Painful reminder
Tim Tisdale was there in 1986. And he is there today — to assist anyone who survived the Humboldt Broncos’ bus crash and needs to talk.
Tisdale was a member of the Swift Current Broncos when their bus crashed on Dec. 30, 1986, shortly after the WHL team departed for a road game against the Regina Pats. Four of Tisdale’s teammates — Trent Kresse, Scott Kruger, Chris Mantyka and Brent Ruff — were killed.
A painful memory has been revisited countless times over since Friday, when Humboldt’s team bus collided with a tractor-trailer while the Broncos were en route to an SJHL playoff game against the Nipawin Hawks. Fifteen of the 29 people on the bus died in the accident.
“This hockey world is pretty small,” Tisdale said Saturday from Swift Current. “By all means, if anyone who’s involved wants to talk to me and get a feel for what we went through and maybe share experiences, I’d be more than willing to do that with them.”
Tisdale is all too familiar with the several stages of grief that the survivors are likely to encounter.
“One, they’ve got to worry about themselves and deal with the injuries that they have before they can really go anywhere else,” he said. “They’re going to have that disbelief. They’re going to go through some anger, for sure. Some of them might have some guilt at times because they survived and others didn’t.
“The emotions that they go through, it’s going to be the full gamut. Unfortunately, it sticks
with you for a long time.”
One of the keys, Tisdale noted, is to avoid internalizing any reactions to the tragedy.
“At least from my standpoint, I know it took a lot of years before I really opened up and talked to anybody about it,” he said. “I think, in hindsight, it was probably a mistake, and those were mistakes that I think they’ve learned from. By the sounds of it, they do have grief counsellors there right away.
“For everyone involved, I definitely encourage them to talk. It’s not something that you can deal with internally.”
The people of Swift Current are dealing with an accident that hits too close to home.
“It’s pretty sombre,” Tisdale said. “My phone’s been going off pretty steady ever since the news came, from people all over the place, people I haven’t heard from in lots of years. I think everybody is in that state of shock that this has happened again. You think maybe this is a once-in-a-lifetime thing and, unfortunately, it’s not for people here.”
After the accident and memorial service, the 1986-87 Broncos decided to resume their season. Many members of that club were also on the team in 1989 when Swift Current won the Memorial Cup — thanks to an overtime goal by Tisdale.
“When we got together and decided what we were going to do as a group and as a team, we did that because we felt that was best for ourselves,” Tisdale recalled. “On a really big scale, were we overly concerned about how it affected the community? Probably not. But as a group, we rallied together and said this is what we needed to do for ourselves to heal and, along with that, it involved everyone in that community.
“The whole community rallied around that decision, and hopefully they can look back and say that, yeah, it’s terrible what’s happened and it’s a situation right now that no one can imagine, but hopefully there is a light at the end of the tunnel that they can look towards.”