1972-73 Centennial Cup champion Portage Terriers a wild bunch

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This article was published 15/05/2015 (4039 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PORTAGE LA PRAIRIE — That one exploding moment, that bubbling hot rush of blood, maybe that part of winning a national championship belongs to the young.

This weekend, it will belong again to one of the four teams still fighting for the RBC Cup, as the tournament’s final games heat up.

It could be the Penticton Vees who take it, the reigning western junior A champions. It could be the Melfort Mustangs, who hung on through a difficult round robin, or the Carleton Place Canadians. Or, after Sunday night’s final the Portage Terriers could be the ones to lay hands on Canada’s top junior A trophy in their own rink.

Whatever happens this much is certain: The party will come first, while the weight of making history will come later. Just ask the guys who have been there.

“That moment, you don’t realize what it means,” said John Hewitt, a defenceman on the historic 1972-73 Canadian champion Portage Terriers team. “All we were doing was playing hockey, and trying to win the damn hockey game so we could have that celebration at the end.”

They were a veteran bunch for the Manitoba Junior Hockey League at the time, but they were so young. Captain Grant Farncombe, who now acts as the squad’s volunteer historian, was a seasoned 20; though forward Dan Bonar would grow up to play 170 games in the show with the Los Angeles Kings, in 1973 he was a red-hot rookie at 16 years old.

Together, that bunch banged out a scrappy hockey journey that tore a swath through opponents; caused at least one legal incident; sold out the old Winnipeg Arena; and ended with engraved gold watches and a heroes’ motorcade through Portage la Prairie as Centennial Cup champions.

Today, their names are in the Manitoba Hockey Hall of Fame, and for good reason. The Selkirk Steelers won the national title the next season; no MJHL team has accomplished the feat since. This year’s Terriers, though, are sure in the mix as they prepare to face Melfort in Saturday night’s semifinal at the PCU Centre.

The tournament now features a far different format than the ones their championship forebears knew — in 1973, the Cup was won in a gruelling seven-game series.

Then again, the whole game was different back then. Instead of a sleek new facility, those 1970s Terriers squeezed into a dressing room under the stands at the old Portage arena. The biggest changes, though, have happened at ice level — which the former Terriers still smirk to think about, all these years later.

Some of it was subsequent rule changes that sped up the flow of the game. Some of it was just a little good ol’ prairie grit.

“I’m not going to go into details, but it was way, way different,” ’73 defenceman George Miller said. “They’re getting bigger and faster, but contact was much different. Like, we really played hard and that. Tough and hard. You couldn’t get around us.”

On Friday afternoon, a gaggle of players from that historic team gathered at the PCU Centre for an alumni luncheon and some friendly games on the arena ice. Their memories flowed in perfectly preserved vignettes, a running list of old plays and great hits and teammates who they left in Saskatchewan, chasing after the team bus.

“Hockey players,” one of the alumni said, during another round of laughs, “never forget.”

They were a great team, they nodded. They had a secret song they chanted after every win, huddled in their dressing room, shouting it loud enough for fans still in the stands to wonder at the noise. Even on Friday, when someone found an old photo of them in the chant pose, they jokingly declined to disclose the lyrics.

Back then, instead, they let their play make their statements for them. Those passages were spirited to the extreme: They hit lots, they scored, they once put 68 shots on one poor Humboldt Broncos goalie to even their Manitoba-Saskatchewan series at 1-1.

That series ended in a wild controversy after Game 5, when a last-second penalty-box fight spilled out into a brouhaha of a brawl. The Broncos pulled out of the series in protest of the Terriers’ play, but that was the kind of hockey late Portage coach Muzz MacPherson liked: tough as nails and rowdy on ice.

At any rate, Humboldt’s rare decision left the door open for Portage to take the Centennial Cup. They beat the Pembroke Lumber Kings in the first three games in Brandon, and sold out the Winnipeg Arena for Game 4; they proceeded to lose that one, they laughed on Friday, and had to come back the next night to win it all.

There, they clinched it, setting their place down in history. They clambered back onto a bus already loaded with beer for the celebration. The owner of the bus company drove them home himself, just to be part of it, lumbering slowly down the Trans-Canada Highway so they could savour the, uh, moment.

That was the celebration of young men, who went where no Manitobans had gone before and came back as champions.

Today, newspaper clippings of that campaign and yellowing old Terriers sweaters hang in the alumni room at PCU Centre. Some of the players who weren’t from the area put down roots in Portage, where they are still known — and the thrill of the win has long since settled into a quiet pride in the history they brought home.

“As far as the meaning of it, what it brought us going through life, has been special,” Hewitt said. “We’ve all gained something from it. Jobs, notoriety. I live here. There’s hardly a week goes by that someone isn’t talking to you about it, and that’s 45 years. Having this RBC Cup just amped it right up.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca