Why I Didn't Say Anything: The Sheldon Kennedy Story

Dear Sheldon:

Even though I started writing about you in 1996, and have talked about you since 1998 when my book came out about the rape culture of the locker room, I never did meet you. I don’t think any of the messages I left with the hockey brass and your agent were passed on, and I figured as much. They knew you had seen way more in Swift Current than the inside of a hockey rink. They knew we might put it altogether.

I’d spent years digging into an alleged horrific gang rape of an innocent girl by two of the players on the Swift Current Broncos, and you’d been raped by the coach who coached the two players. They knew Graham’s victims numbered up to one hundred players. Might the ugly swath of sexual violence be cyclical? Might some of the victims already be victimizers? Might the commandeers of the junior game covered for that belching slough - also known as Graham James - as he devoured prairie youth in the name of scoring goals? Might all of this change forever the meaning of hockey night in Canada?

So the brass tried their best to let the smallest amount of information get out there so people wouldn’t connect the dots. Well, thanks Sheldon. Thanks for connecting the dots in your life, however horrendously painful the process was and still is, and thanks for putting those dots on paper because you have turns dots into an honest and terrifically important Canadian constellation, and I don’t know how you did it.

Your story starts with an emotionally and physically abusive father in the isolation of the family’s farm in Elkhorn, Manitoba. He treats you like dirt until you put on a pair of hockey skates, and then finds the cash to send you and your brother to hockey camp. Here Graham James—predator that he is--can spot your talent and your neediness a mile away. James is the keeper of the gate to a Canadian boy’s biggest dream, a junior career followed by an NHL jersey. He, like all the other men with great power in the hockey racket, can open and close at will. This, combined with hockey’s oppressive homophobia, and chummy club where James plays golf with the people who are supposed to protect the players, keeps your lips, and the lips of perhaps one hundred other boys sealed.

Just interviewing young people about how they were raped either by a coach or a player from the nation’s most fawned upon sport sent me to a psychiatrist. Their pain sliced my heart open, and the silent compliance of the “in locus parentis”, whether they be billeting parents, general managers, owners, other coaches, or CHL executive, made me so angry I had to run for hours just to dry my tears.

But you, my friend, lived it from that fateful fourteen-year-old’s day when James set up your cot by his bed, and just in case you didn’t get the picture, brought his rifle along. I know you say over and over in your book that you are not a hero. That after the talk show and the telling of your story you’d retreat into alcohol and drugs, and couldn’t have an intimate discussion if your life depended on it (which it eventually did). Believe me, you are a courageous human being, and a damned good story-teller. There were passages I loved to read, and here’s one:

"I had to be a hero but I wasn’t even ready to be me. I still felt like a wounded three-year-old child stuck in an adult’s body. I was drinking heavily and feeling ashamed of it. When I think of myself at that time, I see a man with a split personality. One of those personalities is a beaten-down drunk drinking out of a paper bag on a street corner. Then the drunk staggers over to a phone booth, gets in, and throws on his Superman cape and goes out to talk to the media".

Who knows why some people are brave, as you are - whether you acknowledge it or not - and others are cowards? You describe the scene, five years after you left Swift Current, when Darren McLean, a player who knew James was abusing a teammate, went to management to alert them. Sure, we’ll fire him they said and didn’t. You talk about that meeting in the locker room, where James was all powerful, and how one by one the other players agreed to shut up and scores goals. Only McLean and Kevin Powell refused to play.

I think of Germany in 1933, and I think of how boys did not question the iron fist of authority and donned on the brown shirts of Nazi youth, and I think of those other players. They would have worn brown shirts. You, Sheldon; you, Darren and Kevin. You would have joined the underground.

There’s something else. After you went to the very bottom of the pit, as a paranoid junkie and alcoholic, you found your faith in the sweatlodge and fasts with Native friends, who opened their hearts to you across the country. If there’s ever a place to find sex abuse survivors, it’s the rez. One hundred years of residential schools guaranteed that. After I wrote Crossing the Line, that’s where I ended up too. Love the black humour about tragedy. There’s an openness about why people are tripping over their lives. Why they so often don’t let the light inside them shine the way it would have had an adult not snuffed it out so early on in their lives.

I’m coaching a great bunch of Anishinnabe mountain bikers right now—grades three to eight. Come and see us. You will be welcomed with tea, bannock, and open hearts.

- Laura Robinson wrote 'Crossing the Line: Violence and Sexual Assault in Canada’s National Sport' and 'Black Tights: Women, Sport and Sexuality'. She coaches the Niish Nobbie mountain bike team at CapeCrokerFirstNationElementary School.