REMEMBERING JIM CARR
Sharp on and off the ice
Jim Carr was Papa Bear, the ultimate University of Alberta hockey lifer, who never met a rink he didn’t like.
“Jim was a champion not just on our team but in life,” said his legendary former coach, Clare Drake, at the Celebration of Life Oct. 10 for Carr, the role-playing centre who touched the lives of so many people.
“It’s always difficult to lose a friend … he was an assistant captain for us, a gritty player who battled hard and sometimes was annoyed he didn’t get more time on the power play,” Drake said jokingly.
“He’s an important part of the Golden Bear legacy that will live on.”
Carr, the man who was instrumental in creating the Golden Bears’ alumni group, died at age 65 on Oct. 2 after a short, private battle with an undisclosed illness. Few knew he was really sick.
“He never wanted to burden anybody else,” said his good friend John Devaney, who took Carr’s old No. 7 with the Bears. “He was a passionate leader, an intense competitor, with a heart as big as the Bear logo on the jersey.”
Carr was a member of the Bears’ national championship teams in 1977 and ’78.
“He was emblematic of what being a Golden Bear was all about,” former teammate Rick Peterson said at the gathering to remember Carr at the Royal Mayfair Golf Club. “There is nobody who embodies what Coach Drake’s credo was, what the Golden Bears stand for. There is not one man. All of us realize as we grow older how lucky we were to have been a Golden Bear and how lucky we were to have had Jim Carr as a teammate.”
Carr was a lawyer at his Edmonton firm, Carr and Long, and an incredibly sharp businessman and philanthropist who was into land development and owned numerous properties here and in Grande Prairie.
He was also an NHL agent for the likes of forward Hnat Dominchelli and former Golden Bears defencemen Cory Cross and Wade Campbell, a fiercely competitive pickup hockey player on Wednesday and Sunday mornings, father to hockey players David and Daniel, and best friend to wife Marjorie.
Carr played full-time for the Golden Bears from 1975-78. He grew up in Fort Saskatchewan, the only child of mother Violet, a high-school teacher, and Joseph, a labourer. He made the Golden Bears squad via Switzerland after playing junior hockey in Fort Saskatchewan and with the old Edmonton Crosstown Motor City Maple Leafs of the Alberta Junior Hockey League.
That’s right, Switzerland. After finishing his junior hockey career and enrolling at the U of A in the fall of 1972, Carr tried out for the Golden Bears but didn’t make the squad.
He spent the rest of the hockey season with Fort Saskatchewan of the North Central Alberta Intermediate League, leading the team in scoring. A friend who had just returned from playing in Switzerland then helped Carr find a team there where he could play the next winter.
He starred in front of crowds of 5,000 in the city of Thun, leading the team in scoring with 40 goals and 40 assists.
“We played in an outdoor rink, but it was never that cold and had artificial ice,” Carr told the Journal’s Ray Turchansky in 1976. “Only the bigger cities of about 200,000 had indoor arenas. The biggest problem was the language. One guy on our team spoke perfect English, the rest all spoke German and just a few words of English.”
He returned to Edmonton and the university in 1974 to enrol in law school and re-joined the Bears, playing just six games and skating with them once a week after that. It was the next fall he made a push to etch a permanent spot for himself on the roster. He had rented ice in Fort Saskatchewan with friends over the summer to prepare to make a team coming off a national championship with nine returning forwards.
Carr impressed new head coach Leon Abbott, who replaced Drake for a season while the coaching legend guided the World Hockey Association’s Edmonton Oilers, and stuck with the Bears.
After being called to the Alberta bar in 1980, Carr embarked on his professional career. He could see business and how it could work better than many.
“He was into real estate development when he was in school, an entrepreneur right from the start,” said former Oilers’ equipment manager Barrie Stafford, also an ex-Golden Bear.
“He’d put numbers and stuff on a napkin and you’d take it home, turning this way and that for three weeks and you couldn’t figure it out, but he was bang-on,” said Devaney.
Carr taught his sons hockey — defenceman David played in the AJHL, while forward Daniel currently toils as a Montreal Canadiens farmhand — and they taught him how to use a reel and rod.
“My dad hated fishing … he didn’t have the patience to sit there for hours, but every summer at Invermere, he’d go out because we asked him,” said David. “He had a lot of sunscreen on and we never caught anything for the first 20 years. When I was 23, we finally did. The trout was six inches.”
“Our dad did everything for us, getting up at 5 a.m. to take us to practice in Bruderheim,” said Daniel. “No offence, but who wants to go to Bruderheim at 5 a.m.?”
Longtime friend and lawyer Doug Jenkins remembers Carr convincing the Zamboni driver at the Jubilee Recreation Centre in Fort Saskatchewan to stay out after minor hockey practices and Jenkins would strap on the goalie equipment while Carr fired 10 pucks at him.
“If I ever stopped six and won the contest, Jim would want another match and another match until he won. He was so determined,” said Jenkins.
Veteran NHL assistant coach Perry Pearn had Carr representing him for a time.
“We played midget hockey against each other, and when he made the Bears, I was always getting cut,” laughed Pearn, now a part-time coach at Vimy Hockey Academy. “I had Jim as a coach with me one year with NAIT. He had a really good hockey mind and was involved early on in the hockey programs at Vimy and Donnan (schools).”
Derek Drager, the Bears’ manager for two of Carr’s three years with the team, remembers Carr’s character as well as his good nature.
“He paid for two seats at $750 each for myself and my wife Teresa to attend the dinner in Vancouver a few years ago when Clare was given the Order of Hockey in Canada,” said Drager. “He just phoned me out of the blue and told me if I could get to Vancouver, the tickets were mine. A very generous guy.”
“He helped so many people and never wanted any credit for it,” said Stafford.