by Barry Stagg
February 1997
Fear and Loathing at Rinkside
The sexual pervert Graham James has been the topic of choice all through the hockey media early in the New Year. This sick and self- deluded homosexual has the shattered psyches of many junior hockey players on whatever passes for his conscience. The idea of stopping others from doing what James succeeded in for so long is the main focus of most debate.
The sad fact is that the likes of James are difficult to stop because they all use a variation on the old "Confidence Game " scheme that has gained many a criminal access to the object of his or her affection -be that sex or money or power. Quite simply these criminals present themselves as being the least likely to be dishonest or perverted. The obvious drooler or thief is never difficult to spot. It is the clever faker who is the most pernicious of deviants. These are the ones who use an upstanding and totally respectable image to gain the trust of the vulnerable.
Now there is plenty of talk of weeding out the undesirable in the ranks of minor hockey coaches and managers. Care must be taken to ensure that this does not become some sort of puritanical witch hunt where the merely eccentric are shunned while the clever pervert continues to sit on the screening committee.
There may be signs of an overall day of reckoning for professional sports in general. The ridiculous emphasis in minor hockey on producing candidates for the gravy train of pro hockey has twisted the judgment of many. It was the winning record of Graham James the junior hockey coach that caused his apparent homosexual predation on children to be ignored. Deviance and perversion are overlooked every season in the junior and professional hockey leagues. Players indiscretions are the ones most commonly hushed and minimized. Brutish social behaviour is tolerated if the player is a star.
How often do we hear of alcoholic hockey players driven from the game at an early age by their drunken decay. Whispers sometimes grow loud as promising players are shunted from team to team and league to league. For this to occur there must be tolerance for boorishness and stupor. Otherwise the problem players would never get across the threshold of the professional game in the first place.
Too much emphasis is placed on raw talent and too little attention is paid to strong character. Thugs with talent fail to lead a team to success in the National Hockey League and the general manager starts a search for "character players". This tells us that amoral morons are no substitute for tough minded leaders like Wayne Gretzky. Remember the ridicule that was directed at Gretzky when he joined the league. Every brawny power forward was touted as a certain annihilator of the flimsy and cerebral youngster. It is still hard to figure out why such media darlings as Mark Messier, Mario Lemieux and Cam Neely were never able to break the scoring records that the little kid from Brantford somehow managed to set.
The mentality of the meat market pervades the hockey system. Despite the success and leadership of small, smart players, the talent searchers look for muscle and brute strength over finesse. In the edgy world of major junior hockey this gives the trolling predators like Graham James the leverage they need. While the players with mental agility and toughness are shunted to the side if they lack size, the naive and the plain stupid can advance if they possess height and enough muscle. That is the pool of prey that the pervert or the sadist or the thief can exploit. The frightened and the unsophisticated are the most vulnerable.
It is important to remember that in the exploitative world of junior hockey there are many willing victims. The lust for fame and money drives players and particularly parents to tolerate many forms of degradation. Players drop out of school. They may be sent far from home to work with a particularly aggressive coach. Greed and vanity are treated as virtues in this bizarre world where a player's personal worth is measured in statistics instead of morality. It is a small wonder that deviants might prosper as managers, coaches and indeed as athletes in that atmosphere of unreality.
Supporters of sport must demand more than animalistic performance ratios from athletes if they also expect that the normal rules of civilized and honest conduct are to be honoured. Otherwise perversion is the foundation of the whole business as hockey players are treated like the products of some Kentucky horse- breeding farm. You reap what you sow.
Until next month: Be proud , be prosperous.