Original Chief fondly remembers move

Brent Gilchrist and his Kelowna Wings teammates had reasons to be leery.

Their team was being uprooted and transported across the border to Spokane, which had already buried one Western Hockey League franchise. Ownership and management were, well, volatile and generally penurious. Senior amateurs had owned the city’s hockey heart.

Just what were they getting into?

Only the memories of a lifetime.

The Wings became the Spokane Chiefs in 1985, and on Friday the club staged a pregame ceremony to reveal and salute its Top 25 Chiefs in 25 years, Gilchrist among them – to his surprise, though not because he was on the list.

“How could that be 25 years ago?” he wondered. “I talked to a few teammates and we all agreed we weren’t nearly that old.”

Time’s trickery notwithstanding, this is not one of those instances in which self-delusion makes the players’ careers better with each passing year. More than half of them have Memorial Cup rings. Three hoisted the Stanley Cup. There are first-round NHL draft picks and undrafted grinders who stuck anyway. One played 352 regular-season Chiefs games, another just 14 – and collectively they’ve appeared in 6,746 games in the NHL, with more to come.

And all, as general manager Tim Speltz pointed out, wore a letter in Spokane. Leadership is always the skill most prized.

The team is understandably weighted toward the most successful years, and if there was a fear that the era before Bobby Brett’s ownership might be slighted, it was acknowledged by the man himself that the “good, young players” already on the roster – Pat Falloon, Ray Whitney, Jon Klemm – helped him through any buyer’s remorse.

As for Brent Gilchrist, he would play 15 years in the NHL and win a Stanley Cup, but now he has the distinction of being the Top 25’s only original Chief.

“Our support in Kelowna wasn’t tremendous,” he remembered, “but that had a lot to do with the building. We knew we were going to a bigger city and a larger building, but we didn’t know if it was a hockey town – and we were surprised just how strongly the city got behind us.”

The city had reason to – the action was fast and explosive. And that was before they dropped the puck.

Majority owner Vic Fitzgerald and coach and GM Marc Pezzin were forever at odds, complicated by the fact that Pezzin also owned a piece of the club – and was the son-in-law of another minority owner. After a season, Fitzgerald brought into the mix one Bob Strumm, a solid talent evaluator with a penchant for stirring the pot.

On the ice, the Chiefs tried to replicate the fire-away mentality of the front office.

“The league was built more for offense then,” Gilchrist said. “The game’s changed so much, as it has from the NHL on down. There’s so much more emphasis on defensive hockey systems and kids in the WHL play like pros tactically. In our day, we’d put our best players on the ice and try to score as many goals as we could.

“I wouldn’t say the players were better, but it was possibly more entertaining.”

In his two years in Spokane, Gilchrist netted 90 goals in 98 games and scored at a clip of 1.94 points per game, still the franchise record. After a year’s minor league apprenticeship, he stuck in the NHL with Montreal and was devastated when the Canadiens traded him four years later. He bounced through three more clubs before landing with Detroit in 1997, where he got a warning from roommate Bob Rouse.

“We won the Stanley Cup last year and you’re the only player we changed,” Rouse said. “If we don’t win again, it’s your fault.”

The cherished memories of the Top 25 Chiefs vary in magnitude and bling, but it was obvious even those with NHL cred were touched by Friday’s reunion.

“What they’re doing here,” said 1991 Memorial Cup goalie Trevor Kidd, “rivals what an NHL club may do, honoring their former players. (To) fly guys out here from all over the country … I’m humbled to be here.”

Gilchrist drove down from Kelowna, where he and his wife, Caroline, settled, and where he works in the investment business and coaches his son’s midget Tier I team. Living in one of the hubs of the ’Dub, he can be transported back 25 years whenever he wants. Friday brought it up close.

“I don’t think there’s a player on that original team that wouldn’t say moving to Spokane was a positive,” he said. “It’s a great city for junior hockey, and for the small-town guys it seemed like a big city to us.”

With a hockey club that has a big-time history.