Lucas Punkari
It has been 60 years since the Fort Frances Canadians hoisted the Allan Cup trophy as national senior men’s hockey champs after defeating the Stratford Indians in six games in the final.
But the memories of that experience will never fade away for Canadians’ blueliner Alex Kurceba.
“We didn’t even know going into that year if we would even have a team,” noted Kurceba, 84, who now lives in Winnipeg but was in Fort Frances this past weekend with his son, Sandy.
“But we ended up playing that season, and we ended up with a great team that played their butts off every single night,” he added.
Kurceba, who got his start with the Winnipeg Rangers’ organization, originally came to play in Fort Frances in 1948 at the age of 20 and immediately was thrown into the line of fire.
“I arrived here that fall, got married in January to my wife [Joyce], and in my first season I was in the playoffs,” he recalled.
“Before I came here, I could have gone to play for Omaha, which was Detroit [Red Wings] property at the time,” he added.
“But I elected to take the opportunity to play in Fort Frances even though I still had to make the team.
“Myself, Harry Barefoot, and Gordie Miller came from Winnipeg and made the team, along with three others from Thunder Bay,” Kurceba said.
“And before you knew it, we were in the playoffs and we beat Kenora and Port Arthur, along with my old team in Winnipeg.
“I also have to say that in those days, we didn’t have a home ice so all of our home games ended up being on the road,” he noted.
“And at the end of the 1949 playoffs, we played in Regina for a best-of-five series for the Western championship and we ended up spending almost two weeks there.”
Two years later, the Canadians made another lengthy post-season run and advanced to the Allan Cup final, which they lost to the Owen Sound Mercurys in seven games.
“We had a pretty good team that year also, and we ended up staying down there for 21 days for the final,” Kurceba recalled.
“One of the things that I remember about that was that at the time, Owen Sound was a dry town and none of the guys wanted to stay there.
“So as a result, we ended up staying in a town that was just outside of Owen Sound that had a pub, and we all had a great time with everyone else that lived there,” he said.
“Another thing I remember about the finals was that it was so hot and mild at the arena there that both teams had to come out on the ice and skate around to lift the fog off of the ice,” Kurceba added.
After the team decided to make another run for the Allan Cup in 1952, the Canadians found themselves with their backs to the wall in the regional showdown, trailing Fort William 3-0 in the best-of-seven series.
“I remember before the fourth game that they had found a trophy that was nicer-looking than the Allan Cup, and they announced at the old Port Arthur Arena that they were going to award it to the Fort William team after they won,” Kurceba recalled.
“I can still remember sitting down in the dressing room and saying out loud, ‘They aren’t going to get it,’ and the rest of the team was saying, ‘What are you talking about? We’re down 3-0.’
“When they asked me why I said that, I told them that, ‘All of a sudden, a trophy that you guys had won over the last few years but never actually received shows up, and now they are going to give it out when you lose,’” he remarked.
With that extra motivation, the Canadians won the next four games to capture the regional title, which pushed them forward towards a return to the Allan Cup final against the Indians.
“We actually had to play our first two games of the final in Fort William, and why that happened I’m not really sure but that’s the way things go with hockey politics,” Kurceba smiled.
After splitting the first two games of the series, the Canadians won two of the next three games on home ice before taking a 4-1 victory in Game 6 to capture the Allan Cup crown.
“It was so hot in the final game of the tournament that the fire department was pouring water on the roof to keep it cool, but inside the ice was holding beautifully,” Kurceba stressed.
“At that time, I was the recreation director here so I knew that the arena could only hold 1,628 because I kept fielding calls saying that, ‘We need tickets for the CHA brass coming out of Winnipeg,’ and I would have to keep telling them that we simply had no room.
“But during the game itself, the kids were hanging off of the rafters and there had to have been over 3,000 people in there,” he enthused.
While the feeling of capturing the Allan Cup was great enough, Kurceba felt winning on home ice made it even more special.
“The amount of people that were in there for the game was more than I could have ever expected,” he smiled.
“Fort Frances really backed this team, as in those days you had to travel by train to get to Thunder Bay and Winnipeg, and the fans would always follow us.
“I remember the one year in Regina, we had fans that came with us to the games there, and I also saw a man who came all the way from Barwick to cheer for us in Owen Sound,” Kurceba noted.
“They just loved our team.”
Unlike the current landscape of senior men’s hockey, the teams that played during the 1950s were full of players who could have made in the professional ranks but never cracked an “Original Six” roster.
“I remember that during a game we played in Eveleth, [Hall of Fame goalie] Frank Brimsek came to watch the game and he told us in the dressing room that we could all play in the NHL,” Kurceba said.
“You had guys like Ed Kliner, who could switch and come in with both hands to take a shot, and ‘Blackie’ O’Donnell, who could tip in a shot from anywhere on the ice, who would fight out all year for the leading scorer and they would end up tying for the lead with 52 points.
“That’s how much talent we had all through the lineup,” he stressed.
Off the ice, the team was very closely-knit, with Kurceba becoming very close with team captain William “Sambo” Fedoruk.
“On the ice, there was no one that could catch up with him, even from our team,” Kurceba said.
“But off the ice he was a great man. And when my wife and I got married in 1949, he let us live in the upstairs part of his house.
“He was a great leader, and someone that I personally looked up to on the team.”
Kurceba lived in Fort Frances until 1958, when he moved to Dauphin, Man. for work. He played for the Kings there and ended up meeting up with his old teammates during a playoff game a couple of years later.
“I remember I stole the puck off of one of their defenceman, as I knew what he was going to do, and I came racing in on my old teammate Harry [Barefoot] in goal,” he recalled.
“I threw a back-handed shot that couldn’t harm a fly, and I think Harry was so astounded that I was coming in on him that the puck went in and we ended up winning the game 1-0.
“Afterwards, he was chasing me up the blueline. But even though we were on different teams, we still had a lot of laughs,” he smiled.
Kurceba then moved back to Winnipeg a couple of years later, where he coached minor hockey for a number of years before retiring.
Despite being away from Fort Frances, Kurceba got together with his teammates every five years, with the biggest ceremony taking place in 2002 when the Canadians were the guests of honour for a 50th anniversary celebration.
“That was a special time and a really great afternoon with everyone,” Kurceba said.
“But in 10 years, a lot of things can happen and today there’s only just a few of us that are still left,” he remarked.
While many of the younger residents of Fort Frances may be unaware of the accomplishments Kurceba and his teammates achieved nearly 60 years ago, the influence from that team still is being felt today.
“For our age group, they were the inspiration for us growing up,” Sandy Kurceba noted.
“I played with the other sons from that team, and when we got to be 15-20 years of age, we were in the junior hockey ranks and doing what our fathers did.
“What they did in the early 1950s took us into the late 1960s here,” he added.
