LANNY: THE TIGER THAT ALMOST WASN’T
A long time ago, when the Earth was green and hockey players used wooden sticks and leather skates, there was a team in Lethbridge called the Sugar Kings.
A raw-boned kid from Hand Hills named Lanny McDonald had played for the Kings in the 1970-71 Alberta Junior Hockey League season, and was headed for the team’s parent club, the Calgary Centennials, for the 1971-72 campaign.
But Jack Tennant had other ideas. (Unless you’re dead or in Edmonton, you know who Jack Tennant is.)
As general manager of the B.C. Junior Hockey League’s Kamloops Rockets, Tennant, in tandem with the Sugar Kings, was grooming talent for the Western League’s Centennials. McDonald fully expected to be playing in Tier 1 junior hockey in Calgary.
The Medicine Hat Tigers, meanwhile, were combing AJHL and BCJHL rosters for much-needed talent following a particularly unremarkable inaugural season.
“Medicine Hat had been in the Western League for a year, and were not very good,” Tennant recalled of the Tigers’ 22-43-1 record. “It was decided they could have a draft.”
The Tier 2 junior teams were allowed to protect seven players as the Tigers trolled for bodies ahead of the 1971-72 Western League season.
When the dust had settled, McDonald was still in Lethbridge with a ticket to the Centennials in hand.
“I always thought I was going to be a Calgary Centennial,” McDonald said while signing autographs and posing for pictures with his legion of fans at the re-opening of the Cochrane Canadian Tire.
But a skilled forward named John Senkpiel had been plucked from Tennant’s Kamloops roster to join Medicine Hat. Losing the Smithers, B.C., product didn’t sit well with Tennant.
“We got a hold of Scotty (Centennials head coach Scotty Munro) and said you can’t do that, you’ve got to find somebody else for the Tigers,” Tennant said.
So the Tigers said they’d send Senkpiel back to Kamloops to get McDonald from Lethbridge. Despite the protestations of Sugar Kings head coach John “Chappy” Chapman, Munro agreed to the deal.
Tennant was ecstatic.
“We said ‘you bet’ because McDonald will never be a hockey player,” Tennant recalled of his relief at getting Senkpiel back. “As a 17-year-old, Senkpiel was a hell of a hockey player.”
Then Senkpiel turned 18.
The rest, as they say, is history.
McDonald went on to a Hall-of-Fame hockey career, winning a Western League title with Medicine Hat in 1973 and a Stanley Cup with the Calgary Flames in 1989.
“Senkpiel, the last I heard, was a bartender in Idaho,” Tennant reported.
McDonald, meanwhile, was nothing more than a passenger on the bus to the big leagues. And his recollection of “the deal” has an added twist after Senkpiel was returned from the Hat.
“They (Centennials) had a choice of who else they could protect on their Lethbridge farm team,” McDonald said. “It was either John Davidson or myself. John Davidson was a fantastic goalie. Right choice. Both of us ended up in the NHL. So it worked out.”
As for the man who insisted McDonald “would never be a hockey player?”
“How could Jack and I still be such good friends?,” Lanny cracked, adding that he finally did get to play hockey in Calgary. “It absolutely worked out fantastic for me. It came full circle. It worked out for everyone.”
