BRACEBRIDGE BEARS MADE WINTERS BEARABLE IN MUSKOKA
Mark Clairmont | MuskokaTODAY.com
BRACEBRIDGE — Dollar for dollar, you couldn’t get better value.
In 1970, Doug Smith, a former manager of the Bracebridge arena was musing with Danny Poland about what it would take to get a junior hockey team going again in Bracebridge to make up for a lull in action.
“Give ’em a call and find out,” Smith told Poland. “You know those people at the league.”
The Georgian Bay Jr. C Hockey League, that would be.
So Poland, no shrinking violet, called them up.
They said “$150 — $50 for the entry fee and $100 for insurance.”
Smith wrote the cheque on the spot in the same rink that still stands today — 50 years later.
“And we were in,” said Poland. “All we had to do was form team, find players, set up an executive and sell tickets.”
That they did, giving birth to one of the greatest sports stories in the Heart of Muskoka’s history.
The beginning of the Bracebridge Bears.
A team that would entertain and thrill a community for more than a dozen glorioius years from 1970 to 1983 — and beyond.
Beyond to this past weekend, when over two days stories about exciting hockey, relentless fundraising, Georgian Bay championships and hundreds of lifelong friendships were formed.
Poland, a former Ontario junior hockey great himself and the Bears’ first coach, told the story at the South Muskoka Golf and Curling Club, following a day of golfing, a night of community celebration, an afternoon Wenonah II cruise on Lake Rosseau, and a hockey banquet of old — where MPP Norm Miller, another Bracebridge minor hockey product, also brought greetings.
Sure, there have been several other great Bracebridge hockey teams, players and organizations before and after (Ace Bailey, Roger Crozier, Chubb Downey to name just three of many more), but this dynasty was just a little bit more unique in local sports folklore, capturing the imagination and crowds few if any other teams equalled.
Maybe it was the timing, when interest in Canada’s national winter game was peaking locally.
The Leafs had recently won their last Stanley Cup three years before, NHL expansion was new, and business was good in Bracebridge.
Even the rink was still in relatively good shape.
Fans were hungry for hockey.
Huntsville had a team, Gravenhurst didn’t. So Smith, Poland and a dozen or more diehards put together the beginnings of a legendary group of mostly (but not all) guys many in town still talk about.
And talk they did, for 36 hours straight. On and off the golf course.
There were more than enough stories and lies to last another 50 years and to continue the legend of the Bracebrdige Bears.
And the $150 — that was $1 for each of the 150 former players, spouses, sponsors, fans and friends who turned out for this special reunion led by Greg Crozier and his committee.
Poland’s free-form summation weaved through the early years like Rick Smith or Wayne Sander going end-to-end deking forwards, defencemen and goaltenders.
The former prison guard’s gruff love ’em or hate ’em coaching style evident as ever, provided a perfect recap that was both entertaining and moving, as he talked about running a team and the lives he obviously touched.
The good and the bad, wins and losses all fodder for room full of fans who love the shenanigans of shinny.
Cold hard nights on the road and cold hard cash nailed to the dressing room wall as an inducement to win another round of the playoffs to fill the seats and keep the Bears going.
A 1,000 or even 2,000 Bears fans in the seats for some playoff series — against the likes of Huntsville, Sundridge, Penetang, and Leamington — were gold for Bracebridge and its boys.
Most of them came in from surrounding communities like Gravenhurst, which had seven or eight — almost half the team, with Smith and Ron Hansen, Tim Montgomery, Mike White, Brian Whitehead and Garnet Corcoran among them.
Several good ones even came up over the years from Orillia, which had the Travellers Jr. B club.
A couple of them were among two of the three Georgian Bay championship teams. Alas, they never did quite make the provincial finals, but some would say they were as good as the all-Ontario champs on any given night.
Mike Terry came in from Vankoughnet, the Mortimers from Bala and Port Carling.
They hooked up with Bracebridge’s Morrison brothers Tim and Bill, part of the core of the team that included a who’s who of that era’s hockey elite.
There were dozens of others fans will remember (Barry and Greg Hammond among them), for their lasting imprint they put on the Bracebridge hockey psyche to this day, with the impressionable youngsters who follow in their skates with the south Muskoka Bears minor hockey association.
It’s been that way for decades, as each generation looks up to the next.
For coaches it’s been a similar succession. Ron Webb (another local hockey family man) who took over from Poland and led more great Bears teams. As did ex-Bear Eric Faulkener who went on after a stellar playing career to go behind the bench.
They were there regaling in the fun and comradeship of old.
A special moment came when MC Greg Crozier took a call at the podium from another former coach, Don Thur, who just last month moved to the Yukon.
His “best wishes” were met by cheers as his voice echoed across the country through the cell phone and out the microphone.
Many players who hadn’t seen each other for decades greeted old team-mates as if they’d just seen the last practice or game.
A number of them went on the college careers in the States, including, Crozier, Smith and Ron Hansen, who came from Maine for the reunion.
Mostly, though, they became the all-star backbones of many men’s beer league teams and champions locally and around Ontario over the nex decades and even to today as many still play a little.
Montgomery regaled the crowd with a great, almost period-by-period, blow-by-blow account of scores and bus trips that were in a way inside baseball that you had to be there to understand the humour of.
Terry and Wayne Welcher spoke on behalf of another group of mid-’70s Bears, followed by Tim Oliver late ’70s, and a particularly entertaining Barry Munro from the ’80s era.
He recalled his dad — who was a “client” of Poland at Beaver Creek — calling up the 16-year-old in Windsor and telling him they needed hockey players in Bracebridge.
Munro was on the next train and had to jump off a slow moving passenger car to catch up with his hockey and duffel bags as they almost landed in the Muskoka River.
He had so much fun he urged organizers to “hold this (reunion) every year.”
The anecdotes shared the same jocular sense of humour.
Like the time Poland was excoriating players in the dressing room under the stands when he walloped his head on a cement beam that probably gave him a concussion.
Not a player said a word — till they got out on the ice and broke up.
Oh, this was a hockey night in Canada, for sure, and a Saturday to boot.
It was all good and not to be forgotten.
As good as a Dennis Hull guest speaker on the NHL rubber chicken circuit.
Only this time the food and stories were better, personal and relatable.
These Bears may have been more grey than black or brown Bears, and there shots would have had more heft behind them now, but overall most had aged well — for hockey players.
There were some elbows up as players scrambled to be in position for a photo-op at the end. They all wanted to make sure they were in this one, because a couple of teams missed having an official portrait for some crazy, petty-losing reasons.
O Canada, yes, this was hockey at its we the true north strong and free best.
And about a time not to be forgotten by a few of the hundreds of Bears who made winters a little more bearable in the Heart of Muskoka.
Organizers raised more than $1,500 for local charities though the auction of three autographed flags and the sale of Bears Alumni hats, shirts and banners.
- Reporter Mark Clairmont was sadly cut from the team after the first Bear’s first tryout.
- See followup Letters to the Editor at:
- https://muskokatoday.com/2019/08/bears-reunion-coverage-captured-spirit-of-event/
For a great look at the weekend, go to John Pokocky’s South Muskoka Photography website at:
https://www.southmuskokaphotography.com/Bracebridge-Bears-Alumni/Bracebridge-Bears-Alumni-19701983/
