SURVIVORS OF ’86 FATAL CRASH OFFER COMFORT
A lot of eyes that lit up, and moms and dads who had a smile when we told them we’ve been through this and we’re doing OK now.
Everything changed that day, in the proverbial blink of an eye.
One moment Bob Wilkie was playing cards with his friends and teammates in a school bus headed to their next game. The next, “bodies were flying everywhere,” he says, his eyes closing briefly as he recalls the horrors of Dec. 30, 1986.
“I went from being a 17-yearold looking to get drafted,” he says of the day 31 years ago that he’ll never forget, “to a survivor.”
While it’s a word that usually has mostly positive connotations, survivor in Wilkie’s mind meant the start of a decades-long process of healing.
“We know what a long road it is, we know how dark it can get,” says the former NHLer and current mental health coach, who chronicled the tragedy and its aftermath in his 2012 book, Sudden Death: The Incredible Saga of the 1986 Swift Current Broncos.
Wilkie and his fellow mostly teenaged survivors were never offered counselling or grief support during that turbulent time, an injustice further compounded by the sexual crimes perpetrated on some of them by their coach Graham James.
On Sunday morning, Wilkie landed at Saskatoon’s John G. Diefenbaker international airport, part of what can be best described as a “comfort crew” — a band of “old guys,” as his friend Sheldon Kennedy puts it — here to let the survivors of Friday’s Humboldt Broncos bus crash know that, as Kennedy again adds, “there is light at the end of the tunnel, there is a way out of the darkness.”
Over the 48 hours previous, Wilkie, Kennedy and other survivors of another crash that took the lives of four of their teammates joined their fellow Canadians in mourning the loss of 15 lives when a bus carrying the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League team collided with a semi-trailer on an otherwise quiet stretch of Prairie highway.
One thing that sets them apart from the majority, though, is they are also survivors of an eerily similar tragedy — their Swift Current junior league team also bearing the Broncos name — when they were teens.
On Sunday, the friends, who also include Peter Soberlak, Darren Kruger and Bob Harriman, made their way around Saskatoon and Humboldt, spreading their message of hope and healing for the young survivors, their loved ones and their community.
At Royal University Hospital, they made their way to two different floors where several of the Broncos players are being treated. Family and friends, many wearing the logos of the Humboldt Broncos on hats, jackets and sweatpants, spilled into the ward as they at some points joke and commiserate with the young patients, as others share tears and words of wisdom with the injured who are also grieving for their lost friends and mentors.
It is the kind of outpouring of love, compassion and simple kindness that one can see everywhere in this quiet corner of Canada, across the country and indeed world, after news of the devastating accident spread fast and far.
Still, there is a unique gift in knowing that when a life is irrevocably altered by tragedy, there are others who have not only survived, but also thrived in its wake.
That’s why, says Soberlak, he didn’t hesitate to jump on a plane Sunday to join his fellow comfort-crew members. “We’ve been a family for over 30 years and now they’ve joined our family,” says Soberlak, who today works as a mental performance coach at Thompson Rivers University in Kamloops.
“There were a lot of eyes that lit up, and moms and dads who had a smile when we told them we’ve been through this and we’re doing OK now.”
Hope. It is a word that seemed such a faint possibility here in the hours before hundreds gathered at the Humboldt’s ice arena to say goodbye to 15 beautiful boys and men.
Kennedy and his crew — Kruger lost his brother Scott in the 1986 crash, while now retired RCMP officer Harriman was a new first responder when he came across the devastating scene that left four dead — know that coming from them, the promise of hope is worth its weight in gold.
As the day goes on, other notables descended on the hospital to offer kind words, support and small gifts, from Coach’s Corner Don Cherry and Ron MacLean to Oilers and Flames coaches Todd McLellan and Glen Gulutzan; they are visits that delight and cheer everyone from the patients to staff.
Still, it’s a good bet that when it comes to instilling a belief in future hope on these young hockey players, few could hold a candle to the comfort crew of Kennedy and friends — an appreciation that is mutual.
“To hear them say ‘that’s what we needed to hear’ … was extremely powerful,” says Wilkie. “It’s a day I’ll never forget.”