Hockey Towns

by Ron MacLean

  The whole team could see the chemistry between Ellerman and Zukiwsky. Over the season, they each averaged more than two points a game. Zukiwsky managed to lead the Canada West conference in goals despite being, as he put it, “the most benched player in the whole league.” Mike wanted Jarret to play aggressively, but when he could see Zukiwsky getting to the point where he was ready to either get into a fight or take a dumb penalty, Mike would slap him on the bench to rein him in.

  The Horns swept the UBC Thunderbirds and then the University of Alberta Golden Bears at home. They’d never beaten the Bears like that. The Horns moved into first place, and the team started to believe.

  At the end of November, they faced the University of Saskatchewan Huskies and their old coach, Dave Adolph. Mike and Dave had played hockey together at the U of S, so they were friendly competitors. The Horns won two overtime games and were ranked number one in the country. They had finally found a way to win the close ones.

  Lethbridge ended the season with a record of 19–7–2. They were not easy wins—tons of bullets were dodged. In the conference semifinals, they faced the Regina Cougars. Regina was the only team that had beat them twice in a row all year. Canada West was a much tougher league than those in the east, so the Horns felt if they made it out alive they’d have a chance at the championship.

  They lost right out of the gate, 5–4, a one-goal defeat. Having never been in the playoffs, they weren’t ready for the intensity level and the speed. The loss brought doubt. Would the Horns be haunted forever by a losing mentality?

  The next night Regina scored early, and the Cougars kept the 1–0 lead all the way into the third period until Jarret shot one in under the crossbar. It hit the mesh and bounced out, but the goal light came on. The play continued for a few seconds until the linesman blew his whistle. Regina objected, but the officials ruled it a goal. The Horns scored on a power play in the second overtime, and the series was tied at 1–1.

  Emotions ran high. Cougars head coach Bill Liskowich, still upset about the tying goal, stepped out onto the ice and was suspended for the final game of the series the next night.

  The third game between Lethbridge and Regina was tied at three after regulation. In the dressing room between the first and second overtime periods, Mike could see that the guys were just vibrating with nerves. He came in to talk to the boys about pressure. He spoke about all the hard work they’d put in all year and how they had earned the right to feel confident about their preparation. There was no room for . . . the phone rang.

  The landline was in the trainers’ room at the other end of the dressing room. The team had two trainers, Don Matern and Dwayne (Dewy) Monteith. Dewy was a roofer by day. He’d been around forever, and he was all things—stick boy, trainer, skate sharpener, you name it. He ran to answer the phone. Mike took a breath, but he was steamed. He yelled out, “Who the eff is calling here right now?” Dewy, who had picked up the phone, yelled back, “It’s God calling. He wants us to win tonight!” The tension broke and the team relaxed. When they went back out, Perry Neufeld tapped in a centring pass from Jarret Zukiwsky, and they took the series.

  Up next were the University of Calgary Dinosaurs, a very tough team. The Horns took the first game in a squeaker, 2–1 in overtime. U of C came back and won the next game 3–2. In his pregame speech before the tiebreaker, Mike continued to focus on matchups and pairings. He looked James Moller square in the eye and gave him a mission—shut down the Dinos’ best line, Greg Suchan, Sean Krakiwsky and Tracey Katelnikoff. Make sure to pressure those guys—no time and space . . . and then the phone rang. The guys all laughed and cheered, “It’s God calling, he wants us to win tonight!” Just ahead of his speech, Mike had given Trevor Keeper a quarter for the pay phone down the hall.

  The score was 1–1 late into the third, and then with six minutes left, Ellerman picked up a rebound and flipped it off his backhand. The Horns were on their way to the University Cup.

  The papers said the Acadia Axemen had an unbeatable squad. Head coach Tom Coolen was quoted as saying, “I think that if we play our game, we’ll be all right.” The Lethbridge Herald reported that they were “licking their chops,” they were “fearsome” and they had “clobbered Dalhousie.” Ellerman said the Horns read all the hype. If the Axemen were overconfident, that was a good thing. Later, he told the Meliorist, “We played up the role. But deep down we knew we were there for a reason.”

  In their single-game, sudden-death semifinal, the Horns got swarmed in the first ten minutes. The Axemen scored a pair of fluky goals and built a quick 3–1 lead. Ellerman’s line went out on the ice seven minutes in. Ellerman knew the big stage was making the team feel that they were in over their heads. From the bench, Mike shot him a look that said, “Should I call a timeout?” Trevor shook his head no. That would show weakness. Instead, he turned to his line and said, “Let’s win this shift.” By the end of the first period, the score was 4–3—for the Horns.

  At the start of the third, Lethbridge was up 7–5, but Acadia kept up the pressure, outshooting them 18–8. Thanks to Kruger, the Horns were still in it, but as Babcock told the Lethbridge Herald, “Holy mackerel, there were a few fire drills out there.”

  The game ended 9–6 for the Horns, with Ellerman scoring three goals and adding three assists. The Pronghorns were through to the final against the Guelph Gryphons, scheduled for two nights later. During the season, Trevor Kruger and Trevor Ellerman would head out for a couple of beers after practice on the night before a game. Mike didn’t acknowledge the activity, but he seemed okay with it. After practice on the off-day between the semifinal and the final against Guelph, Mike pulled Trevor Kruger aside, handed him a twenty-dollar bill and told him to go out for a couple of beers.

  Before the final, Mike warned the boys to stay disciplined. All year, Mike had focused on their specialty teams, and the Horns had the top power play in the league. Perry Neufeld and solid defenseman Travis Kelln each scored early goals with the man advantage, and Guelph never got back into it. The Horns won 5–2.

  As he held the trophy high, big D Johnny Curran yelled out, “This is for all the fans in Lethbridge who took a boot-lickin’ all those years supporting the Pronghorns!”

  Today, when Trevor Ellerman watches Mike being interviewed after games, he hears him say things like “We gotta be on our toes. We gotta keep the motor running.” He gets a kick out of knowing that Mike has said the same things to NHLers like future Hall of Famer Pavel Datsyuk that he once told the Horns. Ellerman is forever grateful. “Once, he was our coach and helped us climb to the greatest heights. He said it was his most amazing feat ever, to take this group who had never made the playoffs and win the championship, and he did it in ten months.” But Mike told the Toronto Chronicle Herald what he told everyone else. “I didn’t do it. I set out a standard, and the players lived up to it.”

  Winnipeg

  MANITOBA

  POPULATION:

  663,617

  Me Blue, You Blue

  From 1980 to 1984, Gerry James was the coach of the Yorkton Terriers, the midget team that a young Trevor Keeper played for in Saskatchewan. Gerry tried to talk Trevor’s teammate, defenceman Wendel Clark, into staying, but they lost him to Notre Dame.

  In his youth, Gerry had been a pretty tough stay-at-home defenceman for the Toronto Maple Leafs in the winter and an all-star running back for the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the summer and fall. At that time, the kids had no clue about his CFL background. Trevor didn’t find out until Gerry missed a couple of practices to attend his Canadian Football Hall of Fame induction.

  Gerry didn’t talk a lot, but he had presence. After training camp that fall, Trevor was nervous when he walked into the coach’s office for a one-on-one. Gerry asked him how big he was. Trevor was about 162 pounds, but he answered, “About 175.”

  Gerry laughed. “Is that with rocks in your pockets?

  Gerry’s eighty years old now. A couple of years ago, he was watching television when he saw a s
tory about the research into sports concussions being conducted at London Health Sciences Centre at Western University in southern Ontario. In the 1950s and ’60s, there were only two tests for concussions—“What’s the score?” and “How many fingers am I holding up?”

  Gerry never wore a helmet at any point in his hockey career, and he played football with only rudimentary head protection. Gerry phoned the centre and not only agreed to donate his brain after death to the institute, but offered to be part of the testing. The doctors were ecstatic.

  Gerry flew down to Western, and for two full days they did all kinds of tests—an MRI, puzzles, psychological testing. The MRI showed evidence of numerous concussions, but there are no obvious effects so far. His wife, Marg, and he have been married sixty years, and she says he came through with flying colours, above average for his age. Mind you, she says if she asks him to take out the garbage, he forgets immediately.

  Gerry’s dad was Dynamite Eddie James, a star running back in the ’30s. But Gerry never got to know Eddie very well. It’s a tragic story.

  Eddie James received training in Winnipeg with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry and then went to Europe to fight in World War II in 1939. He was a dispatch rider, a motorcycle messenger. The infantry units used couriers to take urgent messages back and forth. It was a dangerous job.

  Gerry didn’t see his dad during his formative years, ages five to eleven, so when Eddie returned in 1945, he was a stranger. Eddie drank a lot before he went overseas, and back at home it got worse. He couldn’t keep a regular job. Gerry felt upset and ashamed of the way people treated Eddie. He wasn’t a bum—he was a war hero and a football great.

  When Eddie got deep into the bottle, he’d get so worked up he’d come at Gerry’s mother, Moira, with his fists, and Gerry remembers jumping on his dad’s back to hold him off.

  Moira’s life was misery, and so when Gerry was fourteen she finally left Eddie and filed for divorce. No one in the neighbourhood got divorced back then. Gerry rarely saw Eddie after that. One Christmas, when Gerry was twenty-three, the family invited him over for dinner, but a week before, Eddie checked into Notre Dame Hospital for surgery. Gerry wanted to go visit him but didn’t. He was afraid, although he wasn’t sure of what. And then Eddie died suddenly, on Boxing Day, 1958.

  Eddie had never thrown a ball with Gerry or shown any interest in helping him in sports, but sports came easily to the boy. In fact, it’s all Gerry wanted to do. He loved listening to Foster Hewitt on Hockey Night in Canada and he loved the Bomber broadcasts. Gerry rarely saw his dad and missed him terribly, so he’d constantly pore over Eddie’s scrapbooks. He memorized his dad’s stats and knew all the players he played with. He wanted to impress Eddie, get his attention, so he decided he was going to be a Winnipeg Blue Bomber and a Toronto Maple Leaf someday.

  Gerry’s brother Donald was four years older and not a lot of fun to be around. Gerry took a lot of beatings when he was little. When he was in grade school, Gerry would escape on an old bike he’d been given. It was basically a frame, a chain and two wheels, no fenders, but to Gerry it was a treasure. It gave him freedom. Every morning, he got up at five o’clock, hopped on his bike and delivered the Winnipeg Citizen even through January blizzards that buried houses and cars. Riding a bike through icy, rutted streets in Winnipeg helped him develop really good legs and upper-body muscles. In the summer, Winnipeg’s forty-degree heat made it difficult to breathe if you were standing still, so Gerry rode fast to catch the breeze and get away from the mosquitos.

  Moira worked in the garment industry as a secretary. She allowed Gerry to keep the money from his paper route. He needed it—he was always famished. The cheapest meat in those days was liver. And he hated liver. He’d try to get it down, but it would come right back up. Some days, he’d sit at the table for two hours, until Moira wasn’t looking, and then his dogs, Oscar and Skipper, got fed.

  Moira was a great cook. She used to make the best cinnamon buns anyone ever tasted, and she would sell them in the neighbourhood. While they were cooling, she’d tell Gerry, “Don’t you touch those cinnamon buns.” They were tough to resist, but he never did. Using his paper money, he’d fill up on sweets—chocolate bars, turnovers and licorice—from the local confectionery.

  The boys were a handful and Moira had to work, so the summer that Eddie left, Gerry stayed with Moira’s brother, Uncle Pat, in Grenfell, Saskatchewan, where he had a John Deere service centre. Gerry loved hanging with his uncle and learning how to fix engines. Grenfell is just fifteen miles south of Crooked Lake Provincial Park, near the Qu’Appelle Valley, where Moira’s family had a cottage. Donald came to visit, and the minute they laid eyes on each other, the boys started to argue. Uncle Pat told them to take it outside. They thrashed around in the gravel and stubble. Gerry had grown a few inches that year and so he managed to hold Donald down and land a few good punches. It was their last fistfight.

  Gerry had grown into a terrific athlete with incredible hand-eye coordination. When he bowled for the first time, he threw strike after strike. Kelvin High picked him to represent them in a city speedskating competition. All the athletes showed up in tights and skates. Gerry wore a plaid shirt, jeans and a pair of hockey skates. They started him on the inside lane, and he wasn’t sure of the rules, but thanks to a couple of good body checks, no one passed him. He took home the gold medal that day. Gerry liked baseball too and played for the Sir John Franklin community team. He was the league’s best pitcher. One of the headlines in the local newspaper during the season that year reads, GERRY JAMES SENSATIONAL. The story began, “Gerry James entered local baseball’s Hall of Fame Friday night with a brilliant no-hit, no-run game as Sir John Franklin racked up its 11th victory in Bantam leagues competition.” The next year, Gerry joined the Kelvin High football team, and that’s when he found the sport he loved best.

  Gerry and his buddy Jack Robertson couldn’t afford tickets to the Bomber games, so they’d climb the forty-foot wall under the scoreboard at Osborne Stadium and sit on top to watch the games. Security would order them down, but Gerry and Jack would stay put, because they knew none of the guards wanted to climb up to get them.

  When Gerry was fourteen years old and playing his last year of bantam hockey, he was spotted by a Toronto Maple Leaf scout named Squib Walker. It was around Christmastime. After the game, Squib patted him on the back and said, “That was a good game there, Gerry. Buy your mother a Christmas present.” They shook hands, and Squib walked away, leaving Gerry to discover a twenty-dollar bill in his palm.

  As a midget, Gerry showed remarkable endurance and often played a full sixty minutes on defence. He was so tough, his buddies started calling him Jesse James. In 1950–51, with Moira negotiating for him, Gerry signed a C form, which gave the Toronto Maple Leafs control over his professional rights. He was paid one hundred dollars, and so he was disqualified from college teams. It didn’t matter—Gerry wasn’t much of a scholar.

  That spring, the Winnipeg Monarchs, a Leaf-sponsored Junior A team, was on its way to the Memorial Cup final against the Eastern Canadian champions, the Barrie Flyers, and they called Gerry up as a spare defenceman. Barrie had a strong team that included future NHLers Jim Morrison, Leo Labine, Réal Chevrefils, Jerry Toppazzini and Doug Mohns. They swept the series 4–0, but the Leafs were impressed by Gerry’s play so they asked him to come to Toronto.

  With Moira’s support, Gerry enrolled at Runnymede Collegiate Institute in Toronto and moved into a mansion in the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood with Toronto Marlboro manager Stafford Smythe’s mother-in-law. It was like living in Downton Abbey. The family met in the parlour and dressed for dinner. Gerry was lost when they sat down to eat—he didn’t know which fork to pick up. The family was kind, but they were gentry, and the food portions left him starving, so he moved out and billeted.

  At sixteen, Gerry was almost six feet tall and 185 pounds. He became a football star at Runnymede, averaging twelve points a game. The coach, Hal Brown, told a
reporter, “For years, I haven’t had a boy any better than James and I doubt you’ll see many better in high school. They call us a one-man team.” In one game, with less than two minutes left, Gerry took a York Memorial kickoff behind his own goal line and ran it out 125 yards to score the winning touchdown.

  The Winnipeg Blue Bombers sent him a letter inviting him to spring camp in 1952. He was thrilled but didn’t want to quit school, so instead he attended the team’s main camp that summer. He was fully expecting to get cut, but they kept him, offering him fifty dollars a week to play. He couldn’t believe his luck. The money was good, but it was even better to play with his heroes, players like Tom Casey, Indian Jack Jacobs, Bud Tinsley and Dick Huffman. As far as Gerry was concerned, Huffman was one of the best defensive/offensive tackles in the history of the team.

  Gerry moved back to Winnipeg that July, and every day he jumped on his trusty old bike to make it to practice.

  Gerry had just turned nineteen, his second year of pro, when the Bombers won the western championship and met up with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats at Toronto’s Varsity Stadium, before a crowd of twenty-seven thousand, in the 1953 Grey Cup game. The Bombers had flown him back from Toronto to sub in for fullback Lorne Benson, who was injured. Gerry scored the only Winnipeg touchdown in a 12–6 defeat. He also rushed for 167 yards in the game, more than any other player.

  Gerry had long admired Indian Jack Jacobs, who he says doesn’t get enough credit for the Bombers’ success in the 1950s. Indian Jack was miserable to the rookies, but Gerry didn’t care—Indian Jack was a competitor, just a fantastic athlete. He won the Manitoba amateur golf championship one year, and in football he could do everything—punt, play defence (he was a cornerback) and quarterback the team’s offence. But Indian Jack had very small hands, so he couldn’t throw a wet football. He had to palm the ball, and it was raining during the 1953 Grey Cup game.