1978-79 BWK Series — Day 17 — 1970s was a very different era

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/08/2021 (1499 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Forty-two years after covering the 1978-79 Wheat Kings, Gregg Drinnan was asked to reflect on the season and the experience. 

 

It was March 21, 1979.

The Brandon Wheat Kings had just surrendered three third-period goals in losing 6-4 to the visiting Saskatoon Blades. But as the 2,692 fans filed out of the Keystone Centre, you can bet they weren’t talking about what was only their favourite team’s fifth loss of the WHL season. No, they were abuzz about a nasty third-period brawl that occurred after one of the Blades had the misfortune of having his stick make contact with the face that belonged to Brandon sniper Brian Propp.

Of course, this was Game 71 in a 72-game regular-season and the teams knew they would be facing each other a few times in the fast-approaching playoffs. So, yes, the donnybrook was at least a little bit predictable. Hey, that’s the way things were done back in the day.

But now it was 15 or 20 minutes after the game had ended and few people remained in the stands when Dunc McCallum, the Wheat Kings’ coach, walked up the stairs en route to his office. On the other side of the ice surface, Joe Arling, the Blades’ assistant coach, also was leaving the scene via the stairs. When he saw McCallum, Arling yelled a few choice words. McCallum responded. They went back and forth a couple of times before going their separate ways.

As McCallum reached the top step with a nosy reporter trailing him, he turned and said, with a chuckle: “Well, do you think we sold some tickets tonight?”

As much as anything else, McCallum knew that the Wheat Kings were — as they are today — in the entertainment business.

Of course, those were different times. In one of that regular season’s best games, Ernie (Punch) McLean’s New Westminster Bruins came to town and battled the Wheat Kings to a 1-1 tie on Dec. 3, thanks to 64 saves by goaltender Richard Martens. A few nights prior to the game, the phone rang at my desk. It was McLean. “Need any scoops?” he asked.

After the game, I visited both dressing rooms, then headed upstairs to McCallum’s office. I walked in to find him and McLean sitting and chatting with a bottle — something tells me it was high-end Scotch — perched on the desk. “Just having one for the road,” McLean said.

Anyway … for that one season, 1978-79, the Wheat Kings were the greatest show on ice.

Oh my, were they!

By the time the season ended, the Wheat Kings had set or tied at least 23 WHL regular-season and playoff records of the individual and team varieties.

In a regular season in which teams didn’t play overtime, the Wheat Kings finished 58-5-9. I have always wondered how many of those nine ties would have been victories had they played extra time. Can you imagine starting OT with Brian Propp, Laurie Boschman, Ray Allison and Brad McCrimmon on the ice? How many of those nine ties would have been turned into victories on the first shift of OT? After all, that forward line accounted for 496 regular-season points, including 220 goals, then added 44 goals and 65 assists in the playoffs. All told, the three totalled 605 points, including 264 goals, in 94 games. McCrimmon, by the way, put up 98 points.

Numbers like that are almost beyond belief and won’t happen again.

Who’s to say whether this Brandon team was the best one in the history of the WHL, but it certainly is in the discussion. Changes since then in the way the game is administered and played mean there hasn’t been a team approach that same level of greatness in the intervening years. Nor will there be, if only because this is a much younger league than it was in the 1970s.

I had gotten my journalism career started at the Brandon Sun in 1972, fresh out of the auto body course — yes, I spent 10 months learning how to repair and repaint dinged fenders — at Assiniboine Community College. In two years at The Sun — I absolutely loved covering the Manitoba Senior Baseball League — I didn’t get a taste of the Wheat Kings, the beat then belonging to Bruce Penton.

After five years at the Winnipeg Tribune, I returned to Brandon in October 1978, hired by then-sports editor Jack Gibson to cover the Wheat Kings, with Penton having moved to the city editor’s desk.

In the first game I covered, the Wheat Kings whipped the visiting Regina Pats, 12-0, to run their record to 9-0-0. “And just think,” muttered Regina head coach Gregg Pilling, “the way the schedule is, we likely have to play these guys 100 more times.” Actually, it was 16 times and, yes, the Wheat Kings won all 16 games.

(Pilling, though, was great copy, like the time after yet another loss, this one refereed by Glen Agar of Brandon, when he said: “We’re the weakest team in the league and Brandon is the best, and I don’t think Brandon needs any assistance from a trailer salesman masquerading as a referee.”)

Upon arriving in Brandon, what I discovered was a team that was incredibly focused and driven, some of that no doubt a carryover from the spring of 1978 when Brandon had been left with egg all over its face after being eliminated in one of those debacle-filled WHL round-robin playoff circuses.

At the same time, I found a team chock full of players who were in the right place at the right time, each of whom knew his precise role, along with a head coach in McCallum who knew exactly when to yank on the reins and when to let the thoroughbreds run.

McCallum knew what he had and where he wanted to go with that team. He and general manager Jack Brockest — who would end up as the franchise’s sole owner before the season ended — were comfortable with what they had. So there weren’t any trades; well, there was one but it hardly was a blockbuster. They added only one player via trade, with forward Larry Roberts coming over from the Billings Bighorns in October in a three-team swap in which Brandon sent forward Darren Bobyck to the Regina Pats.

What Brockest and McCallum did early that season, no doubt with the help of ace scout Ron Dietrich, was add three St. James products — forwards Dave McDonald and Steve Patrick, along with defenceman Kelly Elcombe. The three were friends, and they played McCallum-style hockey, which is to say they could beat you in the corners, along the boards or in front of the net, or in the alley if you preferred. They slipped quietly onto the roster and into the dressing room, thus there weren’t any trade-related distractions and the team’s chemistry, which was terrific, remained intact.

Keep in mind, too, that the Wheat Kings that season carried only 21 players for the most part — two goaltenders, six defenceman and 13 forwards. So there weren’t a lot of comings and goings to disrupt things.

That isn’t to say there weren’t distractions.

Freshman forward Walt Poddubny had 22 points in 20 games when he went home to Thunder Bay. There also was the devastating injury suffered by defenceman Mike Perovich, who had 73 points in 62 games when his season was ended by a broken arm. Might the season have ended differently had either or both of them been in the lineup on that May day in Verdun, Que.?

Distractions? Let’s not forget about the goings-on in November when Peter Pocklington, then the owner of the WHA’s Indianapolis Racers, having just sold a 17-year-old named Wayne Gretzky to the Edmonton Oilers, swooped in and tried to sign Allison and Propp. Pocklington offered the Wheat Kings the grand sum of $80,000 for the two forwards. The team’s board of directors voted unanimously — after having a good chuckle, I’m sure — to reject Pocklington’s offer. (A couple of weeks later, Pocklington flew into Brandon on his private jet, bringing Allison and Propp’s agent with him. He apparently upped the offer by a few pennies, but the answer was the same.)

It turned out that the WHA’s Birmingham Bulls had made attempts to sign McCrimmon and Propp over the summer, too. It’s a good thing for Wheat Kings fans that those WHA teams weren’t rolling in dough.

One other thing that can’t be emphasized enough about those Wheat Kings is that there weren’t any assistant coaches so, really, there only was one voice — McCallum’s. Think about that the next time you’re looking at a WHL team’s coaching roster and notice an associate coach, an assistant coach of two, a video coach, a goaltending coach, a strength-and-conditioning coach, a mental health coach …

But, then, if you were paying attention you knew that McCallum had a de facto assistant coach in McCrimmon, whose hockey IQ was off the charts and who was mature beyond his years. When McCallum felt that the team needed a break from him, McCrimmon would run a practice or two.

Of course, in the end, the 1978-89 Wheat Kings didn’t win their last game of the season, losing the Memorial Cup final to the OHL’s Peterborough Petes, 2-1 in OT, in Verdun. It was a crushing loss that no doubt remains fresh in the players’ minds even all these years later.

But it shouldn’t diminish this team’s legacy and it shouldn’t overshadow the memories that were created just by winning the WHL championship.

And from my perspective, there always was something to write about, like the time …