YORKTON - The Yorkton Junior Terriers are celebrating 50 years in the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League this season.
To mark the milestone Yorkton This Week is digging into its archives and pulling out a random Terrier-related article from the past five decades of reporting on the team, and will be running one each week, just as it originally appeared.
This feature will appear weekly over the entire season in the pages of The Marketplace.
Week #23 comes from Feb. 10, 1996.
Grant Ottenbreit’s hockey career has moved from Yorkton to the East Coast Hockey League, to tryouts with the Winnipeg Jets and New York Rangers in the National Hockey League and back to Churchbridge.
It’s a journey which has taken most of his life, and thousands of miles on team buses, eating hundreds of meals at fast food outlets.
Years of lacing up skates in dressing rooms across North America – dressing rooms musty with the sweat of the game.
Years of tending bruises – playing through the pain of pulls, sprains and strains. Years of taking stitches too numerous to recall.
Years of loving the game.
While Ottenbreit admits his career has been one of ups and downs, it’s the love of the game which keeps him looking forward to it each fall as the leaves turn to crimson and temperatures plunge.
Now 29, the name called Otto still grabs an equipment bag stuffed with the regalia of the game, albeit with a few more elastic bandages and a little more liniment these days, and heads out for regular duty on the blueline of the Langenburg Warriors in the Yellowhead Hockey League.
“I love it. Your back’s a little sore and stiff, but once you get the gear on and hit the ice … That’s what it’s all about. You’ve got to love the game,” he said.
Ottenbreit may now be content with senior hockey, but there was a time he took a shot at the big time, including the Jets tryout.
The tryout didn’t extend beyond an exhibition rookie game, but Ottenbreit says at least he knows now what it would have taken to make the NHL.
“I was in the best shape of my life. Honestly, I was doing wind sprints, I was lifting weights. I was 220 pounds, 6 foot 2, and I was skating everyday with guys like Garry Shewchuk from the L.A. Kings and guys like that.
“I went to the camp and I was the third worst guy there (on a fitness test). I only beat out two goalies.
“You don’t believe what those guys go through to get in shape,”
Ottenbreit admits he often looks back on what might have been.
“I see some of the clowns that made it for even one game, that were just terrible. Guys that were no better than I was and I tried to fight them and they’d just back down.”
Ottenbreit looks back on his junior days, when he smoked too much and partied too much, and it leaves him with a message for young players.
“I’d like to sit down with all the juniors and say, ‘Hey, I know you get out after the games and have a few beers and have fun. But f—k it, put your head in the game for three years and give it all you’ve got’,” he said.
“No wonder I couldn’t skate. I never got in any shape. I was never in any kind of condition. I was just a big boy. You go out and fight.
“If I knew then what I know now, when I was 18 years old and had started working on my skating and quit smoking …”
Still, Ottenbreit is satisfied with the way his career turned out, especially considering his start in the Yorkton minor hockey system. The system also provided him with his first indication that breaks are a part of hockey.
“The first year of midget I went to the midget A camp and was one of the last guys cut. I went back to the midget B team and they had already picked their team,” he said.
“I ended up going to the C team.”
It turned out to be a lost year for the developing Ottenbreit.
“Basically, it was just a terrible year. It was just horrible hockey. We played in towns like Esterhazy and Buchanan instead of Moose Jaw and Regina.”
The next season he headed to Junior B in Hudson Bay, but by Christmas the then 16-year-old found being away from home was too much to take. And at Christmas he was back in Yorkton playing juvenile. That was followed by a year in the Yellowhead Hockey League playing for Saltcoats.
Then finally, as an 18-year-old, a break came. Gerry James had left the Yorkton Terriers, leaving the team in local hands, with only one player on the roster.
Ottenbreit got a tryout, and although a defenceman throughout his career, his skills weren’t up to the Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League standard.
“I wasn’t a bad skater when I was younger, but it all seemed to go out the door,” he said.
Without a sot at defence, Ottenbreit looked to be headed out of hockey. But the Terriers lacked toughness.
“So they kept me as a tough guy up front. That was the start of the scrapping career,” he said.
It wasn’t a case where he was asked to drop the gloves, but he saw the role as a way to make the team.
“He (the Terrier coach) didn’t come up and straight ahead say, ‘You’re going to have to scrap’, but he put me up front and told me he didn’t think I was to make the team as a defenceman, but they needed some pluggers, some guys that could work the corners.
“He didn’t tell me I was going to be a goon, but he told me I would have to go out there and make things happen.”
The first year Ottenbreit found ice time hard to come by.
“I maybe played 40-45 games. If somebody asked me what line I was on, I would always say I was on the fourth line in section F,” he laughed.
But, he did find a way to mix it up, recording more than 400 minutes in penalties. Ottenbreit’s propensity for the rough going was coming to the fore.
The next year it was 490 minutes and the third moved up to 507 minutes in the sin bin.
Ottenbreit says it wasn’t a case of enjoying the rough style, but he added, “I knew it was my role. It didn’t bother me at all.
As a combatant with more than 2,500 penalty minutes since his SJHL days, (he played from 1984 to 1987), Ottenbreit says fights are a part of the game, and far less dangerous than work done with the stick.
“It’s not like you get to grab a guy and know exactly where that punch is going because guys’ heads are ducking and dodging. I don’t think I’m out of line saying that I had at least 150 fights in my junior and semi pro career, and I maybe had half a dozen black eyes, and two broken noses,” he said. “Fighting is not as dangerous as everyone says.”
Often, a fight is simply a vehicle to boost a team.
“My first year in the East Coast League there was only five teams. Every team had two, three, maybe four really tough guys. We had only five teams and played a 60-game schedule … It would get to the point we’d be up two goals, or they’d be up two goals, you’d be at the faceoff and – ‘Give me a chance to fire my team up’ – so you’d go.
“He never did anything to me. I never did anything to him. We just knew it was our jobs, so let’s fire our teams up.”
For those looking to take fighting out of the game, Ottenbreit says they’re missing part of the game.
“I think they’re idiots. I mean, you go and watch a Saskatchewan junior game, you see the prettiest goal be scored and you listen to the crowd, and then you get the two biggest guys squaring off, and you see.
“You have to have it in hockey, unless you want to put neck guards on everybody, and full face masks.”
While fighting was an Ottenbreit trademark, with the tough going improvement as a hockey player also came.
Through his three seasons, 1988 to 1991, at Erie, Ottenbreit averaged nearly a point a game, 164 in 174 games, at the time fifth in team career scoring, to go with his 845 penalty minutes.
There were even a few hat tricks, which was a bonus for a guy making $500 a week.
“If you scored a hat trick in Erie, the executive took off their hats and passed them around the stands. So you got $600, $800 cash, U.S. tax-free money in your pocket,” he said.
“If your winger got three assists you’d give him $100 and the defenceman who set up the hat trick goal would get $50, and you’d buy a round of beer for the team and still have $400.”
While penalty minutes might be an Ottenbreit trademark, he remembers the big goals too, such as his first as a pro.
“It was a powerplay goal. A wrist shot to the top, blocker side against the Johnston Chiefs. I went in and everybody was saying, ‘You went up top you big sniper.’ It was the big joke that day,” he smiled.
