Wingate Takes Nickname a Bit Too Seriously

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He Thinks He's (Win)God: Catching Up With Hans Wingate

 

Calgary, Alberta -- Following his successful career with the Calgary Wranglers, Riga Reign and Toronto Legion, VHL fans haven’t heard much from Scottish goaltender Hans Wingate in recent years. On the one hand, that’s a bit of a surprise – he was recently named one of the top ten players in VHL history, after all, a veritable legend for the only team to win a threepeat in VHL history. On the other hand… well, you only need to look at his social media.

 

It all started in late winter, two years after Wingate moved back to the Calgary area after hanging up his pads. He and a group of friends were out snowmobiling, when he went over a jump he thought was harmless. It was not. His snowmobile veered left in midair, and he couldn’t correct it. Wingate went crashing to the ground, the snowmobile landing square on top of him. As he lied motionless in the snow, his friends thought that was it.

 

“He wasn’t moving, I thought for sure he was gone,” friend Buck McBuckington said. “No normal person takes that type of hit and lives.”

 

The group called him an ambulance, which due to their location in the Canadian wilderness turned into an airlift operation. It was an hour and a half trek to the closest trauma center in Calgary. An hour and a half that, for certain, doctors thought they didn’t have.

 

Upon arriving in Calgary, doctors pronounced Wingate in critical condition, giving him a 5% chance of emerging from his induced coma. But then, a miracle occurred. Somehow, someway, Wingate began to recover. Doctors were able to take him off life support after a few days; he returned to consciousness a week later. And over the course of months, he began to regain full motor function and ability.

 

This is the story the public knows, the one of the star hockey player returning to form. His jersey retirement ceremony, which occurred almost a year to the day after this accident, was a particularly tear-filled affair. However, there is a twist.

 

Wingate, it turns out, knew exactly how improbable his comeback was. He heard the fans, calling him a modern miracle. And somewhere in his brain, whether through concussion or pure delusion, he began to conflate his playing days nickname of “WinGod” with the accident that befell him.

 

It is then, sources say, that Hans Wingate began to view himself as something more than human. He began to look at himself as divine.

 

The reveal began slowly. One of his first tweets after the accident reads, “I am doing fine! God is good! I am good!” To the public, this seemed like a proclamation of him being okay. But those close to him now say that the last sentence, “I am good!” was less a declaration of how he was doing, and more equating himself with “God is good!” From there, sources and his social media history says, he began to believe he was a higher power.

 

“Think about it this way. You’re a star hockey player randomly out of Scotland. You’ve been called above mere mortals your entire life. And then you survive a horrible accident in a way that is called far and wide a miracle. I mean, can’t you see it?” McBuckington says now. “Of course he was going to have a big head, he was called 'WinGod' for Pete's sake. I’m just a bit surprised it’s gone this far, I guess.”

 

“This far” is perhaps an understatement. Wingate is not verified on Twitter, but those close to the goalie have confirmed that the @WinGOD account is in fact his. On that platform, Wingate has filmed himself attempting to perform various miracles, such as turning water into wine (using purple food coloring) and walking on water (it was a puddle, and his shoes indeed got wet).

 

He also spends his days writing various “verses” on Twitter to his followers. Some of them are direct copies of scripture from the Bible or Quran. Others, perhaps amusingly, are song lyrics. The one tweet of his that went viral, and for which most people may know of his current state, reads, “And lo, beware: This world is the jungle, we take it day by day. If you want it you're going to bleed, but it's the price you pay.”

 

Friends have tried to get Wingate help, but law enforcement officials believe that if he’s not hurting anybody from his rural Alberta home, they might be best letting him live in his delusions. “He’s definitely not the first guy to think he’s a higher power, and he’s probably not the last,” McBuckington said. “Probably not the best for a former VHL star, but what are you going to do?”