National Post (National Edition)
‘I am still a Humboldt BRONCO’
When you’re a member of the Broncos, ‘you’re not something special in the community,’ says former NHLer Curt Giles. ‘You’re part of the community and you have to act that way.’
The Humboldt Broncos bus crash is a terrible chapter in a decades-long story about a town, the people who live there and the team they call their own. But there are other chapters, about hard work, resilience and the time the town stood behind a coach who chose integrity over a championship. There is hope in their story.
For Terry Henning, it all started with a knock on his front door on 9th Street, just past the land titles building in Humboldt and about a block from the old Leo Parker Arena. Kelly Kidd was doing the knocking. Kidd was a prominent grocer around town, and president of the newly formed Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team, a squad that reeled off seven consecutive victories to kick off its inaugural 197071 season.
The team’s hot start had a significant flaw. The Broncos head coach, whose name has slipped through the cracks of local history, would celebrate each successive win by getting raucously drunk. For a new, community-owned, community-operated franchise, in an area with strong German-Catholic roots, and with players largely drawn from the town and the surrounding farms and villages, it was a situation that just wouldn’t do.
And so they fired the coach and came knocking for Henning, a young physician at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital with a sparkling hockey resumé — he had played at the University of Saskatchewan, and coached younger kids in Humboldt to provincial hockey championships. He was busy building his practice, delivering babies at night but, as he recalls, saying no wasn’t exactly an option.
“What you need to understand is the Broncos were a different ballgame. We built a team of mostly local kids, and kids from the nearby towns,” says Henning, from his home in Nanaimo, B.C.
“We were a community team.”
Humboldt and its Broncos were a thread in a larger hockey fabric, a rich Canadian tapestry of towns and farms and suburbs and cities, and the places in between, where the game brings us together, where we understand what it means to be part of a team. And that is why Canadians put hockey sticks on their front porches in the days after the Humboldt crash, as a memorial to an unspeakable tragedy; it is why school kids across the country went to class in hockey sweaters on Thursday; why a GoFundMe campaign for the players and families affected has surpassed $10.5-million; and why hockey Moms and Dads everywhere, who spend winters in cold rinks, tying skates, and telling their sons and daughters to try their best and have fun, have been thinking: that could be my kid — that could have been me.
Humboldt is one place, but the story there is a part of all of us. And what you need to understand about Humboldt’s story is that, before the Broncos came along, the town had been starved of junior hockey for 13 years. Ever since 1957, when Scotty Munro, persona non grata in Humboldt hockey circles, hijacked the Humboldt-Melfort Indians, relocating the franchise to Estevan and renaming it the Bruins.
It was an unholy hockey insult for the residents of Humboldt, and the Broncos, at long last, were their deliverance: a town-owned team consisting of small, speedy, skilled, hardworking, dynamic local kids, with a doctor for a coach — Henning would stitch players up on the bench — and an optometrist for a general manager.
Aaron Lukan is 61 years old, manages the Humboldt Housing Authority, and counts himself as a “day one” Broncos fan. Games at the Leo Parker, a rink without protective glass or mesh, had all the fervor of a big tent religious revival. Fans didn’t sit — they stood, and when they ran out of places to stand, the younger bucks would clamber up onto the catwalk overhanging the ice, and watch from there.
“The place was literally packed to the rafters,” Lukan says.
Curt Giles, a transplant from The Pas, Man., with family roots in Humboldt, joined the team as a 14-year-old in 1973. He was the youngest player, wore number four – in honour of his hero, Bobby Orr — and billeted with his aunt and uncle, Bob and Bernice Grunsky.
“We were brought in there, and the older guys took care of the younger guys, and the billet families took care of the kids,” he says. “It was like family, there is no question about that.
“It was the true sense of a community actually wrapping itself around a hockey team.”
Players went to Humboldt high school, got part-time jobs in local businesses and got recognized wherever they went. They were teenage celebrities, but they didn’t act like it, because home was Humboldt — where nobody was any better than anybody else, and nobody was any bigger than the town and its team.
“You’re not something special in the community,” says Giles, who went on to play 14 seasons in the NHL. “You’re part of the community — and you have to act that way.
“It’s one lesson you never forget.”
Giles is an anomaly in provincial junior hockey’s greater whole. He made it to the NHL where most players didn’t, and still don’t. The Humboldt Broncos, the Richmond Sockeyes, the Pembroke Lumber Kings, the Pictou County Crushers, the Fort McMurray Oil Barons, and the scores of other teams and leagues that dot the country, aren’t the next step on the road to the big leagues. They are the big leagues, for kids who aren’t quite good enough to play major junior hockey, for late bloomers looking to land a scholarship to an American college program, and for 20-year-olds who love the game and aren’t quite ready to give up on the dream.
These kids aren’t playing to get rich, and their teams — and their towns — aren’t playing for a pay-off much greater than community pride. And that pride is a powerful draw in a place like Humboldt. Doc Henning lost his first 13 games as Broncos coach in 1970. But Humboldt didn’t lose faith. It was the beginning of a hockey journey, with twists and turns, downfalls and get-back-up-agains. Henning drilled his players in a simple philosophy: as community representatives they must never be “out-skated or out-worked.”
The Broncos made the finals that first year.
Two years later they made headlines as a central player in one of the greatest junior hockey dust-ups in Canadian history. Humboldt won the Saskatchewan league championship, advancing to interprovincial play against the Portage la Prairie Terriers, a bruising lot from Manitoba. (Media wags dubbed the Terriers the “Terrorists”). Game 5 of the seven-game series ended with a wild brawl in Humboldt, after which Doc Henning declared enough — the Broncos would be forfeiting the series.
The controversy caught the eye of Peter Gzowski, the CBC radio host, who waded into the fray in April 1973. Gzowski asked Doc Henning was it true, were the Broncos prepared to forfeit, even at the risk of being banned, fined and potentially booted from the Saskatchewan junior league by the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association (CAHA)?
“When that brawl broke out, we just said no way,” Henning told Gzowski. “There is just no way, as a physician, that I could live with myself, saying to myself that I put kids on the ice and somebody lost an eye, or was seriously injured.
“I’ve got two kids on crutches right now, and I’ve got three or four kids with bad face lacerations.”
The coach stood firm. The players stood behind the coach. The town stood behind its team, and the Broncos held fast — a rebuke to a bash-your-brains-in-brandof-hockey. The CAHA investigated, ultimately fining the team $150 for abandoning the series. Meanwhile, a criminal investigation into the Terriers resulted in a trial for Ty Langton, the back-up goaltender, and his conviction for “common assault causing bodily harm” — with a goalie stick.
“It was unbelievable,” Henning says. “I’m a physician. I’d make the same decision today.”
By the time Billy McDougall came to Humboldt from the Toronto suburbs in August 1986, times, and the Broncos, had changed. The team was regarded as the best in Canada — a magnet for players from across the country, the United States, and as far away as Finland. The Broncos weren’t just local. They had gone global.
“Everybody wanted to play for Humboldt,” he says.
McDougall is the Broncos Wayne Gretzky. People around town still talk about his eight-point night against Weyburn. He scored 83 goals and 187 points in 61 games in 1986-87, a Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League record. But it is not the hockey he remembers most.
McDougall billeted with Brent Stebbings, the Broncos marketing manager, whose father, Murray, owned Murray’s Men’s Wear on Main Street, a clothing store that sold everything from suits to snowmobiles (and hockey sticks). McDougall worked part-time at the shop, and would meet his teammates for meals at Smitty’s, over on 8th Avenue. The players might not have been from the town but they were made to feel a part of it.
“Right from the start, the people were so welcoming, and that feeling just grew,” he says.
The relationship was near perfect, unless the Broncos lost a game, which they only did four times that season. (Their record was 56-4). Dougall’s phone lit up with calls from former teammates, many of whom he had not spoken with in years. Now here they were reaching out for one another across time, sharing stories, shedding tears. Humboldt was the small town that sucked you in, McDougall says, and it made you friends for life. The Broncos Gretzky played 28 games in the NHL — another anomaly — and spent close to a decade on the pro loop in Switzerland, Italy and Germany.
“I’ve spent a lot of time over the years thinking about where I’d be without my experiences in Humboldt,” McDougall says, from his home in New Waterford, Nova Scotia. “It is where I learned how to be a man.”
Jordy Wingate was a teammate of McDougall’s, a defenceman. He is convinced that if he hadn’t gone to Humboldt he wouldn’t have earned a hockey scholarship to St. Cloud State University in Minnesota — and he wouldn’t have come home to the University of Saskatchewan for medical school afterward.
Now he is a family doctor in Melfort, about 40 km west of Tisdale, where a crash with a tractor-trailer obliterated a busload of hockey players on a Friday afternoon. As the call went out for help, Wingate jumped in a car with another doctor, rushing to Tisdale Hospital to assist with the victims during the “golden hours,” those precious moments after a trauma where lives can be saved or lost. “It was awful,” he says. On the weekend, as what had happened settled in, and as the adrenaline drained off, Wingate phoned Maddy Smith, his billet Mom from Humboldt. They still talk once or twice a year. Somehow hearing her voice made him feel better.
“I am still a Humboldt Bronco,” Wingate says. “When you are part of a team, you are part of that family forever.”
Humboldt and the Broncos share a narrative, about hard work, teamwork, taking pride in a common purpose — and winning. Humboldt isn’t some dying Prairie outpost. It is a working, thriving place of almost 6,000 souls, and the Broncos are part of its pulse, woven into the local DNA and into a calendar that has two seasons: hockey — and getting-ready-for-hockey-season.
The crash is impossibly sad. But it is not the end, it is another chapter, a terrible episode in a decades long story about a town and the people who live there, and the team they call their own. There is hope in that story.
“The thing about the Humboldt people is they are great people. They’re hardworking people,” Curt Giles says.
“They are strong, strong people. They’re proud, proud people. I can see them building something even stronger based upon this accident.”
Doc Henning has been thinking a lot about the old days, at his home on Vancouver Island. What he remembers aren’t the wins, or even the run-in with Portage la Prairie, but how the community stood behind him when he made the decision to walk away from a potential championship.
“I’ve never forgotten that,” he says. “What you need to understand is the commitment of the town, of the people, to this team.
“I am not a very good mathematician, but they have been supporting the Broncos since 1970 — that’s 48 years — and I tell you, that means something.
“That means something.”