communities rally. They never forget, but they rally. They have to.”

“It's tough,” says Joe Sakic from his home in Colorado. “You can't believe what happened. You just don't believe it. It's tough to think about it and it's something you never forget. You want to overcome it all, but these are your friends. You can't forget. You don't want to forget.

“All you know for sure is that, in time, things will get better.”

Joe Sakic retired in 2009 as one of the greatest players in National Hockey League history. He stayed away from the game for two years, but has since rejoined the Avalanche as a special adviser and alternate governor. The Swift Current Broncos failed to make the playoffs in 2010–11 and are in a rebuilding mode. An RCMP investigation into the Bathurst tragedy concluded that the van would never have passed a safety test and that six of the seven who died did not have seatbelts properly fastened. A public inquiry produced a number of safety recommendations, several of which have now been put in place. One year later, remarkably, the Bathurst High School basketball team, the Phantoms, won the provincial AA championship
.

POINTE-CLAIRE, QUEBEC

“N
ice gift.” The smile was subtle—the sarcasm, not at all.

Guy Lafleur was thinking about his and Lise's thirty-fifth wedding anniversary, which fell on Monday. Next month, their new restaurant, Bleu Blanc Rouge, is scheduled to open in nearby Rosemère. Their first child, Martin, a full partner in the business, is currently building a house, which has his father looking tanned and fit from his new life as contractor, landscaper and manual labourer.

Life, you would think, couldn't be better for the fifty-six-year-old hockey legend known in Quebec as the “Flower.” But his wife has not been well. Twice, recently, Lise's voice mysteriously vanished. Neither of them sleeps well. Guy Lafleur—winner of five Stanley Cups with the Canadiens, one of the province's greatest heroes since that February day in 1962 when the
eleven-year-old sensation from Thurso scored seven goals in a single game in the Quebec International Pee-Wee Hockey Tournament—still in shock from having a warrant issued for his arrest in January. And their other son, Mark, appeared in Montreal court yesterday to plead guilty to fourteen charges, including uttering threats to his now nineteen-year-old former girlfriend who was a minor, forcible confinement and assault.

“I look back on all this,” says the elder Lafleur, “and say it's a nightmare.”

And it is far from over. There will be more court days, as Mark Lafleur also pleaded not guilty to two charges of sexual assault. And Guy Lafleur will have his own day in court this fall. The police records and newspaper clippings will say the nightmare began a year and a half ago with that long list of charges being laid against the younger son, who has been in custody for the past nine months since he broke the strict conditions of his bail—police say with his father's assistance.

More accurately, it is a shared nightmare, and it goes back twenty-three years, virtually to the moment of Mark Lafleur's birth and a nurse's comment to Lise that her squirming, squealing second child had a “big personality.” Perhaps too big. The records and the clippings—and now the courts—speak to the demon side, but the family and friends will tell you of a young man who has remarkable people skills, who can be charming and funny when he is not lashing out irrationally.

Guy Lafleur is not here to argue his son's innocence in all that he has been accused of, and now in part admitted to. “I have nothing against my son paying for what he did wrong,” he says. But he has agreed to talk so that people know what it is like to have been a child such as Mark Lafleur. And, by extension, what it is like to be a parent of such a child.

Guy Lafleur tells his friends, “
Ton enfant reste ton enfant”
—once your child, always your child.

Three weeks after that squirming, crying baby was born, Mark
Lafleur had surgery for a digestive problem. He was not much more than a child when he was diagnosed with Tourette's syndrome, a neurological disorder that is more often associated with curious tics—sometimes in action, sometimes in voice—and less often with sudden outbursts of obscenities and cruel insults. Mark Lafleur is one who has no tics to signal this disorder to others, but has had the outbursts in quantity.