HOCKEY ANGELS
Cape Breton man helps with Humboldt Broncos statue
Cape Breton man helps with Humboldt Broncos statue.
Growing up playing hockey in rural Cape Breton, Mitch Boudreau spent many hours on a bus travelling to games.
So, when 16 people were killed on April 6 when the charter bus carrying the Humboldt Broncos to a Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League playoff game collided with a transport truck, the Louisdale, Richmond County, native knew he wanted to show his support.
Boudreau recently had his chance to do that when he and five of his friends presented the team with a seven-foot statue of a Broncos player with angel wings before the team’s home-opener earlier this month.
“A big part of it is I grew up playing hockey and I know what these bus trips are about, and I know that it could have been me, or you, or your kid,” Boudreau, 34, told the Post from Leduc, Alta., where he’s been living for the past 12 years and operates his own rig welding company, Caper Welding Ltd. “That’s what makes you really think, when it’s so real.”
Boudreau’s friend Ryan Villiers, a wood sculptor and carver, came up with the idea for the Hockey Angel statue. Villiers and another friend, Geoff Stewart, worked out the design, but after some rotten wood abruptly ended their first attempt, faced a nearly impossible deadline before the Sept. 12 game in Humboldt, Sask.
That’s when Boudreau and three other friends — Grant Hipfner, Shawn Eisenkrien and Shawn Moore — joined in. They basically cast aside their regular responsibilities and worked day and night to make sure the statue was delivered on time.
“I dropped everything. I put all my work on the side — to this day I’m still backlogged,” said Boudreau, who has an eight-year-old son, Leland. “We pushed away any bit of work that financially supported us and our families, we pushed it aside and really stuck with this project and got it completed in time, but she was some long days.
“I felt guilty in a sense where I had my son with me at home and when I had my son with me at home, I couldn’t be at Ryan’s, so I’d be working on the base of the sculpture from home. I felt because I wasn’t spending the quality time with him. He’d come out and give me a hand, try to sand things and basically just screw it up, but the fact that he was trying to be a part of this and help out was huge to me.
“He’s only eight years old and still understands that these people had lost their kids, so he’s trying to help me out. It was pretty tough actually.
“The whole project, you’d step back, look at it, and you’d tear up.” The hard work and long hours paid off when they disassembled the sculpture into eight pieces, loaded it into a rental truck and drove it nearly seven hours to Humboldt. Boudreau said they were expecting to simply reassemble it and then begin the trip back to Leduc, but Kevin Garinger, the team’s former president who became was the public face of the organization after the crash, had other plans.
Instead, they took the sculpture to a curling rink where there was a reception for the families of the crash victims before the game next door at the Elgar Petersen Arena, where the statue is expected to ultimately make its permanent home.
“We just went in there, we took the tarps off and we stood back in the shadows and just watched everything, and that alone was worth it,” said Boudreau. “We got to meet a few of the families, which was pretty rough, to be honest with you. It was an emotional rollercoaster. I don’t even know how to explain it.
“Just to see the families and how appreciative they were for something that we put a lot of heart and thought and time into, to see the appreciation they gave us was pretty amazing.”