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  “I think Ed got tired of us,” Rittinger said with a chuckle.

  In the end, Rittinger’s bunch paid between $400,000 and $450,000 for its WHL team. (The Edmonton Oil Kings, the last expansion franchise sold by the WHL, cost the NHL’s Edmonton Oilers a cool $4 million. The Oil Kings began play in the 2007–08 season. The Kamloops Blazers, a more established franchise, sold for more than $6 million in the fall of 2007.)

  Some of the teams that Rittinger had tried to purchase didn’t stay put for long. The Kelowna Wings became the Spokane Chiefs for the 1985–86 season. The Calgary Wranglers, who had moved west from Winnipeg for the 1977–78 season, ended up in Lethbridge as the Hurricanes in time for 1987–88. The New Westminster Bruins became the Tri-City Americans over the summer of 1988.

  In 1988–89, a season in which the Broncos would win the Memorial Cup, there were fourteen teams in the WHL. At one time or another, Rittinger had tried to buy eleven of them. Only the Medicine Hat Tigers, Prince Albert Raiders, and Saskatoon Blades hadn’t heard from him.

  But now a sale had gone through; the WHL’s board of governors gave its unanimous approval on April 11, 1986, just three days after the Broncos’ last season in Lethbridge had come to an end. Rittinger’s perseverance and diligence had paid off — Swift Current Tier One Franchise Inc., headed by Rittinger, owned the Broncos. The WHL was back in Swift Current.

  Buying the franchise was one thing, of course. It took an untold amount of work to take the franchise from there to the ice, and there was the matter of a budget approaching $600,000, a large sum for a franchise operating in the Canadian Hockey League’s smallest market.

  But it all got done in time for the 1986–87 season.

  CHAPTER 4

  The RCMP Officer

  On December 30, 1986, at 3:45 p.m., a call for emergency assistance was heard on the scanner in the RCMP detachment at Swift Current. A bus had overturned east of town on the Trans-Canada Highway.

  Corporal Bob Harriman, an RCMP officer since 1974, was on duty when the call came in. Immediately upon being contacted by the radio dispatch centre, Harriman knew he was responding to a situation in which there were likely to be multiple injuries and perhaps fatalities. En route to the accident site, he was further advised by the dispatcher that there were at least four dead and an unknown number of injured.

  The heavy slush and ice covering the roads was a challenge, even for a seasoned law enforcement officer like Harriman. However, with his hands tightly gripping the steering wheel of his vehicle, Harriman wasn’t just worried about the road conditions.

  After all, it wasn’t a commercial passenger bus that had crashed: it was the bus carrying Swift Current’s beloved junior hockey team. When Harriman heard that, his mind reeled, and he had to pause and regroup. The fact that the Broncos were involved made it personal — really personal. Harriman and his family — wife Janine and daughters Suzie and Cari — provided room and board for defenceman Bob Wilkie. He had been billeted in their home since the Broncos acquired him from the Calgary Wranglers. Like most billet families, the Harrimans had gotten close to the seventeen-year-old Wilkie over the previous three months, and by now he was all but part of the family.

  Billet families provide a home away from home for junior hockey players, and the relationships that are forged are often unbreakable. Any billet mom will tell you that “her” hockey player is like a son to her. It is not unusual for a billet family to be there when their player gets married or debuts in his first NHL game. It also isn’t unusual for a real, true friendship to grow between a player’s billet family and his parents.

  Despite Harriman’s personal connection to the accident, however, he was first and foremost a professional; he knew he had a job to do, and he set out to do it.

  Upon his arrival at the scene of the crash, Harriman noticed the presence of other police units and saw that plastic yellow sheets had been placed over four bodies. Police officers and emergency medical services personnel were, according to Harriman, “triaging injured for transportation via ambulance or available vehicles” that had happened upon the scene.

  The Broncos’ bus had ended up on its right side, and the space that at one time had contained the front windshield had been used as an emergency exit. Harriman observed that twelve to fifteen people with various injuries were gathered in the highway’s south ditch.

  “Many were capable of walking and had moved from the bus to the side of the roadway,” he recalls. “Others had exited the bus but remained on the ground in the ditch.”

  At the time of the call, Harriman had been driving a police van, so he was able to transport six of the injured, including general manager and head coach Graham James, to the hospital in Swift Current. The hospital was about a ten-minute drive from the accident scene.

  “James appeared to be in shock,” Harriman recalls, “and was crying and saying ‘Why?’ over and over.”

  (More than twenty years later, Harriman would look back at everything and offer this: “A twist of pitiful irony also unfolded that day, as I transported Graham James and a couple of injured players to the Swift Current Hospital. I recall his grief toward his players, which was to be overshadowed by investigations into his sexual misconduct involving his players.”)

  After turning over the injured to hospital staff, Harriman, almost sick with worry over the fate of Wilkie, returned to the accident scene. In the short time that he had been on site and during his first trip to the hospital and back, he “hadn’t accounted for Bob as either a survivor or one of the injured.”

  Mind racing and heart pounding, Harriman entered the bus through what used to be the windshield. Scrambling over what had been the right-hand seats, he searched for injured, trapped, or dead passengers. Harriman felt a brief sense of relief when he realized “the bus was clear of survivors.” That left only the four bodies to be checked, something Harriman didn’t want to think about, not even for one second.

  During an RCMP career that began in Humboldt, Saskatchewan, in 1974 and ended in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia in 2010, Harriman attended hundreds of fatal accidents.

  “But,” he admits, “this one in particular remains the most vivid and difficult scene I have witnessed.”

  In Swift Current, Harriman was working as a forensic identification specialist, so one of his responsibilities was to capture the accident scene on film and gather evidence, which he did as he moved through and around the site.

  Lifting each of the plastic yellow sheets and looking into the faces of the young men who had been enjoying a card game just a short time before would be difficult enough, but not knowing whether he would lift a blanket and find Wilkie’s dead eyes staring back at him made things that much worse.

  Harriman prepared to check under each of the yellow covers. By now he felt physically ill. His forehead was wet, but he didn’t know if it was sweat from nervous anxiety or from snow melting as it landed on his face. With great trepidation, he lifted the cover off one of the victims who had been pinned under the bus. It wasn’t Wilkie. But there are no words to express his mixed emotions in the moment.

  Harriman moved further outside toward the other three blankets.

  “I uncovered each boy, recognizing some, and fearing the next one would be Bob,” Harriman says.

  Upon completing the ghastly task, Harriman was torn — he was relieved to realize that Wilkie wasn’t one of the four players who had been killed, but he felt tremendous sorrow because four boys were dead.

  For their families, for the survivors and their families, and for the citizens of Swift Current, life would never be the same, and Harriman knew it.

  Most of the other players, coaches, and team officials, as well as the driver, Doug Archibald, were injured to one degree or another. The physical injuries would heal; the mental hurt would linger for a long, long time.

  “I don’t think you ever get over it,” Peter Soberlak, one of the Broncos, would say more than twenty years later. “It’s a cliché, but you ne
ver get over something like that because it drastically changes your perspective on life.

  “It made my hockey seem really not all that important at that point.”

  While thoughts of the impact the accident would have on the team and the community raced through Harriman’s mind, he continued to be faced with one pressing question: What had happened to Bob Wilkie?

  The Harrimans had gotten involved as billets out of their sheer love for hockey. Bob was a career RCMP officer — he had even been part of the famed Musical Ride in 1977 and 1978 — and Janine was employed by Scotiabank. Janine’s four brothers, like so many young Canadian males, had played hockey, and she had grown up watching Hockey Night in Canada. With the Broncos franchise returning to Swift Current from Lethbridge, the Harrimans jumped at the chance to be a part of what most of the community felt was a homecoming.

  When Bob Wilkie came to live with the Harrimans, they had two small children, Suzie and Cari, and another on the way. On May 8, 1987, five months after the bus accident, they welcomed a baby boy into their family. They chose to name him Patrick, after Broncos goaltender Pat Nogier, who was Wilkie’s good friend. Nogier would often visit Wilkie at the Harriman home, and they found him to be extremely likeable.

  Janine remembers, “We had Bob as a billet for a total of three years. He became one of the family, especially through all the challenges and difficulties endured by the players during the Graham James era, beginning with the bus accident and ending with the coaching scandal.”

  Bob Wilkie, with former billets Janine and Bob Harriman (2008).

  Courtesy of Bob Wilkie.

  After the Broncos won the 1989 Memorial Cup and had returned to Swift Current from Saskatoon, the site of the tournament, the Harrimans held a barbecue as a prelude to the partying. The Harriman children and others from around the neighbourhood watched as the Broncos barbecued wieners with the plastic on them. (Hey, these were hockey players, not culinary arts students.) During the barbecue, Wilkie began spinning the youngest Harriman daughter, Suzie, above his head. After he put her down, she staggered around like a catcher under a wind-blown popup, only to receive a gash when she fell and hit her head on the fireplace. Which is how Suzie got her Memorial Cup souvenir.

  Janine fondly remembers long talks around the kitchen table, and becoming a surrogate parent to a young man who affected her family in more ways than they ever could have imagined.

  Of the accident, Bob Harriman says, “It was a memorable but tragic moment: looking under body blankets for my hockey son, but also looking for that young boy who arrived at our home full of dreams to be the next superstar in hockey, who was bewildered and so very unprepared for his new environment, who was confused by the mixed messages of agents and coaches, and so very young to be thrust on his new billet family at sixteen years old. What I saw in each young face that day was something that no one can imagine. The dead would speak no more and the injured would carry scars forever.”

  Because of his job, Harriman spent a lot of time involved with the accident and its aftermath.

  “The days and weeks after the accident I spent working on the accident scene by day and dealing with Bob’s injuries and post-traumatic syndrome by night,” Harriman remembers. “Bob had ongoing visions of witnessing three of his friends fall into the open window area of the bus and disappear under the bus as it moved along the ditch. His most difficult time was dealing with the friend who, when the bus came to rest, was still alive but pinned under and slightly inside the bus.

  “Janine spent hours at the hospital with Bob. We would spend many hours helping Bob cope with his conflicted emotions as he had been sitting in the bus seats most impacted by the crash. He had witnessed the dying moments of the young boys who had become his friends, and suffered both the fear of the crash and the scene repeating itself over and over in his mind.

  “Bob also suffered the ‘survivor syndrome,’ and often said, ‘If I could have only done something to help one of them or save any of them.…’”

  All Harriman could do was tell Wilkie over and over again that neither he nor anyone else could have saved anyone that day.

  CHAPTER 5

  The Hospital

  Bob Wilkie awoke in Swift Current Union Hospital. As his eyes opened, all of his senses began to take in all that was going on around him.

  “When I came to,” he says, “I remembered immediately what had happened, and I couldn’t shake the image I had in my head of Chris Mantyka.”

  Needless to say, the hospital was a beehive of activity. But at the same time, a pall seemed to hang over the building. People were scurrying every which way and there were unanswered questions hanging out in every corner. This was a small hospital that served Swift Current and surrounding area, and bus accidents that included fatalities weren’t a run-of-the-mill occurrence.

  By now, word of the accident had gotten out into the community, and family members and billets, hopeful and fearing the worst at the same time, had begun congregating at the hospital. Everyone was looking for news — any tidbit of news.

  Wilkie had asked someone at the hospital to call Janine Harriman, who hurried to be at his side. He had a hip injury — he was fearful that it had been broken — but hadn’t yet been taken for X-rays. Upon her arrival, Janine, four months pregnant with Patrick, quickly realized that Wilkie was going to be fine. But she found the hospital a sombre place, with several players wandering aimlessly around the emergency ward, clearly overcome with grief and shock, clearly dazed and confused.

  Janine was shown to Wilkie’s room, where the two had an emotional reunion. As best he could, Wilkie related what had happened. She held one of his hands and wept as emotion poured out of him.

  In times of stress, people sometimes say the strangest things, and this was no exception.

  “Janine,” Wilkie said, “all I have on is my Christmas boxers. Can you get me some shorts or something?”

  He remembers something resembling painful laughter coming from Janine.

  “It was total chaos and all I could think about was my underwear,” Wilkie says. “We held each other and cried some more.”

  Wilkie asked Janine to call his parents with the news that he was okay. That wouldn’t be a problem, she said, adding that her two girls already had been told that their “big brother” would be fine.

  Meanwhile, Janine’s husband, Corporal Bob Harriman, would spend several hours doing investigative work at the accident site before being able to get back to the hospital, where he found his wife and Wilkie comforting each other.

  “Picture a tough hockey player sitting on a hospital bed close to his billet mom in Santa Claus boxers,” he says.

  While the Harrimans and Wilkie held a teary reunion, players were continually being wheeled past the room. On their way by, players would glance into the room, recognize Wilkie, and ask if he was okay. Some of them asked if he had seen Scott Kruger, Trent Kresse, Chris Mantyka, or Brent Ruff.

  After a while, Wilkie was able to compose himself enough to tell Janine that he had seen Mantyka die and that “there had been at least one other player trapped under the bus.”

  It was about then when Graham James, the team’s general manager and head coach, happened by. He darted into Wilkie’s room and asked if they had seen Joe Sakic and Sheldon Kennedy.

  “That was it,” Wilkie says. “He didn’t ask, ‘Are you okay?’ He didn’t ask, ‘Did you hear about Scotty and Trent?’ He didn’t ask, ‘Did you hear about Brent and Chris?’ All he said was, ‘Have you seen Joe and Sheldon?’”

  Bob Wilkie with his father, Jim, mother, Judy, and brother, Scott.

  Courtesy of Bob Wilkie.

  Wilkie was stunned by what he interpreted as James’s callousness. In hindsight, he says that it was then, in that hospital room, when he began to look at James in a completely different light.

  “It didn’t make any sense to me,” Wilkie says, adding that he was left wondering, What about me? I was part of his team, too.

 
He admits that he turned his head away from James and “continued to cry … and cry … and cry.”

  Eventually, Wilkie was examined by a doctor. His face was scraped and covered in dried blood, but he didn’t need stitches. He was taken for X-rays on his sore hip, but they came back negative. Nothing was broken.

  In the meantime, things continued to happen.

  Peter Soberlak remembers arriving at the hospital in a van, walking in, and realizing that a wave of urgency had overtaken the facility. It was, he felt, organized confusion.

  “It was all us kids walking around … I think there was a sense of shock with the people in the hospital, the nurses and the doctors,” he says. “I remember standing there, just waiting to get behind a counter and phone my parents. That’s the first thing I did, was get back there and call my folks and say that I was all right. At that point, I still didn’t know what had happened. I didn’t know for a while.”

  He had ridden from the scene of the crash to the hospital in a van with Trevor Kruger, who kept asking Soberlak if he had seen his brother, Scott. Trevor, who had been seated near the middle of the bus, knew that Soberlak had been in a seat right in front of where Scott, along with Kresse, Mantyka, and Ruff, had been playing cards.

  “He knew I was in the back and he was worried about Scott,” Soberlak says.

  Trevor was the Broncos’ rookie goaltender that season, and he would stay through the Memorial Cup–winning season of 1988–89. Being from Swift Current, he would become something of a hometown hero.

  “I must admit,” Wilkie says, “the first time I saw Trev play I thought, ‘Who the hell is this? Why is he here?’ Little did I know that he was to be one of the main reasons we won the Memorial Cup. He played the puck like a defenceman and was very quick and agile.”

  Trevor was not yet four months past his eighteenth birthday at the time of the crash. He called his mother, Louise, from the hospital.