WHERE ARE THEY NOW — Hockey greatly impacted Mikkelson’s life

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This article was published 06/02/2018 (2980 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The “accidental hockey player” and his family certainly took their careers a long way.

Now 69, former Brandon Wheat Kings defenceman Bill Mikkelson would follow the footsteps of his uncle Jim McFadden by playing in the National Hockey League, a feat that would be repeated by Mikkelson’s son Brendan.

And Mikkelson will soon head to South Korea to watch daughter Meaghan take the ice with the Canadian women’s hockey team. Even Meaghan’s husband Scott Reid played minor pro hockey. But the man in the middle doubted any of it would happen for him.

“I sort of feel like people took care of me,” Mikkelson said. “I didn’t expect things to happen to me.”

Mikkelson grew up on a farm two miles east of Brookdale, which is located 50 kilometres northeast of Brandon, and 19 kilometres west of Wellwood. He started skating around age four or five, and would play his minor hockey in Brookdale.

The old community rink was an A-frame building, and the boards were actually the outside walls. The teams would stand in the corners near the entrances onto the ice from the basement dressing rooms because there was no room for benches along the sides.

“There was tons of opportunity to skate when I was a kid,” Mikkelson said. “Every Tuesday and Thursday nights were hockey practice nights, so all the different age groups would go throughout the evening. Monday, Wednesday and Friday were public skating and Saturday there would be hockey games and practice. I think it was pretty much closed on Sunday.”

Local kids also skated every day over the noon hour because the school was 30 yards from the rink.

The family certainly had a hockey heritage. McFadden, who was born in Belfast, Ireland and raised in Manitoba along with Mikkelson’s mother Mabel, played 412 NHL games with the Detroit Red Wings and Chicago Black Hawks between 1947 and 1954.

He was named the league’s rookie of the year for the 1947-48 season, played in an all-star game and won a Stanley Cup in 1950 with Detroit.

Mikkelson thinks it may have been the 1955-56 season when his uncle, then playing with the Calgary Stampeders of the minor professional Western Hockey League, came to Brandon’s old Wheat City Arena to play against the Regals. After the game, he gave his nephew a stick.

“If I could go back in, I could point to the place where I was standing when he came out of the dressing room and handed me the stick,” Mikkelson said. “I noticed how he taped his stick, and the knob on the end, and I taped my sticks exactly the same way. In all the years I played, I never changed it. I treasured that thing for a long time.”

At age 14, Mikkelson also started skating with the Wellwood-Carberry-Brookdale Combines, a regional all-star team. It proved to be an important move.

He played beside a pair of future Wheat King teammates, Jack Wells and Mark Kennedy. But it was Kennedy’s father Morley who would prove to be an important early advocate for him.

He suggested all three try out for the Brandon midget club at age 15 and they all made it, with Morley’s promotional efforts both with their parents and the hockey club a big help.

Mikkelson played midget in Brandon and then graduated to the Wheat Kings Junior B team in Deloraine, which at the time was a well-established pipeline to the Junior A club.

He continued to live at home and attend Brookdale High School for both seasons, with his father Bob driving him to Brandon and Deloraine.

So what did the Wheat Kings mean to youngsters in the region back then?

“Everything,” Mikkelson said. “I used to listen on the radio. Henry Stothard was the play-by-play guy and I used to listen to (him talk about players) George Hill and John Vopni and Ted Taylor and Bobby Ash and all those guys on the radio.”

Thirty miles was a lot further in those days than it is now, but Mikkelson also attended some games, idolizing the players and aspiring to one day suit up for the club.

He attended Vincent Massey in Brandon for his Grade 12 year after joining the Wheat Kings, living with the Kennedy family.

Another big change for Mikkelson in his midget year came when he was shifted back to the blue-line from forward by coach Ron Dietrich, who then worked with him on his backward skating. It was a position he would play for the rest of his career.

“The fact that he changed me to defence was maybe a big deal,” Mikkelson said. “If I hadn’t switched to defence, I may never have gone anywhere as a forward.”

Oddly, the same thing happened to Meaghan Mikkelson when her university coach moved her back to defence. She’s set to participate in her third Olympic Games with the Canadian team.

As a full-time Wheat King for three seasons from 1965 to 1968, Mikkelson was one of the players who suited up in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League, the Manitoba Junior Hockey League and the Western Canadian Hockey League as the team changed leagues.

For two of those seasons, he played with a pair of the club’s all-time greats, Bill Fairbairn and Juha Widing.

“When I think back to those three years in Brandon, some of those players on that team had an influence on me and what I became,” Mikkelson said. “Just from being around them and watching them and the kind of individuals they were. You pick up things as you mature over the years and I think some of those people were influential on me and my development and what I became and believed in.”

Mikkelson said skating was his strength, but beyond that he suggests he did many things fairly well and nothing exceptionally well.

After three seasons, Mikkelson decided that he was going to go to university full time in Winnipeg and retire from hockey. He attended a New York Rangers camp anyway, and eventually returned to school after declining a chance to play in their system.

But at the same time, the Winnipeg Jets of the WCHL had made a trade with the Wheat Kings, sending Ray Butterworth for Mark Kennedy. When Kennedy refused to report, Jets coach Ed Dorohoy acquired the rights to the retired Mikkelson.

“I don’t know how many times I said no, but eventually I relented because of the financial considerations primarily,” Mikkelson said. “Them paying for university, tuition and books and a monthly spending stipend helped me a lot.”

At the time, if a player started university when he was 18, he could play for four years, allowing for a 21-year-old season in which a player could get his degree.

“It was fate,” Mikkelson said. “If Eddie hadn’t called me, things would have ended right there and who knows how the rest of my life would have unfolded. I certainly wouldn’t have met my wife.”

He caught the eye of Los Angeles scouts in Winnipeg and, after his final season in the WCHL in 1969-70, finally went pro. After a season with the Springfield Kings of the AHL, Mikkelson made his NHL debut with the L.A. Kings during the 1971-72 season, playing 15 games.

His first game came on national TV in Canada against the Toronto Maple Leafs. He passed the puck a bit too softly across to his partner, Jean Potvin, the older brother of Denis, and it was intercepted by Dave Keon, who went in and scored.

“I felt like crawling out of the place,” Mikkelson remembered.

He would go on to play 147 NHL games with the Kings, New York Islanders and Washington Capitals, none of which would be described as league powers.

Mikkelson said he never became comfortable playing at that level.

“You could not be comfortable on any of those teams,” Mikkelson said. “On a team like that, that isn’t winning, you always know that changes are going to be made. And they were. We were always overmatched, sometimes severely. For us to go into Montreal and play those teams or Boston … Somebody said we were a very good team, we were just in the wrong league. We would have been an outstanding American League team but a not very good NHL team.”

Mikkelson bounced between the AHL and NHL, with one life-changing event occurring when he was in the minors: He met his wife Betsy while he was playing in the American Hockey League with the Baltimore Clippers.

After moving to Europe for one final season in Germany in 1977-78, he called it quits.

“I was ready to settle down,” Mikkelson said. “It’s hard to do when you’re playing and travelling all the time. I was ready to settle down with her and move on to the next stage of life.”

He said at the that point he had no expectation of returning to the NHL and was tired of riding buses in the AHL.

After finishing his commerce degree at the University of Manitoba, he worked at IBM for 24 years, moving to Regina in 1979 and to St. Albert, Alta., in 1994. He retired in 2003.

They have three children, Meaghan, Brendan and Jillian.

Brendan now plays in Sweden, and his parents watch the games on the internet. With the Canadian women’s team based in Calgary, they were able to see many of Meaghan’s games in person, and will soon be in the stands watching her compete in the Olympics for the second time. (They didn’t make the trip to Sochi, Russia.)

Mikkelson was inducted into the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame in 2013.

He said now it’s almost like those pro hockey years were in a different life that wasn’t his. He said even the ribbing he takes for his NHL career plus-minus of minus-147 and single season record of minus-82 don’t begin to sour him on the incredible time he had.

“I take a lot of beating because of my plus-minus but I tell everybody that I don’t care, I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything,” Mikkelson said. “I think Brendan played 131 games and I tell him that’s something you should be proud of. I’m proud of having played there, even though it was an accident.”

He said even when he watches an NHL game on TV, he’s familiar with what the players go through to be there.

“To have played in Madison Square Garden and the old arena in Chicago and the Coliseum in L.A. and the old Montreal Forum and Maple Leaf Gardens, those are things that people would pay money to do. What an experience for me. Considering where I came from, it’s incredible.”

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