BRUCE ARTHUR, MORE COVERAGE,
Everyone in hockey could put themselves on that bus, and not just them. This one was on a Saskatchewan highway: two lanes, paved, north-south, flat as a kitchen table in the late afternoon sun. The Humboldt Broncos were nearly to Nipawin for a playoff game; 20 minutes away, maybe a little more, on the bus.
“We’d hit the rumble strips or something and it was funny, guys would laugh,” said Connor McDavid in Edmonton. “You never think that anything bad was going to happen; you thought it was a haven, a safe space.”
“That’s exactly why it hits home because everyone has been on that bus before.”
On Friday night, a bus carrying the Junior-A Broncos collided with a semi-trailer at an intersection called Armley corner, north of Tisdale, Sask. As of Saturday night, there were 15 dead, 14 injured. Some remained in critical condition. It reverberated around Saskatchewan, around the hockey world, and further. A horror.
“I prepared to talk to you so I won’t get emotional,” said Leafs coach Mike Babcock, a Saskatoon boy since he was a kid. He still had to keep himself from crying.
“Yeah, I know that road pretty good,” Babcock said. “It didn’t seem like a big spot, it’s not mountains or anything like that, but accidents do happen. You send your kid away — in my case to junior hockey — or college hockey, or college soccer, and I always used to think about those vans that the coaches were driving in college soccer: I always thought those were a nightmare. This was supposed to be as safe as it gets, and it just goes to show you you’ve got to embrace each and every day, and every day that you’re with your ...” — he had to stop for a second, and took a breath — “your family you better enjoy it.”
Humboldt is a little city of just over 5,000 people, but the Broncos have had 10 championships since 1970 in a league full of players more focused on college scholarships that the NHL. It’s four hours to La Ronge, four and a half to Estevan, on the bus. It’s the same across Canada: in the Maritime Junior Hockey League, it’s nearly nine hours from the Campbelltown Tigers to the Yarmouth Mariners; out west, it’s nearly 12 hours between the Prince George Spruce Kings and the Trail Smoke Eaters. Every hockey player — and not just hockey players in a big country — knows what it’s like on the bus, driving through winter days and nights.
“Even for me, my best memories are riding the bus, and doing what junior hockey players do: talking, playing cards, watching movies,” said Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Morgan Rielly, who played hockey in Saskatchewan from Grade 9 through major junior. “When you talk to guys in this room, or on different teams that you might meet along the way, that’s the first thing you talk about. ‘Oh, what was your longest bus ride?’ ”
In Saskatchewan, the little towns have been getting smaller for years, or even disappearing. As Swift Current native Patrick Marleau says, “Going back now to Saskatchewan and talking to parents and kids that are playing, they have to travel an hour for practice. As opposed to I didn’t have to travel until I started playing rep hockey, travel hockey, and I was 12. I think kids now, when they’re 6, 7, 8 years old, they have to travel far just to play.”
As much as anywhere in the country, Saskatchewan feels like they took a major city and split it into hundreds of villages and towns. Everybody knows someone. Everyone has a cousin, an old friend, a connection. By Saturday afternoon, Saskatoon’s blood banks were turning people away. People were offering lodging, transport, whatever they could. The GoFundMe for victims and families soared to almost $2.6 million, and kept climbing. If Saskatchewan is a small town, more people feel connected, so both the pain and the support are greater.
“In Saskatchewan, every community is fairly small,” said Swift Current native Patrick Marleau, “so everybody knows everybody.”
“These are the heartbeats, right?” said Sheldon Kennedy, who grew up in Elkhorn, Man., close to the Saskatchewan border and played for the Swift Current Broncos in Saskatchewan. “They’re the heartbeats of the town. People rally around the rink not just for junior hockey, but minor hockey. This is where they socialize. Towns come together.”
Kennedy was at the front of the bus on Dec. 30, 1986, when it hit a patch of ice, and four boys — Trent Kresse, Scott Kruger, Chris Mantyka and Brent Ruff — playing cards at the back of the bus were killed when the bus slid off the road. They just put up a memorial to the crash two years ago, and the WHL’s most valuable player award is still called the Four Broncos Memorial Trophy. In hockey, the pain is multiplied by billet families who treat these boys like sons; there were boys from more than just Saskatchewan on this team. This will last a long time.
“What I remembered yesterday was the chaos that came with people trying to figure out, is it my son, is it not my son? Is it my husband, is it not my husband? Is it my dad, is it not my dad?” said Kennedy, who along with three other members of that Swift Current team are heading to Humboldt to help any way they can. “We have all these families who are trying to piece it together. We have the players who survived trying to figure out who they’ve lost. That’s what I remember.
“They’re going to have a grieving process, and then a lot of that long-term trauma that comes with things like this. And just pain, and pain. One of the biggest things is being in Saskatchewan and growing up in a small town and knowing lots of people from out there, the resilience and the closeness of the towns and these people is what helps them pull through.
“We need to take a message of hope, because a lot of people need to feel and need to see and need to hear that there is a way to get through this, to recover from such loss and such tragedy in your life. I think that that’s important. It’s not a four-month fix. This is something that is going to take years and years.
“I know how close that whole town of Swift Current was when it happened. If there’s any light that comes out of this, it’s going to be how it pulls these communities even closer together.”
But it will be hard. Babcock said: “The hockey world’s an unbelievable world, (but) you can’t make up for loss. You just can’t. It’s got to rip the heart out of your chest.”
This is a big country with more empty spaces than people, and often the best way to get from city to city, town to town, is to drive. A lot of us put our kids on the buses, to get to school or to a game or somewhere. For many of them it’s a happy place, full of memories that will never fully fade. And it’s a safe space, until it’s not.