HUMBOLDT, SASK., IS ONE PLACE, BUT THE STORY THERE IS PART OF ALL OF US. THE TOWN AND THE TEAM IT BUILT, THE BRONCOS, SHARE A COMMON STORY AND UNDERSTAND THE GAME THAT BRINGS US TOGETHER.
THE STORY OF A TOWN AND ITS TEAM
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. WE WERE A COMMUNITY TEAM. — TERRY HENNING, HUMBOLDT BRONCOS HEAD COACH FROM 1972-76
For Terry Henning, it all started with a knock on his front door on 9th Street, about a block from the old Leo Parker Arena in Humboldt. Kelly Kidd was doing the knocking. Kidd was a prominent grocer, and president of the newly formed Humboldt Broncos junior hockey team, a squad that reeled off seven consecutive victories to kick off its inaugural 1970-71 season.
The team’s hot start had a significant flaw. The Broncos head coach, whose name has slipped from local history, would celebrate each 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.
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, all the places where the game brings us together. That is why Canadians put hockey sticks on their front porches in the days after the Humboldt crash; it is why school kids across the country went to class in hockey sweaters; why a GoFundMe campaign for the players and families has surpassed $10.5 million; and why hockey Moms and Dads everywhere 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 hijacked the HumboldtMelfort 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.
Aaron Lukan is 61 and a “day one” Broncos fan. Games at the Leo Parker, a rink without protective glass or mesh, had all the fervour 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,” says Lukan.
Curt Giles, from The Pas, Man., joined the team as a 14-year-old in 1973. The youngest player, he 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 the Humboldt high school, got parttime jobs and got recognized wherever they went. They were teenage celebrities, but they didn’t act like it, because home was Humboldt — where nobody was better than anybody else.
“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 scores of other teams aren’t the next step on the road to the big leagues. They are the big leagues, for kids not quite good enough to play major junior hockey, for those looking for a U.S. scholarship, for 20-year-olds who love the game and aren’t ready to give up on the dream.
These kids aren’t playing to get rich; their teams — and their towns — aren’t playing for a payoff any greater than community pride. 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. Henning told his players that as community representatives they must never be “outskated or out-worked.” The Broncos made the finals that first year.
Two years later they made headlines in one of the greatest junior hockey dust-ups in Canadian history. Humboldt won the Saskatchewan league championship, advancing to inter-provincial play against the bruising Portage la Prairie Terriers. Game 5 ended with a 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. Was it true, Gzowski asked Doc Henning, that the Broncos prepared to forfeit, risking being banned or fined from the Saskatchewan junior league?
“When that brawl broke out, we just said no way,” Henning told Gzowski in April 1973. “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.”
The coach stood firm. The players stood behind the coach. The town stood behind its team, and the Broncos held fast. The Canadian Amateur Hockey Association fined the team $150 for abandoning the series. A criminal investigation into the Terriers resulted in a trial and conviction for Ty Langton, backup goaltender, 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 in August 1986, the team was a magnet for players from across the country, the United States, and as far away as Finland.
“Everybody wanted to play for Humboldt,” he says.
McDougall is the Broncos’ Wayne Gretzky. They still talk about his eight-point night against Weyburn. He scored 83 goals and 187 points in 61 games in 198687. 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. McDougall worked part-time at the shop.
“Right from the start, the people were so welcoming, and that feeling just grew,” he says.
“After we lost our first game — maybe 30 games into the season — it was on the road, and we were on the bus and we got back to Humboldt real late,” McDougall says. “And our coach says, ‘OK, boys. Get your equipment on, we’re going back on the ice.’
“This was at three o’clock in the morning. Winning was expected in Humboldt, and losing was not accepted. The town takes so much pride in its team.”
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, N.S. “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 Saskatchewan for medical school afterward.
Now he is a family doctor in Melfort, not far from where the bus crash occurred. As the call went out for help, Wingate rushed to Tisdale Hospital to assist with the victims during those precious moments after a trauma where lives can be saved or lost.
“It was awful,” he says. On the weekend, Wingate phoned Maddy Smith, his billet Mom from Humboldt. 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. The Broncos are part of Humboldt’s 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. “I can see them building something even stronger based upon this accident.”
Doc Henning has been thinking a lot about the old days. And what he remembers most is 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.”