1978-79 BWK Series — Day 2 — McCallum pushed players but they loved him

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This article was published 26/07/2021 (1558 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

On a hockey team packed with personality and character, no one cast a larger shadow than the man who led the 1978-79 Brandon Wheat Kings.

Dunc McCallum was born in Flin Flon in 1940 but played his juvenile hockey in Brandon before joining the Manitoba Junior Hockey League’s Wheat Kings during the 1958-59 season. In 1959-60, he was part of the great Wheat Kings team — the roster also included Ted Taylor, Bryan Hextall Jr., Wayne Gurba, George Hill and Edgar Ehrenverth — that went 23-6-3 and won the MJHL.

He spent the next five seasons in three different minor leagues before making his two-game National Hockey League debut with the New York Rangers in the 1965-66 season. After spending the 1966-67 campaign back in the minors, he resurfaced the next year with the Pittsburgh Penguins, where he spent most of the next four seasons.

In the 1972-73 season, he jumped to the World Hockey Association’s Houston Aeros, and after a knee injury, a year later retired and returned to his ranch south of Brandon.

He was named Wheat Kings head coach for the 1975-76 season, and spent five years with the club, earning coach of the year honours in 1977 and 1979.

McCallum retired after the 1979-80 season, but came back to help out on Nov. 12, 1981 when the team fired Les Jackson. He left again after the 1981-82 season.

McCallum died of brain cancer on March 31, 1983 at age 43. The WHL’s coach of the year trophy was posthumously renamed the Dunc McCallum Memorial Trophy.

He was inducted into the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame.

Virtually to a man, his players say he was special because of how he handled them.

BRANT KIESSIG: “(Dunc) seemed very worldly and knowledgable but he reminded me of my dad in the sense that my dad was old country. When I turned 12, my dad didn’t give me a hug or anything like that, he shook my hand. That’s the way he treated you, like a man. And that’s the way Dunc McCallum was. He treated you like a man. He treated you the way the world was going to treat you later on. I saw him crack a smile every once in a while but it was an event.”

TIM LOCKRIDGE: “It’s the way he treated everybody. He didn’t treat us as kids. He was a communicator, and would talk to you. There were a lot of coaches in the league that all they did was yell. Talking to other guys over the years, they just cringed with what they had to put up with some of these other coaches. We realize how lucky we were to have Dunc as our coach those years.”

STEPHEN PATRICK: “Dunc had a way of getting the most out of everybody. I played for (Mike) Keenan and Scotty Bowman and they obviously had a lot of success but I had more respect for the way Dunc coached because there were no negatives. There was nothing demeaning. It was all positives with Dunc. It was a great environment.”

LAURIE BOSCHMAN: “I didn’t know what a professional would be treated like. After I joined the (Toronto Maple) Leafs, I realized Dunc McCallum treated us like individuals from a pro hockey team. Dunc was very organized, he had the respect of all of us as players because he had played in the NHL and just the way he treated us, he treated us fairly. I thought he was tough but fair.”

DAVE McDONALD: “He definitely wasn’t a rah-rah guy. When he played, he was a hard-working tough defenceman and he expected us to be the same way as him. He would come in and say ‘OK boys, let’s go.’ We could get ourselves going so we didn’t really need him to do that.”

BRANT KIESSIG: “Dunc was the type of guy who would walk into the room and say this is the starting lineup and ‘OK boys, get up for the game.’ That’s the way he was. He was very matter of fact. He wasn’t rah-rah, there were no flowery speeches, no fiery speeches, nothing like that. He just walked in and said ‘OK boys, it’s time to get to work.’”

RAY ALLISON: “He was a pretty good guy. Dunc was pretty straight forward and you understood where he was and what he wanted. He was great to play for. He didn’t get too upset, he wasn’t a yeller and a screamer. Later on in life you find out there are more of them. (laughs) He had that patient, quietness about him.”

BRIAN PROPP: “Dunc gets the credit because he taught everybody to think for themselves and get prepared for the NHL. Of course it helps when you win so much but you learned good habits, practised hard and didn’t take it for granted.”

GREGG DRINNAN (Brandon Sun): “He was the right coach in the right place at the right time. I wasn’t there for the previous season but it was pretty obvious he had become quite comfortable with the players, and the players who had been on the ‘77-78 team had become quite comfortable with him. They knew what he wanted, and he knew what the players were capable of.”

DON GILLEN: “I’m not going to say I’m the best person ever, but I grew up with honest intentions, and later in life you realize that’s not the case everywhere so you look back at who had the right intentions. Dunc McCallum did. The whole organization did.”

MIKE PEROVICH: “Dunc was the best coach I ever played for, and I played for Jacques Demers, John Brophy, Pierre Page. He just had a presence about him. When he walked in the room, he commanded respect. He was just one of those guys. I really enjoyed playing for him.”

WES COULSON: “Dunc was a great coach. He treated us more like professionals than he did like junior hockey players. We were given quite a bit of latitude, but with latitude comes you better perform. He gave you a little bit of rope, and if you kept performing, that was fine. If you didn’t, he would pull it back in a heartbeat. He never treated us as kids, he treated us as young men, and that really helped when you went to play on other teams.”

RICK KNICKLE: “He always said ‘You have a leash on you, but you’re going to hang yourselves, I’m not going to hang you.’”

DAVE STEWART: “Dunc and I go way back. I went to his hockey schools. They probably started when I was 10 or 11 … He was a good person, a good coach, He was fair but at the same time he was a coach back then. It was a different way of coaching back then. You have to be careful what you say. I remember Dunc as stern. He would let you know.”

RICK KNICKLE: “He was an intimidating guy for me. He never really said much to goalies. He was a nice man, he played in the National Hockey League and played in the WHA and we respected him. He let us be a team.”

BRANT KIESSIG: “Dunc set the practices out at the beginning of the year and it got to a point where halfway through the season, he wouldn’t come out on the ice because we knew what the practice was and we knew what the drill was. We were like a machine. We went on the ice and did our drills and he would watch from the mezzanine.”

DAVE McDONALD: “I got along good with Dunc from the very start. He played hockey with my dad (Ab) in Pittsburgh (with the Penguins), so he was a friend of my father and teammate. He treated me well. Every once in a while he would have to tell me to keep my head on straight and work hard.”

DAVE CHARTIER: “Dunc was a pretty good reader of people. He was actually the best coach for me at the time because he knew what my mentality was and he was really good for me. I have nothing but good things to say about Dunc.”

BRUCE PENTON (Brandon Sun): “(Dunc) was quiet, he had demanding, he was very well respected everywhere, on the team, in the community. He was a Brandon boy who grew up in Brandon, played for the Wheat Kings, went off to a pretty solid career in the WHA and the NHL. People liked him. He wasn’t a king of the one-liners like (former Wheat Kings coach) Rudy Pilous was, he was just a solid hockey guy who treated everything very seriously. I know he was well liked by the players.”

BRANT KIESSIG: “You knew you were going to do your best for (Dunc), because if you didn’t, you knew there were going to be serious consequences. It was that simple. He was a no-BS guy.”

GREGG DRINNAN: “I rarely remember him putting a player into a situation where he might fail or where the chances were greater of failure than success.”

TIM LOCKRIDGE: “He would come in and have a little bit of sarcasm in his delivery. He would give you a little subtle shot every so often. You learned to take it and you understood why.”

DON GILLEN: “You really felt secure with him coaching. When you’re 16, 17 — I like to think I’m an average guy — you’re very insecure but you don’t know it. With the benefit of hindsight, you realize how fair he was. These experiences you have when you’re young, you have nothing to compare them to so you don’t know what you don’t know.”

BRANT KIESSIG: “Dunc understood how to plug guys in, where they fit and where they could succeed to do their job and help the team. He was the master of it. He plugged everybody into a role, and nobody was ever overwhelmed. When we went out of that dressing room, all we wanted to do was 110 per cent our job, whatever that was.”

DON GILLEN: “When I first went to Brandon, Dunc was almost a larger-than-life character. He had a very nice farm just south of Brandon, a cattle ranch a mile or two south. He was doing what he loved. He was a cowboy-kind of guy, wore jeans and cowboy boots. How good was that for them to still be in hockey and doing what he loved after he played hockey?”

RAY ALLISON: “Calving season was always a pain in the butt for Dunc because he had those Simmentals. He had one calf die and he was miserable for a week.”

STEPHEN PATRICK: “Dunc had a bit of a relaxed side to him. He liked all the kids and wasn’t a real hard-ass. He would certainly have fun with the guys in the dressing room, but not too much. He was into cattle. We would always have cattle behind the dressing room so Dunc would sometimes be sitting in an auction after practice. He had the respect of all the kids. He was a smart man but he wasn’t a coach who coached by intimidation. He would kick you in the ass if you weren’t doing what you were supposed to be doing. I thought he and (GM) Jack (Brockest) were a pretty good tandem. I really enjoyed him.”

DON GILLEN: “He was on the bus and had headaches regularly and it wasn’t until later that we understood he had brain cancer. He went through a lot of pain, more so in my second (1978-79) and third year than my first year.”

RAY ALLISON: “Dunc once said ‘This is the best time you’ll ever have in your life’ and he was right. When money doesn’t become involved and all the politics in hockey, we just went out and played and it really was the most fun you can have playing hockey.”

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