B00ADOAFYO EBOK by Leesa Culp, Gregg Drinnan, Bob Wilkie Read Free Book Online Page A

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.
    “Mom,” he said, “you have to come to the hospital. Something happened to Scott.”
    Louise and her husband, Walt, immediately headed for the hospital, where they took seats in the waiting room. Shortly after arriving, Louise found herself comforting Kari Kesslar, who was waiting for news on Trent Kresse, her fiancé.
    (Later it would be revealed that Brian Costello, the Swift Current Sun sports writer who had spoken with Kresse on the bus, had stumbled on a set of keys in the field near the wreckage. The key fob had the name Kari on it. Knowing that the keys belonged to Kresse,