It has been 50 years since the Port Arthur Bearcats passed through the Iron Curtain and into local hockey lore.
Playing mostly outdoors, the team played national clubs in blizzards and even rain showers on a month-long tour of Europe that would end with an Ahearne Cup championship win in Sweden.
Ab Cava, who would go on to coach the Port Arthur Marrs to the Memorial Cup final in 1967, was a 22-year-old defenseman. He remembers the first game, a 3-2 loss to Czechoslovakia’s National B Team, as a learning experience.
“We weren’t using our bodies as much as a Canadian team should,” Cava said. “I think we got whomped pretty good in that first game.”
The team would beat the Czech’s the next day.
And if those first games were a learning experience in how teams beyond the wall played, it was also a learning experience in how they lived.
Rudy Migay, who came back to Thunder Bay after a career with the Toronto Maple Leafs, which included a trip to the 1957 NHL All-Star game, said seeing life on the two sides of Berlin were as different as could be. The wall had just been built that past summer.
“It was like day and night,” Migay said. “The tanks were all lined up all the way to the border to where the wall was built… it was so dismal and dark on that Eastern side.”
Cava remembers passing through the wall back to the west.
“It was just like walking from hell into heaven.”
The two men can’t remember whether it was 18,000 or 21,500 fans on hand to watch the final game of the Ahearne Cup in Stockholm, but they remember the sound of the crowd whistling in disapproval of the Bearcats as they went on to beat Djugardens IF 5-3.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more exciting game than that,” Cava said.
The Bearcats took an early lead and barely held on, Migay remembers. If the game had gone on longer, he thinks the team might have even lost.
“Maybe they were better than us I don’t know,” he said.
But the team stood their ground and came home with the cup. Fans greeted them at the airport to welcome them home.
“They were excited. I can remember the crowd at the airport… it was a big thing," Cava said.
The players, most still live in Thunder Bay, still keep in touch and run into each other at the golf course. Cava said it was one of the highlights of his career. And with the World Juniors on around the same time of year as the Bearcats’ Jan. 3 win, the feeling still comes back every year.
“That’ll be with us forever,” he said. ““To tell you the truth I get a chill… I think about it every year especially at this time of the year.”
The Bearcats are planning a 50th year celebration later this year.
