Hockey scouts honouring legends, including my dad

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OKOTOKS, Alta. — Lorne would have loved it.

Some of his favourite guys were here, the old-school scouts like Marshall Johnston and Bill Lesuk, plus some “younger” scouts from Saskatchewan: Bruce Franklin, Ross Mahoney, Al Murray and Darrell Baumgartner. Many recalled trips with my late father, Lorne Davis, one of 45 inaugural inductees into the Western Canada Pro Hockey Scouts Wall of Honour on Tuesday night. Johnston, Lesuk, Mahoney and Murray were also enshrined.

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It was an emotional event, honouring the oft-forgotten scouts charged with finding the next superstars after Mario Lemieux, Sidney Crosby or Paul Coffey and, just as importantly but much more difficult, the next Kelly Buchberger or Ryan Smyth, heart-and-soul guys on a team. Their jobs — no, their passion — took the scouts to hockey rinks around the world, sitting high in the corners while missing family birthdays and anniversaries because they loved the game so much.

“I made my first trip with Lorne,” said Baumgartner, a full-time scout since 2015 who started a decade earlier as a part-timer with the NHL’s Washington Capitals.

“He took me under his wing right away. And he told the best stories!”

After 40 years of scouting for the Edmonton Oilers, New York Rangers, St. Louis Blues and WHA’s Houston Aeros — interrupted by coaching stints with the WHL’s Regina Pats and Canada’s 1980 Olympic hockey team — dad died in 2007.

He knew everyone being inducted. Many were close friends, people I got to travel with for there-and-back drives to Medicine Hat, Swift Current, Saskatoon or Brandon, while listening to late inductees Danny Summers, Torchy Schell, Lou Jankowski, Bart Bradley, Gerry Melnyk, Gerry Ehman and Clare Rothermel. That was my childhood, hockey education. All gone now. Not forgotten.

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What a Hot Stove League they could hold! It would certainly rival the wonderful “Tales from the Road” discussions with living legends Ken Holland, Archie Henderson, Barry Trotz and John Davidson, a goalie dad selected for St. Louis in the first round of the 1973 NHL draft. From Hayley Wickenheiser to Glen Sather, many of them had “Lorne” stories. And there were lots of tales about Garnet “Ace” Bailey, the chief prankster in the bunch who died aboard a 9/11 hijacked airplane and now has an award in his name, which went to former Leader-Post sports editor Gregg Drinnan and long-time broadcaster Dennis Beyak.

Lorne played junior hockey with the Regina Pats, bounced up and down from the minors to four NHL teams and (before winning regularly as an Oilers scout) got his name engraved on the Stanley Cup for helping the Montreal Canadiens win in 1953.

Dad was winding down his playing career with the senior Regina Caps when Father David Bauer invited him to join the national team, becoming Johnston’s teammate, until a younger defenceman retired from the NHL and bumped Lorne from the roster before the 1968 Winter Olympics.

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That’s how most scouts get started: Play hockey, switch teams, meet people, learn the game and decide they want to stay involved. Through countless road trips to hundreds of rinks they watch thousands of players, file reports and discuss who they might take with that first-round pick. They become part of a fraternity who, as former player/coach/GM Craig MacTavish said, “Give more to the game than they take.”

Lorne often said he vouched at the draft table for future Oilers captains Buchberger and Smyth, convinced his boss Barry Fraser (another departed Wall inductee and dear friend, whose family sat with ours at the ceremony) to draft goalie Grant Fuhr in the first round of his first draft. But he never much spoke about Peter Soberlak, Michael Henrich or Jesse Niinimäki, first-round selections who didn’t pan out.

I promise to write less about my dad going forward, but his stories were among the best. My favourite was about a former teammate who worked very hard in the corners. Of course hockey players would nickname a hard worker, “Digger O’Dell.” “No,” Lorne would say. “He was an undertaker in the offseason.”

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To stay in that frame of mind, about 500 people were at the induction. You know what it’s like at a funeral, when you realize the one person who should really be there is missing?

On Tuesday it felt like lots of people were missing, but so many others stepped forward to fill in for the losses. With a nephew and a son who came along to support me and their grandfather at the huge family reunion, it was joyful!

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