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  “Sheldon Kennedy gave him his personal cell phone [number] and said, ‘Any time you want to talk to me about this just phone me, doesn’t matter what time of day it is,’” the player’s father said. “My son was going, ‘Wow.’”

  Kennedy said he had “just wanted to reach out to him and tell him I think he’s doing the right thing. If I can be there to support and help in any way, I will be.”

  Soberlak flew into Calgary from Kamloops, where he is the chairman of Thompson Rivers University’s department of athletics. He also was president of the Kamloops Sports Council, an organization that oversees a lot of amateur sports in the city.

  Soberlak was born on May 12, 1969, in Trail, British Columbia, the home of the legendary Smoke Eaters. He played his minor hockey in Kamloops, where he began the serious part of his hockey career with the WHL’s Blazers under head coach Ken Hitchcock.

  Early hockey memories are anything but happy ones for Soberlak, who says his first season — he was sixteen years of age — in Kamloops “was hell.”

  “It was horrible,” he says. “The way I was treated by the coaching staff and the players.…”

  A highly skilled player with a sensitive side that ran contrary to what most, if not all, major junior hockey coaches demand from their players, Soberlak played in an era that was a whole lot different from the one that exists today. In fact, Soberlak admits he lived in fear of being hazed, something that happened to rookies with frightening regularity in the days when the law of the jungle governed the junior game.

  Early in his seventeen-year-old season, Soberlak was traded to Swift Current and found himself on a line with Kennedy and future NHL superstar Joe Sakic.

  Swift Current Broncos players Sheldon Kennedy (left), Joe Sakic, and Peter Soberlak.

  Rod Steensland.

  “When I got traded, I got rejuvenated,” Soberlak says. “I was playing on a line with Sheldon and Joe. But you know what? That was temporary; the damage was done. At seventeen, I was still in it, but after that I started to disconnect and distance myself from the love of the game.

  Bob Wilkie

  Rod Steensland.

  “I had lost the love of the game during my sixteen-year-old year in Kamloops.”

  Soberlak was a superb physical specimen, at six foot three and two hundred pounds, and with a hockey stick in his hands he was a magician. Because of his size, hockey people assumed he would be a physical force on the ice. But that wasn’t his game, and early in his third professional season, Soberlak shrugged his shoulders and walked away from hockey.

  He had been a first-round selection in the 1987 NHL draft, taken twenty-first overall by the Edmonton Oilers. He never played a game in the NHL.

  When Soberlak arrived at the airport in Calgary, he was met by Wilkie, who had grown up in Calgary. In fact, Wilkie began his major junior career with the WHL’s Calgary Wranglers. A strong-skating offensive-type defenceman with good size — he would play professionally at six foot two and 215 pounds — Wilkie was always seen as something of a nonconformist. That, in fact, may have led to his being traded by Calgary general manager John Chapman to the Broncos just one game into the 1986–87 season.

  Wilkie was a gifted puck-handler, something that Graham James treasured in a player. James would get more than a point per game out of Wilkie over two-plus seasons.

  Wilkie, however, is one of those personalities who always seem to be searching for something — the meaning of life, perhaps — and, like Kennedy, he would spend most of his pro career wandering in hockey’s hinterlands.

  Like Kennedy, Wilkie was a draft pick of the Red Wings, taken in the second round, forty-first overall, in 1987, the same draft in which Soberlak was selected. (In fact, five Broncos were taken in that draft. Sakic was selected by the Quebec Nordiques with the fifteenth overall pick; defenceman Ryan McGill went twenty-ninth overall to the Chicago Blackhawks; and, defenceman Ian Herbers was selected by the Buffalo Sabres with the 180th pick.)

  Wilkie’s career would end up reading like a Hank Snow country tune — Adirondack, Detroit, Adirondack, Fort Wayne, Adirondack, Hershey, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Hershey, Augsburg, Cincinnati, Fresno, Las Vegas, Fresno, Pensacola, and Anchorage — before he called it quits. For a few years after, he lived near Hershey working as an “attitude coach,” consultant, and speaker.

  Kennedy, Soberlak, and Wilkie hadn’t been together like this, they agreed, since the late spring — actually, hockey playoffs going on forever the way they do, it was early summer — of 1989, when they were celebrating that improbable Memorial Cup championship.

  “It was probably at the parade … after the parade,” a laughing Kennedy would say twenty years later. “What was it, Peter? A three-week party.”

  To which Soberlak replied, “I remember playing golf in my bare feet about the third day. I was real sick and missed the banquet.”

  Yes, those Broncos knew how to throw a party — they played hard and lived harder — and that was a legacy that would live on in Swift Current for a long time. But now they were, in the words of Buck Owens, “together again.”

  If only getting together had been that easy.…

  Kennedy hadn’t been the least bit reluctant to join up with his old buddies again. In fact, he was looking forward to the drive and the chatter that would be involved. He just didn’t know whether he wanted to go back to Swift Current, and he had spent a lot of quiet time arguing with himself: “Should I go or should I stay? Should I stay or should I go?”

  “I was very hesitant about going,” Kennedy admits. “But I needed to face it. Christ, I’ve been running away from everything my whole life. The difference is that I’ve dealt with that stuff.… I’m not — and I hate the word victim — I’m not held hostage by Graham or what happened. I feel it’s part of my life. It did happen. It’s not that it didn’t change certain things of the way I live my life.”

  In time, Kennedy chose to make the trip. And, in the end, he was glad that he did.

  “It was just a real good closure piece for me,” he admits. “I had always had this inner fear of going back there. I don’t have that anymore.”

  When pressed, Kennedy admits that he really didn’t know whether he would find closure. After all, what he had undergone during his time in Swift Current was unspeakably horrific. Who knew what might happen upon his return for the first time in twenty years?

  “The reality of what came out of there was just real good closure for everybody,” Kennedy says. “It was about just being able to shoot the poop and express views that … I think people had wanted to express for a long time.”

  Kennedy, who is prone to speaking in the majestic “we,” also admits to having felt huge relief at “actually being able to leave there and close the door and know that we never had to go back there.”

  Sheldon Kennedy (left) and Bob Wilkie at a Broncos’ Booster Club skate.

  Courtesy of Bob Wilkie.

  Wilkie felt pretty much the same way. He was excited about spending some time with Kennedy and Soberlak on the drive to Swift Current, but he had his doubts about what awaited them.

  “I was going to be with my buddies again,” Wilkie says, “but I did not know what was going to happen. We had been through so much together but never talked about so much of it.”

  Earlier in 2009, Wilkie had made a business trip to Calgary and had been able to hook up with Kennedy.

  “It was such a powerful meeting,” Wilkie recalls. “We shared insights we had not ever talked about.”

  They talked about the Broncos and their pro careers and what had followed.

  “Shelly and I had been together for a couple of years in Detroit’s organization after we left Swift,” Wilkie says. “Things had gone downhill for both of us after we left. Sheldon had gotten in trouble for drinking … as had I.”

  They both were known, as Wilkie puts it, “as troubled players [who] liked to party … that type of thing.”

  The truth, however, was something else. It wasn’
t that the two of them liked to party. It wasn’t that they liked the taste of the copious amounts of booze they ingested.

  “The truth was,” Wilkie now admits, “we were numbing ourselves. We had been through things no one could comprehend, and because we were not allowed to talk about it, we dealt with it the only way we knew how: by drinking.”

  CHAPTER 2

  The Crash

  December 30, 1986.

  When the day dawned in the southwestern Saskatchewan city of Swift Current, it brought with it a taste of January. It would turn into one of those wet winter storms that you have to live through to understand. Biting winds. Wet snow — or is it rain, or sleet? — blowing at you in a horizontal fashion, stinging your face like so many wasps.

  But no matter how hard it tried, the storm that day couldn’t do anything to dash the optimism that surrounded the Swift Current Broncos, the city’s brand new and oh-so-popular Western Hockey League team. The players had just reconvened after going home for Christmas. They had returned full of hope and exuberance; they were bound and determined that the second half of this season was going to carry them into the playoffs.

  While the weather, which had been so good the day before, had turned nasty, the Broncos skated that morning and the vibe was good. They were flying around the ice surface, eager for that evening’s game against the host Regina Pats. The team bus was scheduled to leave at 2:30 p.m., but with a two-hour drive ahead of them and because the roads were bad, it was decided they would leave a little earlier.

  But one thing led to another, and the bus didn’t roll out of the Civic Centre parking lot until 3:35 p.m. A couple of minutes later, the bus, with veteran driver Dave Archibald behind the wheel, turned onto the Trans-Canada Highway and headed east.

  The bus would never reach its destination. In fact, it wouldn’t get too far from its home base.

  As often happens in these situations, one can look back and see fate’s finger. Was that an omen? And what about this other incident?

  The night before the accident, a few of the Broncos — including defenceman Ed Brost, a nineteen-year-old Calgarian, and forward Tracy Egeland, a sixteen-year-old from Lethbridge — had gone to a movie. In order to make curfew, they got Egeland home first, and Brost then borrowed Egeland’s car and drove himself home.

  Egeland, one of the team’s youngest players, looked up to Brost and trusted him enough to let him take his first sports car, a red Pontiac Fiero that his parents had bought him.

  Unfortunately, the weather turned during the night. As Brost was returning the car that morning, he was broadsided by another vehicle while attempting a left turn. Brost remembers having two thoughts: “The first thing … was how bad I felt for this old guy who just hit me, because I could see how shaken up he was. Second, I kept thinking, ‘What am I gonna tell Tracy?’”

  Although the Fiero was badly damaged and would require extensive repairs, Brost managed to drive it to Egeland’s place.

  “I felt like such a schmuck,” Brost recalls, “and I remember the walkway to the front door seemed like it was two miles long.”

  When Egeland answered Brost’s knock, the words spilled off Brost’s tongue: “We gotta go, but I gotta tell you something.”

  Egeland recalls, “He felt real bad about wrecking my car, but I wasn’t mad at him. I could never be mad at Ed. He was too nice a guy.”

  Brost and Egeland were still able to make it to the arena in time for the morning skate, after which the players ran the arena stairs for a workout. There was a lot of chatter about how important it was to start the second half of the WHL season with a bang.

  The team gathered at Thumpers, a local restaurant, for lunch, then it was back to their homes for a pre-trip rest.

  As the players napped, the weather got progressively worse. Bob Wilkie, who was a defenceman on the team, recalls that “many of the players felt that maybe we should stay home.”

  “By then,” Wilkie remembers, “there was a travel advisory in effect. But, regardless of the warning, the coaches told us we were going. So we started to load the bus and prepared to depart.”

  However, there was a delay.

  Scott Kruger, a nineteen-year-old centre who was from Swift Current, had forgotten his dress clothes, so the entire team had to wait while he hurried home to save himself a fine. Like most teams, the Broncos had a rule that required players to wear dress clothes on road trips. Players would change into track suits on the bus and then change back into their dress clothes as the bus neared its destination.

  By the time Kruger returned, it was 3:30 p.m., meaning things were behind schedule. And the weather wasn’t getting any better. When the bus rolled out of the arena parking lot, it was 3:35 p.m. Despite the weather, the players were excited. This would be their first post-Christmas game and they really wanted to play well.

  As the bus hit the road, the talk was about that night’s game and recently received Christmas gifts. The Sony Walkman was a popular item that Christmas; many of the players had received one and were preparing to listen to their favourite music.

  As winger Trent Kresse, one of the team’s twenty-year-olds, boarded the bus, he stopped briefly at the front to talk with Swift Current Sun sports writer Brian Costello about the Christmas holiday. Once the bus left the parking lot, Kresse, who was from Kindersley, Saskatchewan, excused himself, explaining that he heard a card game calling from the back.

  Five minutes later, the bus turned onto the Trans-Canada Highway and began the short — well, short for the WHL — drive to Regina.

  Egeland tried to sit in the back with the veterans, but a pre-Christmas episode involving vomiting and a jacket meant the veterans, led by Wilkie, put the run on the fresh-faced rookie. Egeland ended up closer to the front of the bus, seated with Brost, who was being razzed about his misfortune with Egeland’s car.

  Wilkie was seated in the last row of the bus, taking up the four seats on the driver’s side. On the other side, directly across the aisle from him, were Kresse, Kruger, and two others. One was Chris Mantyka, a hard-nosed nineteen-year-old from Saskatoon who was known affectionately by his teammates as “Chief,” and the other was Brent Ruff, a sixteen-year-old from Warburg, Alberta, who was a member of hockey’s Ruff family.

  As they did on virtually all trips, the four got out a deck of cards and started a game of Kaiser, a four-player game that involves partners.

  And then it happened.

  “You know how when you cross from one side of the road to the other, there’s that little hump?” Wilkie asks. “If you close your eyes, you feel like your insides have lifted, if only for a second or two. I felt the bus moving like we were changing lanes.”

  The RCMP later determined that the bus was travelling at thirty-three miles per hour — fifty-three kilometres per hour — when it began its long skid.

  Wilkie was plugged into his new Walkman and was reading The Long Walk, a book by Stephen King. To this day, Wilkie remembers that the book’s cover “features an eerie picture of a windy road and a skeleton off to the side.” He also remembers that he was listening to the Canadian rock group Trooper. “I had the volume turned up — the track, which I remember like it was yesterday, was ‘We’re Here for a Good Time (Not a Long Time)’ — but not loud enough to drown out the noise of the bus.”

  Kresse was the first person to say anything.

  “Hold on,” he yelled. “It’ll be okay.”

  And then the noise started.…

  “I had no idea we were going off the road. But we did,” Wilkie says. “The bus left the road, rolled onto one side, bounced back to its wheels, hit the approach road, flew into the air, came crashing down on its rear tires, tipped, and skidded to a stop on its right side.”

  More than anything, Wilkie remembers people and things — suitcases, pillows — flying through the space inside the bus. He hit his head on the luggage rack and momentarily lost consciousness.

  It was, he said, “like a war movie. Everyone was screaming, everyt
hing was everywhere. Jackets, luggage, seats, glass … everything was all over the place.”

  Peter Soberlak had been seated near Wilkie. “Wilks … Wilks … you okay?” Soberlak called.

  Wilkie had a sharp pain in his right hip and a numbness in his head.

  “I think so,” Wilkie answered. “But my hip really hurts and my ears won’t stop ringing. Are you okay?”

  “This is bad, Wilks,” Soberlak replied, as he began to survey the carnage.

  Soberlak had been seated against a right-side window, right in front of the four card players. Clarke Polglase, a seventeen-year-old Edmontonian, was sitting with him. They had been talking about how enjoyable the Christmas break had been. Soberlak was in mid-sentence when he realized something was wrong.

  He would end up with a severely bruised right arm, the result of the bus’s right side twice being hammered against the ground. To this day, he has no idea how he survived while four teammates who were seated in such close proximity didn’t make it.

  “Sore. I wasn’t injured; just sore,” Soberlak says. “I couldn’t even get out of bed the next morning. I wasn’t injured and this far behind my head” — he holds his hands a foot apart — “four guys are dead. So I wasn’t really injured at all.”

  Soberlak helped Wilkie get to his feet. When they looked around, what they saw was total chaos.

  The bus was on its right side. People were screaming. Debris was everywhere.

  Soberlak took a look at Wilkie and said, “Your face is bleeding pretty bad. You sure you’re okay?”

  A bitterly cold wind was howling through what had been the rear window. Wilkie, who always wore shorts and flip-flops on the bus, suddenly was cold. He wanted his coat and shoes. So he reached down and started to pull up the seats that were lying on the ground. What he saw would haunt him forever.