Rick Westhead’s book We Breed Lions has important message for hockey

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After the conclusion of the recent Hockey Canada sexual assault trial, my wife asked me a simple question.

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Had I ever been afraid while walking home at night in the dark?

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I immediately recognized why she was asking and answered, honestly, “no.”

Her answer was, quite obviously, yes — and she went on to say that this was a thing she and many women she knew had been discussing, especially after the trial. How men and women move through the world is very different. And in the dark, the fear of having a man accost you was ever present. It was something she wanted me to understand.

Women, she said, move in groups for this reason. That I didn’t ever think in these terms told a story she noted and I immediately understood her point.

I thought a lot about this conversation as I worked my way through Rick Westhead’s excellent new book We Breed Lions.

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It’s a grim tale of how a large corner of junior hockey continues to have a broken culture, one that desensitizes young boys to the safety of others, that feeds back into the fears of women that some men act only as predators, waiting in dark corners to force themselves upon women.

In the broken culture laid out by Westhead’s reporting, women are objects to be conquered. Along the way, so are younger, more vulnerable hockey teammates. In this world it’s not about relationships, sex is about dominance. Dominance of women, dominance of other men.

The boys in this book are objectifying each other: the veteran was hazed once when he was young, so now it’s time for him to haze the new youngsters, to force them to bend to his will. Teammates as objects to be dominated, not to be cultivated as allies.

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And so if hockey boys are objectifying each other, why wouldn’t they also be objectifying women?

That’s one of many grim, but important truths to be drawn We Breed Lions, which takes a hard view on what hockey culture, especially as it exists in large swaths of junior hockey, has, and is still doing to young men.

The “has, and is,” part is important to remember. Hazing and passing along abusive, toxic attitudes toward sex and women are not some creatures of the past. They are very much still here, still being passed down from group of veteran players to young, innocent rookies, a never-ending cycle.

Westhead could have leaned on stories of abuse from the bad old days, like those details in the still continuing class action against the Canadian Hockey League, led by ex-junior players like Dan Carcillo. Instead he focused his efforts on speaking with players who have played Canadian major junior hockey over the past decade.

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“There are so many of them on the record, it’s literally impossible to refute this,” Westhead told me this week.

The impetus for Westhead writing the book, who in his day job is an investigative reporter for TSN, was his reporting on the 2018 incident. The actual verdict of the case is almost beside the point when you read the book; what you are caught by is the disconnection of the players to what was going on in front of them.

“Eating chicken wings while guys were getting oral sex in front of them,” he observed.

Again, there’s the objectification of each other, rather than care for each other. Sex as a game where scorebooks are to be kept, not as something that’s supposed to be about an emotional connection between two people.

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And then there’s the bullying, the hazing.

Listen, I was hazed as a young rugby player in university. Unlike the experiences that many of the former — and current — junior hockey players Westhead profiles in his book, mine was not harrowing. Was it fun for everyone I was with? Probably not.

But what I experienced was not to the depths of depravity, of outright bullying, that these hockey players experienced. The “hotbox,” where players are told to strip naked and are crammed into the tiny bathroom at the back of the team bus, then are told collect a certain amount of change from the floor to “buy” back their clothes for a certain price, which of course is more than the coins made available, was not a thing I had. This ritual, by the way, as described to Westhead by many of his interviewees would always take place on a bus where purported grown-ups, the coaches, sat at the front, apparently believing that allowing their 20-year-old veterans to terrorize their 16-year-old players was a positive team-building experience.

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That was benign in its cruelty compared to what goes on at the hockey parties Westhead was told about: the parties where rookies are told there’s no option but to recruit girls who the older players can prey upon, who are told there’s no option but to drink or eat horrendous quantities of alcohol or bodily fluids.

Team-building rituals can have hugely positive benefits — but when they degrade, they simply do not make a team better.

Westhead’s book has a powerful narrative to it, beyond just relaying awful experiences young men have told him about.

He’s also looking for a way forward. He interviews Brent Bentvelzen, a former Australian rugby player, who is working with junior hockey teams like the Peterborough Petes to work on ending the cycle of this broken culture. He’s working with the Petes to help their players understand how to have healthy sexual relationships, how to have healthy relationships with each other too.

Westhead also heard from many players who want to help the young, impressionable players coming into junior hockey make change.

“I think it’s important to note, there’s cases where young players have wound up in the right kind of room,” Westhead said, finally. “Or 20-year-olds who are like ‘this happened to me, and I’m ending that cycle. This is no longer happening.’”

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