Dad Finds New Goal With Son Younger Braun Faces Hockey Future While Father Doubles As Braves Coach

Hockey wasn’t always the hot winter ticket in Spokane.

Eight years takes you back to a crazier epoch, to a cash-strapped former owner, to an ex-general manger with a streak of genius overridden by a hair-trigger temper and a coach who was promoted in record time.

“I was the Spokane Chiefs’ assistant coach for one game,” Gary Braun remembered, before sending the hockey club he has now through an evening workout.

Braun coaches the Spokane Braves - the other junior team in town, a team that has a shot at catching Rossland, British Columbia, for the final playoff spot in the Kootenay International Junior League.

In the 1988-89 season, Braun was behind the bench of the Chiefs, the flourishing major junior franchise that then was stuck in the dark ages.

The owner lived in Penticton, British Columbia. Stuck with a one-sided Coliseum lease that assured him of losing money every year, he left his GM - Bob Strumm - in charge of the store here.

When Braun came on the scene in November of that season, he was under the distinct and temporary impression that he was No. 2 in the coaching hierarchy.

“Strumm asked me to come as an assistant,” Braun said. “That lasted one game in Kamloops, made famous when Bobby turned his coat inside out. We came back and he said, ‘You got her.’ “

Strumm in his unique way was making a statement in Kamloops, letting the referee and fans know that he was being fleeced, or being taken to the cleaners, or something.

Whatever, Braun had walked into a zoo. The club was going to finish last with rookies that would one day win the Memorial Cup. Fans and the local press were riled up over the abrupt firing of former New York Islanders great Butch Goring.

“Butch was popular here,” Braun said. “I was the butt in that deal. When we struggled, the fans would start chanting, ‘We want Butch!’ When Bobby stuck his head out of the upstairs level of the old Coliseum, people would yell, ‘Jump Strummer, jump!’ Luckily for me, my family was still in Canada.”

The family joined him the following season, after Bryan Maxwell was brought in. Braun remembers wondering what, if any, role he might have under the new head coach, but the two hit the golf course, struck up a friendship and Braun came off the links as Maxy’s assistant.

It was a successful tandem, culminating with Spokane’s 1991 Memorial Cup win in Quebec City. When Braun rushed out on the ice with the team for the celebration after the championship game, his son Jonathan, then 11, was thrilled, taking it in on TV.

Today, the elder Braun gets the same kick watching his son, now a senior at North Central High School. They’re together with the Braves, Gary as coach, Jonathan as a defenseman with the same rough edges and late-blooming potential his dad had growing up in Swift Current, Saskatchewan.

How Gary Braun came to this is a story that started with a bracing chat in the kitchen.

A little guilt can go a long way.

Braun, 48, had had a pretty far run before he took on his present challenge. A defenseman on minor league championship teams in Phoenix in the ‘70s, he’d coached successfully here with Maxwell and earlier in St. Albert, Alberta, under Doug Messier, who in 1977 had a 16-year-old son on the team named Mark. That’s the same Mark Messier who now collects Stanley Cup championship rings.

So when Braun’s work as an assistant with the Chiefs flattened out in ‘93, he turned from hockey to insurance without regret.

A year later, when his frustrated son dropped out of the game, Braun saw a need for what he could offer.

Yet he found himself wondering if all the unpaid time he’d have to plow back into youth hockey was really what he wanted to do. When coaches from Spokane youth hockey inquired about his interest, “I sort of hummed and hawed,” he said.

He took it up with his wife Sherry.

“She said, ‘You spent all those years working with other people’s kids, maybe you should spend some time with your own.’ I just sort of mumbled around and said OK. How do you argue with that logic?”

Braun is the brain behind the Braves, a Junior B club registered with the British Columbia Amateur Hockey Association. Players are basically the same age as the Chiefs, with a lower profile.

The Chiefs are the prime tenant of spacious Veterans Memorial Arena.

The home of the Braves is humble Eagles Ice-A-Rena.

Now that he’s found a way to juggle coaching with work, Braun is trying to start a Junior A team here. He sees it as a link with the growing Spokane midget program feeding the Junior B Braves, and the Braves moving on to Junior A and beyond.

Of immediate concern is the Braves’ late development that is timed to the arrival of goaltender Jason Stephens, who came on board in early December. Defenseman Neil Littlechild has made a difference in the breakout with his passing skills. DJ Greene is steady at the blue line. Cam Werfelman is starting to score. Norm Lochten is a 16-year-old with a history of keeping up with older players. Adrian Wong and Patrick Heinz hope to play beyond this level.

The notable individual achievement came over Christmas, when Brett Virostek joined the WHL Lethbridge Hurricanes.

“He stepped in and didn’t look out of place at all, and he’s just turned 16,” Braun said.

Virostek is back with the Braves, who have three more home games including a Feb. 2 finale at Eagles with Rossland.

Jonathan Braun listened to his dad recount the discussion with his mother.

“This is the first I’ve heard of that, but it sounds like my mom,” he said. “I’m glad she got him into hockey again. It’s helped me - he’s the best coach I’ve ever had - but I never looked down on him for having other responsibilities.

“I always enjoyed watching his teams, going into the locker rooms and being involved. I helped with the Chiefs (as a stick boy) until Bobby Brett got there (as owner in April, 1990). He designated a couple of other kids to do it. It didn’t bother me. I could still go in the locker room only I didn’t have to work.”

Benefits of the father-son relationship run both ways.

“When I coached with the Chiefs, my sons were playing and I was never really involved with them,” Braun said. “I made up my mind a long time ago that I wasn’t going to push my kids, maybe to the point of even backing away too much.

“Now I’m able to share some of the things I learned while Jonathan was growing up that he wasn’t privy to. It’s a thrill being part of the dream that he has, to go on and play somewhere.”

Somewhere soon. The clock is ticking in a game where 19-year-olds are junior hockey veterans.

“He’ll be 18 next year, he has to make the step to Junior A or the Western Hockey League,” Braun said.

“Next September, hopefully, I’ll be in Lethbridge, trying out with Maxy’s team (the Hurricanes)” Jonathan Braun said. “If I don’t make it, I’ll go to Junior A in Calgary, hopefully, or maybe play for my dad again next year if he gets a Junior A team here.”

Braun sees his son as a future hockey tough guy, accepting as he did the trappings of that role - the cuts, stitches, bruises and aches.

“As his coach and his dad, what I can do is prepare him for that,” Braun said. “If he decides to do it, I’d be the last person to tell him no, or even be afraid for him because I wouldn’t want him to feed off whatever fear I’d have for him.

“If you play that role, you have to be able to play (skate and handle the puck as well as fight). Second, your concern has to be for the team, not to prove how tough you are.

“In our Memorial Cup year, everybody talked about (Pat) Falloon and (Ray) Whitney, but the guy who made our practices was (Kerry) Toporowski. When guys stepped away from what the team was all about, Topper and some other guys brought it back.

“Even though he was a teammate, the guys all thought of Toporowski as a presence. If they were going to start messing with what we were doing, they were going to have to face Topper in practice, where there were no linesmen or a referee to stop what was going on.”

You are, Braun shrugs, what you are.

“Very few players are able to determine their own destiny,” he said. “One wrong step can mean the bench, or a bus ticket down to wherever they put you where even The Hockey News can’t find you. There’s not a school or university that teaches you what it takes to play - the fear you have to handle and the sacrifices you have to deal with.

“But in the chase, even if you don’t make it to the NHL, you carry the lessons you learn. Apply those to any other job and you’ll be someone that people want to be around, because you know how to be part of a team.”

Although Braun enjoys telling stories, punctuated by his long high-pitched laugh, he insists he hasn’t mellowed. He says he’s ridden this team, one of the youngest in the league, as hard as he’s ridden anybody.

“If I start to mellow, I’ll quit,” he said. “I don’t get paid for it so I’m not about to waste my time. I approach the Braves the way I approached coaching the Chiefs.

“I give the best I have. That’s what I demand from them.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo