When I moved ahead in hockey, at least I had my school friends. When everyone figured out I needed more in school, they reasoned I could deal with it because I was already playing sports with older kids. Except, by moving me up a year in school, they took me away from the very group of kids who were keeping me socially integrated at my emotional level. As large as I was physically when I was young, I was not an emotionally strong child. I was not ready to live in a world where my hockey and school peers were all older and more emotionally mature.
Because of my size, I wasn’t exactly a normal-looking kid. I was the one in the center of the back row in all the school pictures, the kid with his head sticking up while his neck sits next to the smiling faces on either side of him. Everywhere I went I felt as if I didn’t belong, and that was imprinted on me at a very early age. Emotionally, I was a gentle soul, very much like my dad in that regard, though fortunately I had also acquired my mom’s aggression, which gave me a drive he never had. Emotionally and socially I was a late bloomer. Although physically large, I was very late to reach puberty. And because I was already finding it difficult to fit in, the last thing I wanted was to look different, to actually be different. Yet I was different. I kept growing and growing, I started stumbling over my limbs, I started to gain weight as my body anticipated a puberty that just never seemed to kick in. It was a very difficult time for me. I was a giant with the voice of a choir boy and an athlete who was now bumbling and having to work hard just to keep up at the back of the pack while running laps or doing other training drills that I had once led.
After having started out as very athletic and extremely coordinated, I went through several years of being very tall but also chubby and somewhat uncoordinated. I struggled to keep pace with my height and lingering fat, and had a body composition I thought would never change. Yet, while I was tripping over my own legs, I was still able to fight through the extra weight and keep succeeding at hockey at the highest levels as patient coaches could see in me both my natural talent and my willingness to work at least as hard as the hardest worker on the team.
By age fourteen I was again truly becoming an athlete. I was active in football and other sports besides hockey and had no difficulty excelling at school while keeping up an extensive list of extracurricular activities.
But a disconnect between the reality of who I was and who I thought I was had been cemented. The negative image I had of myself from those difficult times stayed with me longer than it should have. Further, that image, formed by others too, probably stayed with them longer than it should have.
I had just turned fourteen and was away at a hockey tournament in Thunder Bay, Ontario. One afternoon, we had nothing to do between games and were hanging around in one of our hotel rooms. Somebody came up with the idea of having a push-up contest. There had been a time, when I was ten or eleven, when doing even just a handful of push-ups would have been difficult, if not impossible. I tried my best to get out of it, to hide, but when you’re my size (I was by then well over six feet tall) there is nowhere to hide. Eventually, near the end, I was called forward and forced to do my push-ups. To this day, I remember how shocked we all were when I finished second to Scotty Allan, a physical specimen of perfection.
I shouldn’t have been surprised, though, as I’d been quietly working very hard downstairs at home by myself to get my body into shape.
Less than a year later, our team was in Bloomington, Minnesota, for a tournament, and one of the billets we were staying with had a weight room set up in his basement. A couple of guys on our team who were there couldn’t believe it when I went over to the weight bench and effortlessly pressed the entire set. And the thing is, they were shocked that I even went over to the bench, let alone pushed the weights with ease.
Barry Melville, one of our hockey coaches when I was eleven and twelve, later saw me at one of my football games and didn’t realize it was me. Once he found out, all he could comment on was my changed shape. He had been so patient with me, so encouraging, so dedicated to helping me improve, and I felt proud to make him smile at the athlete I had become.
I was also lucky to have had a remarkable gym teacher, Mr. Warkentin, in Grades Seven through Nine at Ness Junior High School. He was always so kind, patient, and supportive of me as I grew into my body. There was nobody happier than he was as I went from being a kid who couldn’t hold myself up to the chinning bar to one who excelled at the flexed arm hang, a rite of passage for all Canadian kids of a certain vintage who had to complete the Canada Fitness Test.
When I look at pictures of me from back then, the change in my physical makeup through those early years was dramatic, more dramatic than I realized. But the image of that eleven- and twelve-year-old heavy, uncoordinated boy persisted with all of us, myself included, despite my new body. We saw only what we had once seen, not what was really there.
I SEEMED TO have it all. I was a star student, an athlete, and a nice, friendly kid. Athletic success came easily. When I played baseball, I was a pitcher, and I threw harder than the other kids the very first time I tried without knowing a thing about baseball. When I played football, I was voted one of the captains. I didn’t know it, but I was in the process of becoming me. Yet, I was different from my athletic peers because school was even more important to me than sports. I liked sports but I loved school, always in that order. Kids like what they are best at, and no matter how good I was at sports, I was always even better at school. I was, in effect, a teenager cast as a jock among the geeks and a geek among the jocks. But underneath it all, I was a jock who hadn’t always been physically solid, who was in many ways anything but.
And if you dug just a bit deeper into my family situation, you would also have seen something that was different from what it likely seemed to be. Families are like that, and mine was no different.
My mom, as much as she appeared to be loving and caring, and as much as she was loved by others outside our home, was incredibly cold and demanding. She was a closet alcoholic, one only we could see. She most definitely was not a happy drunk. She scowled at us, snapped insults, always had a demeaning comment about how we could be doing more or doing better than we were. I grew up thinking that white Bacardi rum was a cleaning supply because I always found bottles of it under our sink—and that’s what my mom told me it was when I was little and asked her what was in the bottle and, well, she was my mom, so I believed her.
Somewhere along the way, somebody or something had taken away her sense of life and fun. The joyful mother she appears to have been in a journal she kept after my birth quickly gave way to an overwhelmed mother of three who struggled to cope. Drunk and belligerent at dinner, or passed out on the couch after drinking to try to escape, life was just too much for her.
That made her incredibly difficult to live with. The sad thing is that every once in a while, maybe twice, three times a year, she would become the person we didn’t usually see, happy, carefree, laughing, and just really cool to be around. I remember her helping me build a crystal ball radio, just the two us, and it was as if she was a different person as we bantered back and forth until we sorted everything out. She joked that if we could figure this out then we could probably build a television and maybe we should just get rid of ours so that we would have to get right onto that next project. It was such a simple moment, yet because such moments rarely happened with her, that conversation is etched in my memory. And those few moments of joy with my mom kind of made it worse, because after seeing her so full of life, it hurt even more to see her the way she usually was around us.
At her funeral, I heard all about the person she had been before life got the better of her. It was like listening to stories about a complete stranger. I wished that the woman who others had seen had been my mom—someone warm, kind, open with her emotions, helpful, encouraging.
And I know this is awful to say, but I never believed she really loved me. I mean, of course a mother loves her child, and of course I must have memories of loving mo
ments stored somewhere, right? But even as I write this I struggle to find memories of any loving moments. The truth is, I have none. She wasn’t wired that way. Maybe she was a product of her generation, maybe a product of her stern farm upbringing, maybe a product of her alcoholism, but whatever it was, she could not show love.
Of course, if anybody outside the family had said, or were ever to say, a bad thing about my mom, I would be livid. That’s the way it works. You keep it within the family. I did, until now. But I loved her, and I tried so hard to be as loving as I could.
Now my dad, he was a good guy. I have no idea how he survived as long as he did with my mom. They clearly loved each other at some level, and they were each other’s best friend, but after my mom started drinking, she became stubborn and cold and ruthless, and it wasn’t easy being in the house with her. My mom would be in a conversation about something, anything, and would always find a way to lash out at my dad.
“Michael, if you’re so smart, how come you have your crappy job and your crappy car and your crappy clothes? See, you’re not smart. You’re not smart. You’re crappy.” It wasn’t exactly Shakespearean iambic pentameter and it most definitely wasn’t nice. Mom did have standards though. She would not swear in front of us, so “crappy” was the go-to word.
She would withdraw into herself, cut short or dismiss any interaction by reflexively turning her back to us to hide her drinking, I guess thinking that if she couldn’t see us, we couldn’t see her. She would go silent to try to hide her slurring. And on the nights when she lost the ability to hide herself, she would just go on and on at my dad about the same thing, whatever the complaint may have been, until everybody sought refuge somewhere in our tiny bungalow, though we were never able to completely avoid what was going on. We never talked about it with each other. We just tried to pretend it wasn’t happening. Yet, my dad never fought back or argued with her, he just accepted her for who she was. I always admired him for acting like a gentleman with her in the face of some of the worst things imaginable. He loved her to the end, for better or worse.
But the thing is, my dad had to take his frustrations out on somebody, and that somebody was me. I’m not talking about physical abuse or beatings or anything like that. First, that just wasn’t in my dad’s make-up. Second, he simply wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of me physically after I got to be a certain age given my size and strength—he was a big man for his generation 6' 2" and strong, but nothing compared to me in my teens. The abuse was verbal, and something our entire family had to witness.
His mantra with me was “book smart, worldly stupid.” It started when I was about nine or ten years old, when it became apparent that I was more than just academically gifted. I’d give my view on politics or current affairs. “You always have been and you always will be book smart and worldly stupid.” I’d fetch him a Robertson screwdriver when he’d asked for a Phillips. “Book smart, worldly stupid.” I’d finish mowing the lawn and not coil the electric cord properly. “Book smart, worldly stupid.” In a certain sense I guess it was sort of a cute, almost endearing way to approach me, because he was actually acknowledging that I was smart. Except it wasn’t cute, because it came with much more.
No matter how big or small the issue, my father had to go after me verbally. He couldn’t ever just leave me alone. He was always on me. Sunday dinners were the worst. My sister, Dawn, later told me that she feared them, dreaded them, for she knew that whatever I said about anything, my dad would challenge me, and not in a productive way to encourage critical thinking, but in a way that belittled me, that tried to tear me down, that was designed to make me feel inferior to him. “You’re nothing. You’re not as smart as you think you are. Oh, come on, that’s stupid, you’re stupid. You’re a loser. What, you think you’re better than me? You think you deserve more than I have? You’ll never make it! You’ll never succeed! You’re nothing!”
My sister would cry. My brother would be thankful it wasn’t him.
It hurt. It hurt so much, until eventually it didn’t anymore. And then it became a game with me to provoke him, to get him whipped up into a frenzy, for me to sit there and be belittled. I just didn’t care anymore. And my inner voice would kick in:
Go ahead. Yell at me all you want. I don’t care. I don’t care about you. I don’t care about anything anymore. You’ve told me I’m stupid, I’m a loser, I’m never going to succeed. What more could you possibly tell me?
But you think I’m a loser? I’ll show you.
Looking back on things, that all makes sense. He had never been able to achieve all that he wanted in life. He saw me, his eldest child, achieving everything that at one time had been his to obtain. He had dropped out of school after Grade Eight, but knew in his heart that he was better than that, that he was smarter than that, but that he was trapped in a situation he couldn’t escape. He was stuck having to do whatever he could to raise a family, and here I was about to get all of the benefits of his miserable hard work. But at the time I didn’t have any perspective. All I could see was his anger toward me.
I fought back. I said things I never should have said.
“I’m a loser? You’re a loser! Look at you! How could I ever be proud of you?”
At some level I knew what he was going through, what he was dealing with, but as much as I tried to focus on the good and love him, it didn’t make any difference. The tragedy of life is that you can’t see then what you can see now. I know now that he was envious of me, but I couldn’t see that back then. All I could see was the anger and his inability to show me any approval for what I was doing, not resentment, jealousy, or a fear that maybe his first born son, a son he loved and admired so much, saw him as looking small and inadequate.
And yet, unlike my reaction to my mom, a part of me always knew that he was indeed proud of me. I would, every once in a while, hear from others the things that he was saying about me to them. But he was too stubborn to ever say these things directly to me and I was too stubborn to ever force the issue with him. So, while he played the tough guy with me, I think I knew that deep down he was proud of me, even in the face of his relentless verbal assaults. Sure, there was his demeaning mantra of “book smart, worldly stupid,” his outright dismissal of anything I ever said or wanted to try to achieve, and his saying I wasn’t nearly good enough for those types of things. Still, I think he was proud of me.
In the midst of this trainwreck at home, I was now moving on to high school alone because the guys I played hockey with, as well as my best friend, Carl Torbiak, all remained in junior high in the proper grade for their age. I became increasingly isolated, a geek living in a jock’s world and a jock living in a geek’s world, now without my best friend.
Please don’t get me wrong. My life at home and at school was not even close to the worst imaginable, and I did deal with things in my own way. I had friends, just no close friends. I know that many have much worse family situations than I did. I wasn’t some lost soul nobody loved or appreciated. But I was a boy with vulnerabilities.
Being an outward success at external things didn’t fulfill my emotional needs. Already isolated within my family, seemingly unloved and unappreciated by my parents, and now displaced at school, I wanted more of a connection with the world around me. And the thing is, when you want something so badly and aren’t getting it, it makes you vulnerable to somebody who comes along and offers you understanding and an acceptance of who you are and what you want out of life.
I may have pretended otherwise, but when I was a young, awkward, giant misfit of a kid I had never wanted to be special or different. Being successful didn’t make up for being different and alone. I craved the acceptance that I wasn’t getting at home, the normalcy that I wasn’t getting at school, and the understanding that I wasn’t getting from friends outside of hockey.
Still, no matter how tough things may have been for me on the inside, I always had hockey, my safe place, the place I belonged.
That is who I was
when I met Graham James.
TWO
THE PREDATOR
IN THE 1970S, everyone in the Winnipeg hockey community knew Graham James. He was an innovative minor hockey coach focusing on talent and speed, not size and brute force. He produced winning age-group (under sixteen) hockey teams while serving as a successful scout for major junior hockey teams in the Western Hockey League, one rung below the NHL. And he was based in St. James, the western part of Winnipeg, where I grew up.
Graham seemed to live and breathe hockey.
You might find it odd that I refer to the man who abused me as “Graham.” Yet that is how I see him, how I think of him to this day. He is, was, and always will be “Graham.” I have tried to pretend otherwise, and I have been encouraged to try to distance myself from him by referring to him as “Mr. James,” “the accused,” or “the defendant.” But to me, he is and always will be “Graham,” and so “Graham” he is.
I had only seen Graham from afar, but I, like the rest of the hockey community, saw him as somebody of importance. He was a winning coach, a scout, an innovator, a hockey intellectual working among less-educated and less worldly coaches. His demeanor at the rinks was somewhat aloof, and he always seemed to be deep in thought, analyzing and processing everything going on around him. He had an aura about him, and he was somebody you wanted to impress. And then suddenly you would see him laughing with a group of coaches or players, and in an instant he went from unapproachable Hockey God to regular guy. Everybody either knew or knew of Graham, and it seemed as if everybody wanted to impress him.
Impress is an interesting word to use, because Graham himself was anything but impressive. He was short and pudgy, with a boyish round face and unkempt curly hair. He had a sad face and was poorly groomed, and his presentation could best be described as “disheveled.” Yet because he was someone of importance in the hockey community, none of this seemed to register. He was somebody to impress.
I Am Nobody Page 3
