Broncos Remember Teammates
The Humboldt Broncos visit Vegas: What a happy, sad week it was, Kevin Mitchell writes.
Star-Phoenix sports editor Kevin Mitchell and photojournalist Liam Richards travelled to Vegas with the Humboldt Broncos this week and were granted extensive access as the team prepared for the NHL Awards.
It’s 2,600 kilometres from the gaudy glitz of the Las Vegas strip to the windswept Saskatchewan intersection where everything fell apart.
But here it is, Monday night in Vegas, and the boys have touched down. Ten of them, all together, assembled from 13 surviving Humboldt Broncos players. They’re accompanied by family members, and they’ll stay for three nights, tasting the city, tightening bonds, and experiencing ... what do we call this? Fame? Widespread recognition?
As players and parents leave the airport building around midnight and walk to a VIP transport, a silhouette in a nearby parking garage hollers “Humboldt strong!” Players turn their heads, and see a solitary man’s dark form, hands held high, three storeys up, saluting them as they pass.
It’s beautiful and shivery. On April 6, on a far away prairie tract, those same players alternately flew and smashed around a bus as it collided with a semi-trailer loaded with peat moss. Sixteen people on that bus died. Thirteen live.
They’re miracles, these boys — it’s a word that’s been tossed around, and it holds up to deep scrutiny.
We’ve seen photographs: Bus, semi, skid marks, littered ditch on a vast prairie. The human body shouldn’t survive that, and most of those airborne frames are still broken — bones, ligaments, synapses, brains.
But you see these 10 boys, lifted from the wreckage, finding life on the other side, grieving those left behind. They’re scarred, and hurting, and resilient. On Monday they had flown to Las Vegas for the National Hockey League awards gala. They would walk a red carpet. They would be treated like kings, applauded by superstars.
They’re hockey kids at heart from cities and small towns, firing off locker-room humour, pointed insults, laughing fast and easy. But you see them in quiet moments: A hand on a shoulder, a gentle push for a teammate in a wheelchair.
“I love those boys,” said Christina Haugan, whose husband, Darcy, the Broncos’ 42-year-old head coach and general manager, died in the crash.
“They can tell when I’m having a bad moment or a bad day, instantly. I had a moment on the airplane, and right away, there’s players there — they ’re sitting there, holding your hand, just being there. (Broncos’ player) Brayden Camrud actually told me he’s going to visit me in the old folk’s home, and I was like, ‘ Well, thank you, but I’m not that old, you know!’ One day. But they’re the sweetest boys.
“The boys have shown up at my house to play PS4 with my boys (aged 13 and nine). They take them for ice cream, they show up to watch their soccer games. They’ ve just shown up.”
After that aforementioned lofty greeting from a Vegas denizen in a parking garage, the Broncos boarded the transport, which took them from the airport to the hotel. It was a party transport: Thumping music, flashing lights, bemused parents along for the ride.
Many of these boys have already tasted the high life. Kaleb Dahlgren, for example, watched a playoff game as a guest of the Washington Capitals. He met with Capitals’ owner Ted Leonsis, sat in the private suite of NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, ate the finest foods, stayed in the fanciest hotel room, talked with Ron and Don on Hockey Night in Canada.
Kaleb’s father, Mark, has accompanied his son on these travels, several weeks after making a frantic — and vain — search for his boy in the midst of all that wreckage, only to be reunited hours later.
“I feel like I’m on The Bachelor. You have all those dates, and you do all these things you would never do in your life,” Mark said. “We’re staying in suites, we’re going to be at the NHL awards, rubbing shoulders with NHL players. That’s not my life. We don’t do that. For us, it’s a great experience out of a bad tragedy.”
Here, for the record, are the players who made the trip: Dahlgren, Camrud, Ryan Straschnitzki, Graysen Cameron, Jacob Wassermann, Matthieu Gomercic, Derek Patter, Tyler Smith, Xavier LaBelle, Bryce Fiske.
Nick Shumlanski couldn’t go, and Layne Matechuk and Morgan Gobeil remain in hospital.
The 16 who died: Coaches Darcy Haugan and Mark Cross, bus driver Glen Doerksen, athletic therapist Dayna Brons, play-by-play broadcaster Tyler Bieber, volunteer statistician Brody Hinz, and players Logan Boulet, Adam Herold, Logan Hunter, Jaxon Joseph, Jacob Leicht, Conner Lukan, Logan Schatz, Evan Thomas, Parker Tobin, and Stephen Wack.
It’s a load to carry, just over two months later. Players talk about conflicting feelings: Excited about the trip, but fully aware of who’s not there.
And there’s this: The Broncos have gone global. Their story cuts deep, everywhere.
They were conspicuous in Vegas: A press conference with a thick blanket of cameras and recorders, and a red-carpet stroll accompanied by loud cheers, autograph seekers and people holding phones high.
On awards day, as the Broncos congregated in the hotel lobby, people stopped, talked, took selfies.
Fernand Driscoll, a tourist from tiny Blanc- Sablon, Que., got a photo — he’s strolling through the lobby, and there they are, these boys he had read about.
“I’m a big hockey fan. I follow hockey, and I followed this tragedy right from Day 1,” he said. “I played hockey all my life. I’ve felt for those guys. I was touched by them. It’s very emotional.”
NHL stars sought them out. P.K. Subban, lively and gregarious, took a selfie with the whole team.
Players from the hockey squad at Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., where a shooting left 17 dead, stopped by a side room on awards night and posed for a photo with the Broncos.
Willie O’Ree, the NHL’s first black player and a walking history lesson, chatted and shook hands. The NHL award named after him, the Willie O’Ree Community Hero Award, was given posthumously to Haugan on Wednesday night.
“Oh, it was a tragedy,” O’Ree said, with feeling. “When I played in the American Hockey League, they travelled by bus most of the time. I just have to say that it’s a terrible tragedy, but everybody’s sticking together, and they’re working with their higher powers.”
On Wednesday morning in a crowded backroom, during a rehearsal for the NHL awards, goalie Jacob Wassermann — paralyzed from the waist down — performed wheelchair wheelies for the amusement of his teammates.
He was released from hospital Monday after a long, long stay and went straight to the airport in Saskatoon for the Vegas trek. He said his spirits were buoyed by a visit from Rick Hansen.
“He told me to live my life the same way I was before,” Wassermann said. “There’s no limitations in the world, as long as I don’t put them on myself. He was a big inspiration to me; he helped me get past the hard parts of accepting having a disability.”
As players rehearsed, Dahlgren realized he shouldn’t have left his glasses in the hotel room.
He had been designated to make a speech on behalf of the team, but he struggled to read the teleprompter, squinting and stumbling. He walked across the stage, borrowed Camrud’s glasses, and made it through smoothly.
He had assumed the teleprompter would be bigger, he said later.
“(Camrud’s glasses) are giving me headaches, they’re a little too strong, but they ’re way better than before. I can actually see,” he said, and that night — with the real thing going live across the continent — he wore his own glasses, and nailed it beautifully.
Then O’Ree pronounced Haugan the winner — no surprise to the Broncos, who knew in advance — and Christina Haugan stepped forward to accept the prize. Her speech was perfect. She was stoic, and poignant. Men and women, already rendered fragile by a video tribute to the team, wiped their eyes.
“His legacy is far more than what is recorded on the stats sheets,” she said. “It is measured by the lives and communities that are better off for having Darcy in them. It is now up to those individuals to pay forward his legacy onto others. For that reason, what’s happening here tonight in Vegas, must not stay in Vegas. The torch has been passed.”
Players, who spent so much time through the week laughing and jesting, were deeply affected. The camera panned their faces, each mug telling its own story during a raw and open moment. They hugged her, and they were a hockey team right there on that stage, glad to be together.
These NHL awards were a tonic, a sweet reunion, a thing they needed.
But they really, really miss their friends.
“There’ s one wish I had on my birthday,” said Tyler Smith. “And that was to bring everybody back, and to be together once again.”
His legacy is ... measured by the lives and communities that are better off for having Darcy in them. It is now up to those individuals to pay forward his legacy onto others. For that reason, what’s happening here tonight in Vegas, must not stay in Vegas. The torch has been passed. CHRISTINA HAUGAN, accepting the Willie O’Ree Community Hero Award on behalf of her late husband, Broncos head coach and GM Darcy Haugan