Free B00ADOAFYO EBOK by Leesa Culp, Gregg Drinnan, Bob Wilkie Page B

Nogier.
    As James told the Swift Current Sun , “It would have been tough for him here being the third goalie. [It would have been] very difficult to fit in. I understand how he feels.”
    Before leaving Swift Current, Feher made one stop.
    “I decided to go to the RCMP building to see if I could go back to the bus and pick up my suit coat,” he says, referring to the coat that he had placed on the top shelf before making himself comfortable in his seat. “They were reluctant, but an officer took me in his police car to a Quonset [hut] out of town where the bus was parked.”
    Feher never will forget what he saw in that hut.
    “It was unbelievable,” he says. “Glass everywhere … dirt, straw, and a bus that looked like twisted metal. I was allowed to enter the bus to get my coat. I walked over to the ‘Do Not Enter’ sign and retrieved my coat.” As it turned out, the coat was in such poor shape that it no longer was wearable.
    “The officer drove me back to my car and off I went,” Feher says.
    Three days and a lifetime worth of experiences after arriving in Swift Current, and without playing even one minute for the Broncos, Feher was headed back to Nipawin.
    On his way out of Swift Current, he stopped at the accident site.
    “All you could see was the slide marks of the bus and a few playing cards scattered around,” he recalls. “I started to drive with my left foot, as my right leg was now in pain, and I went to Moose Jaw to see my old billets and we talked about the accident. From there, it was off to Prince Albert. I arrived at my parents’ house around 10:00 p.m.”
    It was New Year’s Eve, but Feher wasn’t in a mood to celebrate. Instead, he went right to bed. He simply couldn’t get enough sleep, he found.
    Feher rejoined the Hawks a few days later and finished the season with them, playing in thirty-four games. In fact, he is right there in the team photo, seated second from right in the front row. There are two other goaltenders — Dean Ross and Jeff Holness — in the photo. Feher received one of the team’s individual awards, for most gentlemanly player.
    Because he didn’t feel part of the Broncos, Feher says he wouldn’t have felt comfortable attending the memorial service on January 4 in Swift Current. Ten years later, he received a call from The Hockey News . They were doing a story on the accident and were preparing a where-are-they-now story as part of the package. He also heard from CBC Radio.
    “They called and I told my story to them,” he says. “But they didn’t air the story because right after that the Sheldon Kennedy story broke.”
    On January 2, 1997, Graham James pleaded guilty to 350 sexual assaults: three hundred on Kennedy, and fifty on an unidentified player.
    When Feher was with the Broncos, few people were aware that he was even there. And even ten years after the fact, his story wasn’t told, pre-empted by another story.
    Indeed, Feher was an invisible Bronco.
    So, too, was Bob Crockett, who had been scheduled to be on the Broncos’ bus for that trip to Regina. However, he didn’t make it.
    Born in Pitt Meadows, British Columbia, Crockett was two months past his sixteenth birthday during Christmas 1986. He had been the property of the Lethbridge Broncos, so his rights went to Swift Current when the franchise was sold to John Rittinger and his group. Crockett had been in a couple of Lethbridge training camps prior to reporting to Swift Current in the fall of 1986.
    “In Lethbridge,” he remembers, “I was a highly touted goalie — but in Swift Current they didn’t know who I was. I knew I had potential, but I had to prove myself all over again.”
    Graham James, the Broncos’ general manager and head coach, would spend much of the 1986–87 season’s first half searching for a dependable goaltender. It wouldn’t be Bob Crockett.
    “I was sent home right after main camp, and I was brought back a few weeks later,” Crockett recalls. “But I never got