’78 Petes ran out of gas at Memorial Cup

Team reunites Saturday, recalls bus breakdown and players hitchhiking

The Peterborough Petes might have won the 1978 Memorial Cup had they not run out of gas.

On the highway that is, not the ice.

The 1978 Memorial Cup was co-hosted by Sault Ste. Marie and Sudbury. Following their final round-robin game on a Friday in the Soo, the Petes bus stalled halfway to Sudbury.

With help hours away, players hitchhiked to Sudbury, many arriving Saturday morning.

While they didn’t play the New Westminster Bruins in the final until Sunday afternoon, it threw their scheduled sleep, meals and practice off. They lost the final 7-4 in their first of three straight appearances in the Memorial Cup final. A year later they won the franchise’s only Memorial Cup.

Sixteen members of the 1978 team are reuniting Saturday and will be honoured prior to the Petes hosting the Mississauga Steelheads, at 7:05 p.m. at the Memorial Centre.

Gary Green was the youngest coach in junior hockey at 24 when he led the team.

“The biggest memory, everyone will tell you, was running out of gas on the way back from Sault Ste. Marie. We talk about that quite a bit when we get together, about the boys hitchhiking. I talked to Mike Meeker a month ago and he said, ‘I think about that a lot. We lost because we ran out of gas — on the highway.’ It took so much out of us. We lost a night’s sleep, guys got colds hitchhiking. You didn’t have cellphones back in those days and no heat on the bus.”

Dick Todd was the trainer and he remembers Keith Acton playing with a separated shoulder in the final game.

“We harnessed his shoulder so that it wouldn’t move to dislocate,” Todd said. “I remember Boris Fistric taking Acton into the boars and just pounding his shoulder. Somehow he knew he had a shoulder injury.”

“We didn’t have a lot of superstars,” said defenceman Paul MacKinnon, who runs an insurance agency in Livonia, Mich. “We had four lines, five or six defencemen, and it seemed like everyone contributed at different points in the season.”

Green took over a team that lost in the first-round of playoffs the year before, under coach Gary Young. They missed the playoffs the year before under Roger Neilson.

“I recall we got off to a horrendous start,” he said. “I remember thinking I could get fired before I even get going here.”

They got it going with many players who went onto to have NHL careers.

Among those confirmed coming are Acton, Mark Kirton, Greg Theberge, Keith Crowder, Randy Johnston, MacKinnon, Stuart Smith, Dave Fenyves, Ken Ellacott, Tim Trimper, Chris Halyk, Steve Larmer, Jeff Brubaker, Brian Drumm, Green and Todd.

After beating the Oshawa Generals 9-3 in the eight-point quarter-final series, the Petes upset Brian Kilrea’s Ottawa 67’s in eight games, 9-7. Ottawa’s line of Bobby Smith, Tim Higgins and Steve Payne was considered unstoppable.

They edged Bert Templeton’s Hamilton Fincups in seven games in the final.

“Everything just clicked in the playoffs. It all fell into place,” MacKinnon said.