ALUMNI SPOTLIGHT: BUTCH DEADMARSH
(Courtesy of Perry Bergson, The Brandon Sun) — Butch Deadmarsh will almost certainly be the only player to ever join the Brandon Wheat Kings in part because he spent two days picking up eggs at Hutterite colonies.
Deadmarsh, now 66, was with the team for two seasons from 1968 to 1970 and went on to play 137 regular-season games in the National Hockey League and 255 in the World Hockey Association.
A product of Trail, B.C., Deadmarsh left the Kelowna Buckaroos of the B.C. Junior Hockey League to join the Moose Jaw Canucks in the four-team Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League. But the coach who recruited him had taken a job in Ontario and the 17-year-old wasn’t enjoying it, so when Wheat Kings general manager and part owner Glen Lawson called and asked him if he would like to play in Brandon, Deadmarsh was interested.
There was a hitch.
The Winnipeg Jets, who also played in the Western Canadian Hockey League, had his rights and were given a 48-hour window to talk him into playing in the provincial capital instead. Deadmarsh came to Brandon, and was immediately involved in what some might consider fowl play by Lawson, who owned an egg business.
“He was going to all of these Hutterite colonies and making deals for eggs,” Deadmarsh said. “So I hid out with Glen for two days out in the country where I couldn’t be reached by Winnipeg … That’s how I got to Brandon.”
Deadmarsh certainly repaid Lawson’s persistence. In 101 games in the WCHL — which changed its name to the Western Hockey League in 1978 — he had 56 goals, 56 assists and 431 penalty minutes.
“I was obviously a little nervous because you’re out of your own environment and away from your friends and your family and everyone’s a stranger, but when you’re a kid, all you want to do is play hockey so once you hang around the guys for two or three days, it blends pretty quickly,” he said.
Deadmarsh enjoyed the long bus rides, and another thing he hadn’t experienced before.
“We all wore matching team blazers,” he said. “You feel kind of proud that you’re putting on that Wheat King blazer with a crest on it. And being a newbie, it was something that I had never experienced before. All we ever had was a nylon jacket with a crest sewn on it.”
In the 1969-70 season, the team played in the Wheat City Arena for a short time before it was demolished, and then moved to the Manex Arena on the Keystone site, where the Wheat Kings played until the Keystone Centre opened in 1972. (The frame of the Manex, which was dismantled in 2004, now covers the Great Western Roadhouse and stretches north toward Canad Inns.)
“They added an upper-level catwalk all the way around it so people couldn’t even sit down at the higher level,” Deadmarsh said of the Manex. “People leaned over and looked down at the top of your head and yelled at you. It was very weird.”
Deadmarsh’s linemates included Moe Brunel, Bob Fitchner, Bob Leslie and others.
He was coached in Brandon by both Ross (Buster) Brayshaw and Ron Maxwell, and holds a special regard for Maxwell, who coached him in his second season.
“Ron was a real good catalyst for guiding us young guys,” Deadmarsh said. “He wasn’t a temperamental person. He was very strict, demanded respect and demanded effort, but he didn’t try to intimidate you with his coaching style like a lot of coaches did back in that era.”
Deadmarsh said Maxwell was a good influence who let players know what they were doing wrong.
After a strong first season, Deadmarsh had an outstanding final year in Brandon.
“That second year I came in there and played my style of hockey and was just a kid having fun,” he said.
In 54 games, he scored 37 goals and added 33 assists, but the jaw-dropping number is further along the stat line.
His penalty totals that season are alternately listed by different sources as 301 or 361 minutes, which would put him fourth or seventh for single-season minutes in franchise history.
But if that suggests he sought out fights, the truth actually lies elsewhere.
“I think the strongest point of my game was that I loved to hit,” Deadmarsh said. “I should have been bigger and a football player. That’s where I got into a lot of trouble on the ice. I would be charging into the corner and taking guys out against the boards and that kind of stuff, so when you piss somebody off, they come back at you. I guess I had the characteristic that if somebody pissed me off, I didn’t hesitate to give them a little pop with the old mitts.
“I don’t think I went out looking for fights, but I created a lot of bad situations because I loved to hit.”
Deadmarsh said that gave him some space in junior, although it wasn’t as effective at the next level because players were bigger and tougher.
After the 1970 season, he was taken in the second round of the National Hockey League draft with the 15th pick overall by the Buffalo Sabres.
Deadmarsh played 10 games with the Sabres in the 1970-71 season, the year after leaving Brandon, although he spent most of the year with the Salt Lake Golden Eagles in the former minor-pro Western Hockey League, which folded in 1974. The expansion Sabres were stocked with veterans such as Eddie Shack, Joe Daley and Roger Crozier, although they also had a promising rookie named Gilbert Perreault.
Two seasons later, Deadmarsh was traded to the Atlanta Flames, which led to him becoming an interesting footnote in hockey history.
After playing his entire hockey career away from the West Coast and his parents, he signed a deal with the WHA’s Vancouver Blazers that would take effect a season-and-a-half later.
Knowing he wouldn’t be returning for the long term, the Flames left him unprotected in the 1974 NHL expansion draft that stocked the rosters of the Washington Capitals and Kansas City Scouts.
The Scouts selected him with the seventh pick, so, in the final year of his NHL contract, Deadmarsh headed to Kansas City. On a team that was spectacularly bad — they played the first eight games on the road because Kemper Arena wasn’t finished — Deadmarsh had three goals and two assists in 20 games.
When the Blazers offered to buy his contract for $50,000 from the Scouts, who were 4-15-1 at the time, Deadmarsh suddenly became the first player to switch leagues during a season.
“I ended up moving from Kansas City in the NHL to the Vancouver Blazers in the World Hockey Association that season just before Christmas,” Deadmarsh said. “Attendance was (bad) in Kansas City and they were losing money so that was a lot of money back in those days. The Scouts took the 50 grand and I went to Vancouver. A lot of players went from the NHL to the WHA but it was always done in the off-season. This is my claim to fame, I was the first player to move during the season who was under contract.”
Deadmarsh played with the Blazers, Calgary Cowboys, Minnesota Fighting Saints, Edmonton Oilers and Cincinnati Stingers in the WHA. He said he was treated with respect in both leagues.
“The only little glitch that I had was when I got traded from Calgary to the Minnesota Fighting Saints for about two-and-a-half months and then they traded back for me,” he said of his 1976-77 season. “In the two months I spent in Minnesota, it was such a questionable thing. We used to get our paycheques in the dressing room and race to the bank to make sure they were good. That was the only two uncomfortable months I had in hockey.”
After finishing the 1977-78 season with the Stingers, Deadmarsh decided he was done.
With the league’s merging and the Cincinnati Stingers not heading to the NHL, part of the deal was that the WHA teams couldn’t leave any debts. Deadmarsh was paid 60 cents on the dollar for the last two years of his contract as he moved onto the next chapter of his life.
Deadmarsh made a couple of contacts in Brandon who would prove to have a significant impact on what lay ahead.
One was his future wife Pam (nee MacKay), while the other was teammate Brian Harding, who would be a partner in a small Alberta printing business they bought and in 25 years built up to 110 employees before selling it five years ago.
He and Pam were married for 13 years, and had two kids, Kerri and Brad.
Both Butch and Pam are now remarried and remain good friends. Deadmarsh and his wife Karen spend six months of each year in Parksville, B.C., which is on Vancouver Island, and the other six months in Mesa, Ariz.
Deadmarsh kept up with his Brandon teammates for a while, especially when he and Pam had a cabin at Clear Lake, but eventually fell out of touch with many of them when they bought a house in Penticton, B.C., and spent their summers in the Okanagan instead.
He guesses he was last in Brandon in the early 1980s.
He retired from the game healthy at age 28 and now enjoys his time on the golf course, even if he says with a chuckle that he isn’t always sure where the ball is going.
Deadmarsh is grateful for his time in hockey. It allowed him to buy three duplexes in Brandon and a little orchard out in the Okanagan, and with those investments, he was able to leave the game before it left him.
“I have no regrets at all,” he said. “The important thing about life is when you want to make changes, you want to make it for yourself and you want to control it. You don’t want somebody to come to you and say, ‘You’re let go, you’re fired or stuff like that.’ I left hockey and I still had a two-year contract. I just had enough.”
His former team – the Wheat Kings – host Swift Current on Tuesday night. Game time at Westman Place is 7pm.