One of the greatest that never was
You might have heard the stories — the drinking, the abuse — but you’d be dead wrong
The story Kimbi Daniels tells is very different than the many stories that have been told about him over the years.
When he was 19 and playing with the Philadelphia Flyers, doctors discovered a degenerative condition in his knee. He was told there were no guarantees an operation would save his career, but if left alone, the knee would deteriorate.
A bone graft was ultimately performed on his femur, but Daniels says his skating, the thing that set him apart, was never the same.
“From that point on, things were a struggle,” the 42-year-old Daniels now says from his home in Anchorage.
So it seems like a pretty simple story. Except it isn’t that simple when you’re a Metis kid from Brandon who was coached by Graham James and might have been the best 16-year-old hockey player in the country while starring on the Swift Current Broncos’ 1989 Memorial Cup championship team.
Daniels never fulfilled his limitless potential, which led to a lot of rumours and certain assumptions about his life. But if you ask him, he’ll tell you he isn’t a victim, a drunk, a head case or any of the other things that were whispered about him. He is, in fact, a hockey player who ground out a 19-year pro career because he loved the game.
And now that he’s retired, he leads a happy, productive life in Alaska where he’s raising his two kids. “I’ve heard it all,” Daniels says. “I was a partier, a drinker, I did this, I did that. But if you ask the people I played with they’ll tell you something else.”
“He was a good teammate,” says Davis Payne, the former St. Louis Blues head coach who coached Daniels with the ECHL’s Alaska Aces.
“There were no issues off the ice. He was a family man and a mature hockey player. He became a teamfirst guy. A lot of people wouldn’t say that about him earlier, but he was when I got him.”
Young star on the rise
The Memorial Cup begins on Friday in Quebec City and throughout its 96-year history, the Cup has served as the coming-out party for some of the game’s greatest players. In 1989, Daniels was the tournament’s dazzling talent who seemed to be announcing himself to the hockey world as a future star.
He was 16. That season, he scored 30 goals for the Broncos — all even strength — while playing a thirdline role on a loaded Broncos’ team coached by James.
The Broncos went 55-16-1 in the regular season, then won 12 straight games in the WHL playoffs en route to the Memorial Cup in Saskatoon.
They were led up front by Sheldon Kennedy, a dynamic winger who scored 58 goals, and defenceman Dan Lambert, who totalled 102 points. Three other players finished with 100 points and there were eight 20-goal scorers in a lineup that averaged just over six goals a game.
The team played beautiful hockey, and for most of the season, Daniels was overshadowed by his older, more accomplished teammates.
But he averaged a point a game in the playoff run, which set the stage for a virtuoso performance in the Memorial Cup.
The tournament field that year included a Laval team with future NHLers Donald Audette, Claude Lapointe and Patrice Brisebois; the host Saskatoon Blades, who were led by Kevin Kaminski and NHL firstrounders Scott Scissons and Kory Kocur; and a Peterborough Petes’ team with Tie Domi, Corey Foster and Mike Ricci.
The 16-year-old Ricci came into the tournament as one of the marquee attractions and was touted as a possible first-overall pick in the 1990 draft. In the Broncos’ five games, however, Daniels exploded for five goals, including the third-period tying marker in the championship game against the Blades.
Suddenly, everyone was talking about the game-breaker from Brandon with the breakaway speed.
“I haven’t seen any 16-year-old do the things Kimbi could do,” says Vancouver Giants GM Scott Bonner, who would help bring Daniels to Tri-City four years later.
“If they would have held the draft after the tournament, he would have gone in the first half of the first round,” says Tampa’s director of amateur scouting Al Murray, who was then working for the L.A. Kings. Swift Current’s Tim Tisdale would score the overtime winner against the Blades and, 21/2 years after four members of the Broncos — Scott Kruger, Trent Kresse, Chris Mantyka and Brent Ruff — were killed in a bus crash, the team won the Memorial Cup. Tisdale, Kennedy, Peter Soberlak, Bob Wilkie and Trevor Kruger were all on that bus.
Daniels remembers a lot of things about that tournament. Mostly he remembers the quiet bus ride back to Swift Current after the Broncos won the championship.
“You’d think it would have been a party on wheels,” says Daniels.
“But guys’ minds were elsewhere. It wasn’t sombre. It was just very subdued.”
The next season, Daniels returned to the Broncos and rattled off 43 goals and 91 points in his draft year.
It was a good, not great season and by the time the draft rolled around, he’d fallen to the third round where the Flyers took him with the 44th pick. Still, after a 118-point campaign with the Broncos, he was called up to the NHL club for two games as an 18-year-old and started the next season with the Flyers.
Then the knee problem was discovered.
Then everything changed for Daniels.
“There was a real divot there and it wasn’t getting better,” says Russ Farwell, then the Flyers GM who now runs the Seattle Thunderbirds.
“He had that skating ability that differentiates players and it was never the same. We thought we had something.”
“It must have been heartbreaking to have the thing you could do so well taken away from you,” says Bonner.
Daniels would miss most of the next two seasons before his minorleague odyssey started. Over the next seven years, he bounced around like a rubber ball, playing for 16 different teams in five different leagues.
If you’d seen him in Saskatoon that spring, you had a hard time reconciling the burgeoning star with what he became. There had to be a reason he fell so far, so fast.
And people were only too willing to supply those reasons.
Dark secrets
The Broncos, sadly, aren’t remembered solely for their heroic journey to the Memorial Cup.
Seven years after their championship season, James was charged with sexual assault after Kennedy and an unnamed player revealed a pattern of abuse reaching back to when Kennedy was 14. James admitted to more than 350 encounters with Kennedy and the unnamed players. Some of the abuse took place in the Broncos’ home rink.
In 2010, former NHLer Theoren Fleury and his cousin, Todd Holt, came forward with their own allegations. James was sentenced to two years on the original complaint, served his time, then was sentenced to five more years after Fleury and Holt came forward.
There are also suspicions those four players represent a portion of James’s victims. Daniels was interviewed twice by the police when Kennedy came forward and told them what he knew. He hadn’t been sexually abused by his coach and he was unaware of the history between James, Kennedy and other players.
When Fleury and Holt came forward, the police were back again and, again, they heard the same story.
“I told them, ‘I’ve told you everything I know,’ ” says Daniels, who billeted with Kennedy in 1988-89.
“I couldn’t have been more honest.”
Daniels is adamant about this. When he was playing for James, he heard stories. But the whole idea seemed so outrageous, so unbelievable, it couldn’t be true. James was a great coach. The Broncos were a great team. How could this black secret be kept from everyone?
“It bugs me there’s this perception people in Swift Current knew,” Daniels says. “No one knew. Until I saw the police report, I would have said there’s no way.”
Others aren’t as sure. But Daniels still thinks about it.
When he was 12, James wanted him to move to Moose Jaw and billet with a local family while he played minor hockey. His father, Louis, had known James from Winnipeg and left the decision with the boy. Daniels stayed in Brandon. Still, the story followed him around, just as it’s followed everyone who played for James.
Daniels is convinced former teammates told the cops he was one of James’s victims. A former junior teammate confronted him in the minors. Then there were stories Daniels was hitting the bottle hard to kill the pain. And he was Metis. It all seemed to fit. Except it didn’t. “I had an agent tell me, ‘You really have to get your drinking under control,’ ” Daniels says. “It wasn’t an issue in my life, but for a moment I thought maybe I should admit I’m an alcoholic and get fake help because that’s what people wanted. It was bizarre.”
Daniels wasn’t a choir boy, but you don’t play 19 years in the minors if you’re out of control. Farwell said it was never an issue in Philly. Payne said he never saw it in Anchorage. Neither did Keith McCambridge, who succeeded Payne.
Maybe Daniels didn’t rehab his injury as diligently as he might have and maybe he could have kept himself in better shape.
But that’s a far cry from the broken drunk he was thought to be.
Daniels admits he was near the end of his rope when he arrived in Anchorage for the 2000-01 season. But he found a home in the north country. He played eight seasons with the Aces, winning a championship in ’06 with Payne as the coach, and if he wasn’t the breathtaking talent he’d once been, he was a dependable pro who Payne says enjoyed the mentoring role.
“He was a guy who loved to play and wanted to keep on playing,” says Payne. “It’s what he knew.”
After one final season with the Phoenix Roadrunners, Daniels retired and returned to Anchorage. His marriage ended but he has a 13-year-old son, Kaden, and an 11-year-old daughter, Claire, and a job with the big fishing camps.
He says he would have loved to stay in the game but he returned to Anchorage for his kids.
“Life,” he says, “gets in the way.”
Lifelong memories
In the summer of 2009, the Broncos held a reunion of the championship team, which most everyone attended. It was the first time they’d all been back together since that spring day in Saskatoon, and they were men now.
Lorne Frey, James’s assistant coach who’s carved out a highly successful 24-year career as the Kelowna Rockets assistant general manager, was there. So was Lambert, now the Rockets’ head coach.
Frey says he was uncertain about what to expect, but when everyone got together, the stories and the good times started to roll.
“It’s amazing how many of them have done so well,” says Frey.
The old hockey man also describes the scene when Kennedy walked in and hung around the periphery of the group.
At first it seemed awkward. Then someone came over and started talking to him. Then another. And another. Soon there was a group around the former captain, talking and laughing; teammates once, teammates for all time. “I had a great time,” says Daniels. “I think everyone there had a great time. There’s always the elephant in the room. But everyone was happy to see everyone. You don’t forget those guys.”
Twenty-six years later, Frey and Lambert return to the Memorial Cup with the Rockets.
They won’t forget, either.