Maxwell revisits Brandon hockey roots

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 09/10/2015 (3633 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Western Hockey League is celebrating its 50th season, and the Brandon Wheat Kings will reach 50 WHL campaigns next year.

But the Wheat Kings have a history that predates the WHL, something former Brandon coach and player Ron Maxwell recalled fondly in a visit to the Wheat City this week.

Maxwell, 84, now lives in Victoria and returned to his home province for the induction of the 1953-54 Dauphin Kings — a team he captained — into the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame last weekend. Before heading home, he took a side trip to Brandon with his son, Brad, to visit friends and family in the city that kept drawing him back throughout his hockey career.

A native of Portage la Prairie, Maxwell came here to play for the Manitoba Junior Hockey League’s Wheat Kings in 1949. A year earlier he had left Canada at only 17 years old to play for the Falkirk Lions, one of a handful of Manitobans to suit up for the Scottish team. Almost immediately upon his return home, the young defenceman was approached by the Winnipeg Monarchs, but with next to no money put on the table by the team, Maxwell waited for a better offer to come his way; he got it shortly afterward when the Wheat Kings offered $300 a month for his services. Maxwell happily took them up on it and spent the next two seasons playing out of the old Wheat City Arena, winning the MJHL title in 1950.

Maxwell bounced around after that, playing senior hockey in Ontario and B.C., and even two games in the American Hockey League with the Cleveland Barons.

“I really enjoyed that,” Maxwell of his Cleveland stint. “Johnny Bower was our goaltender and Freddy Shero was my defence partner. … I said to Johnny in practice, ‘How come you don’t let some goals in; we never know whether we’re any good or not.’ He said, ‘Max, when I put on these pads, it doesn’t matter if it’s practice or a real game, it’s always for keeps.’”

Bower must have known what he was doing, becoming a Hall of Famer after starring with the Toronto Maple Leafs, while Shero, who had played in the National Hockey League himself, went on to greater fame as a coach, winning a pair of Stanley Cup titles.

Maxwell, meanwhile, returned to Manitoba and spent a couple of years playing in the intermediate Big Six Hockey League with the Kings, crossing paths there with another former NHLer in Bill Juzda, a Winnipegger who filled his time off from his railroad job playing hockey.

“Juzda came out to hit me and I run my stick through his hair,” Maxwell recalled. “He says, ‘Max, I’m going to get you.’ I says, “Juz, you’ll never get me, I’m too fast for you.’ About the next shift I’m coming down the other side of the ice and all of a sudden something hit me. I went down kind of in a sitting position and I was laughing to beat heck. … It was kind of payback.”

Maxwell got the last laugh that season as the Kings won the western Canadian title. He and Juzda settled their differences the next year, ending up as teammates with the Brandon intermediate team that also won the western Canadian crown.

In the early 1960s, Maxwell was back at the Wheat City Arena, this time as a coach at the request of Wheat Kings owner Jake Milford. Maxwell ran the Brandon bench from 1962 to 1964, guiding the Wheat Kings to their third straight MJHL championship in 1964.

Maxwell decided to leave after Milford sold the team; he did return to the Wheat Kings in the late ’60s, when the club was in the Western Canada Hockey League, which later became the WHL, but the team’s MJHL success wasn’t revived as he posted a 37-56-4 coaching record.

Maxwell still makes the odd trip back to Brandon, normally when he’s heading to Minnesota to visit Brad, a former standout defenceman with the NHL’s North Stars. He devotes much of his time these days to his beloved golden retriever, Shelley.

While Maxwell has left his Manitoba hockey life far behind, it is nice to revisit it once in a while, such as on his flight from B.C., when the plane’s captain got word of his accomplishments and announced his presence to the passengers, drawing a rousing ovation — an act that was repeated later in the flight after a crew change.

“That was the most enjoyable part of it was just the fun with all the people there understanding,” Maxwell said. “It kind of gave me kind of a thrill.”

FAREWELL: While we’re on the topic of players who wore the black and gold for Brandon before the Wheat Kings’ WHL days, I got a note from former Brandon Sun managing editor Brian Marshall last month, shortly after the death of Tom Rice, the founder of financial and real estate company TJR and Associates and an avid hockey player in his younger days. Tom’s younger brother,

Gord, an MJHL champion with the Wheat Kings, had died only a few weeks earlier, near Cranbrook, B.C.

Tom was a couple of years older than Gord, but they did play some hockey together, helping Brandon win back-to-back Manitoba juvenile titles in 1957 and 1958.