I Am Nobody

by Greg Gilhooly

  They, like all of us, aren’t perfect (well, actually Gail might be). Still, I can’t overstate how much I like all three of them.

  Because I wanted to do whatever I could to keep my mind off Winnipeg and what it meant to me, I kept very long hours at the office, often working deep into the night. Our offices were located on the top three floors, thirty-plus floors up, in the tallest building in the city, a sleek, modern tower owned by the Asper family. We were at the intersection of Portage and Main, one of Canada’s most famous intersections, at the very center of the city. We had a 360-degree view through floor-to-ceiling glass windows and could see for miles beyond the city limits and across the flat, flat plains. If your dog ever ran away, you could see it running for days.

  Mr. Asper also worked very long days, though he usually wouldn’t show up until the afternoon. He and I were often the only two left in the office late at night, and we would spend hours talking about many things—business, politics, industry trends, the art of the deal. He was fascinating to talk with, and he loved to tell his favorite stories over and over again about how he had built the company, how he had wanted to be a successful politician and run the country. Perhaps because he grew up in Neepawa, Manitoba, a son of parents fleeing Russian persecution, he still identified with the underdog, an endearing trait given his wealth and status. He was then worth hundreds of millions of dollars and soon to be worth billions. But he didn’t care who you were or how old you were or what you had done for a living. The only thing he cared about was your ideas. If a good idea came from the youngest, newest employee in the management group, he would run with that over the wishes of others who had been with him for years. He took a suggestion I made and acted on it during a contested acquisition over the advice of a leading Bay Street mergers and acquisitions partner, a specialist in the field, and made millions as a result. To Mr. Asper, what mattered was not who you were in the pecking order, but whether your idea was the best one.

  I instantly loved working with him. And I instantly recognized a fellow broken soul who had been fighting his own demons for years, a man who had fought lifelong battles to maintain his sobriety and control his weight, battles that were widely known in the business community. He was still fighting those battles and sometimes still losing them late at night and into the early morning, when only the two of us inhabited the otherwise empty corporate hub.

  I was immediately tossed into the deep end. I found myself traveling around the world, pursuing corporate development opportunities, scouring financials and spreadsheets, playing with financial models, teaching myself on the fly. Despite my relative youth, I was involved in extremely complex transactions with a level of responsibility that I never would have had while working in a law firm.

  You name it, we did it, I did it: bank financings, refinancings, a U.S. offering combined with a listing on the New York Stock Exchange, corporate acquisitions, international acquisitions, submissions to local and international regulators, broadcast startups, lawsuits everywhere, corporate and industry strategic planning, internal corporate growth. I was the company’s senior lawyer with responsibilities for corporate development, and I was having the time of my life. One day I would get on a plane to London, and a month later I would still be there in the midst of a bid for a new television channel. Then off to Australia and New Zealand to canvas radio opportunities. Later, I spent the better part of two years flying back and forth to Ireland while establishing TV3 as Ireland’s first private television broadcaster, meeting and negotiating with government leaders, government regulators, and leading industry participants.

  I sat on boards. I worked with our internal groups amidst the competing interests of a family-controlled public company. I worked with minority shareholders in a subsidiary spoiling for a fight. I balanced the line between newcomers to the corporate group and the old guard who had once been with the Aspers during the ’70s and ’80s and who now wanted back in with the corporate resurgence. My salary quickly escalated and bonuses regularly came my way as transactions were closed and goals achieved.

  It was an extremely stressful life and I didn’t have much of a personal life, but that suited me just fine because I was barely a person to begin with. No matter how much travel was involved to get our business done, all trips around the world, whether by commercial airline, private jet, or once even on the Concorde, inevitably ended with a return to Winnipeg, a place where I was always on edge. That leering face. Those groping hands. Those insidious threats. Those eyes. I knew Graham had moved on and was no longer in the city, his hockey career now increasingly public and on the rise, but his ghost was always present. I avoided dangerous places, trying hard to forget, but you can’t always control what goes on in your head, as I well knew.

  And CanWest gave me a good moment with my parents. When I took them on a tour through the CanWest offices, they never let on they were impressed. However, when I was returning from a detour to the washroom but still out of their sight, I overheard them talking with awe about the place. Of course, once they saw me and knew I was within earshot they became quiet again. But I knew, and later I sometimes heard from others, how proud my father was of me, although he never revealed that pride to me until just before his death.

  CanWest was very good for me, and I was very good for Can-West. Its reputation was one of aggressive success and aggressive litigation. Anyone doing research on CanWest as a potential corporate partner would quickly learn about all of that, and as a result, we were often at a disadvantage when seeking to enter transactions or strike deals with potential partners. I was sometimes able to step in and smooth things over after the family had chosen more antagonistic paths.

  I found the way around CanWest’s reputation was to be exceedingly reasonable with potential partners or regulators about our interests. I would always ask, “What would you do if you were me?” to try to get the other side to focus on understanding what we needed to get out of any deal. Similarly, I would always step into their shoes and assess matters from their perspective and then pocket that understanding while never negotiating against myself, leaving it to them to see how much they were prepared to risk to push for their needs. It sounds obvious, but strategic role-playing isn’t as common as you might think.

  As somebody keeping dark, dark secrets and essentially leading a double life, I discovered that I was a good negotiator by being able to imagine the worst without letting it paralyze me. The easiest thing for a lawyer to say, whether to the other side of a deal or even to your own client or fellow executives, is “no,” but I always wanted to try to find a way to get things done. Having to plan negotiations strategically appealed to me at an intellectual level and motivated me to craft deals around those risks. And I seemed to be very good at hearing not just the words being said but the meanings behind the words, the ulterior motives. I focused on facts and assessed behavior, I didn’t get caught up in things people said or promised.

  I want to live in a world where you can trust everyone. But being acutely aware that there are always inherent risks in trusting anybody sure had its professional advantages.

  HISTORICALLY, IRELAND HAD only state-owned television networks and commercial television from the UK. The Irish government issued a license in 1990 for TV3 to become the first private television broadcaster in Ireland. The local group holding the license had no broadcasting experience and was looking for an experienced media company to partner with to help make the network a reality. The Irish license holders were the business people behind U2: Paul McGuinness, Ossie Kilkenny, James Morris, and Paul Kelleher, all major figures in the Irish business and cultural communities. If they didn’t meet their deadline for getting TV3 on air they would lose their license.

  They had tried to make things work with several other partners, but for whatever reasons their efforts had failed. They were on their last chance to get it right when they came to us and struck a deal. But as soon as they signed, they wanted out for fear of having given us too much control. They, m
edia giants in Ireland, had significant relationships with the Irish government and significant influence over the local regulator with whom we would have to negotiate the terms of business, a regulator regulating private national television for the first time.

  It was a difficult year and a half. Each side walked from the table on numerous occasions. But, because of extensive efforts put in by me on our side and James Morris on theirs to develop a fundamental understanding of each other, James and I could always sit down and get things back on track when more volatile members of our teams had torn things apart.

  I flew back and forth from Winnipeg through Toronto and then London to Dublin twenty-seven times in a year and a half to build trust where there was no trust. I immersed myself in Ireland, in Dublin, in the national culture, and in the end we came out of a situation that so many different times had been declared dead to CanWest with a deal that netted us many millions in profits. And when it was all over, James Morris, the man behind Windmill Lane, who ran The Mill and Shepperton Studios, the man who had worked more closely with me for an extended period of time than anybody else before or since, asked me to come to London and work with him.

  Accepting the offer would have been a good decision personally for me. So, of course, I rejected it.

  And while this Irish adventure may sound good, I was always still the same me. In Ireland I resumed old habits and discovered The Towers, in the north part of Dublin, a phalanx of semi-inhabited tombstones epitomizing the failure of a perfectly planned suburban apartment complex that had devolved into a glorified drive-through pharmacy. I understand that they have now been torn down. The world is a better place for that.

  BUT MY PROFESSIONAL successes were always just footnotes in the far greater battle I was fighting.

  Then, one night, on the CBC, there was Graham’s picture. I hadn’t seen anything of him for years. Now he was in the news. Sheldon Kennedy, a professional hockey player in the midst of his NHL career who was a number of years younger than I was, had come forward to disclose years of abuse by Graham. I stared at the screen but couldn’t hear anything. I wasn’t processing things properly. My body froze. I started to shake uncontrollably. Standing there, not knowing what was happening, I bent over and started throwing up.

  Tangible evidence that Graham had abused someone else after me.

  I’d believed that Graham had been in a relationship of some sort with someone I had played with all those years ago, but I’d never had any direct evidence. Now, however, not only was there confirmation that I hadn’t been the only one, but Sheldon had come later. Because I hadn’t stopped Graham when I had the chance, he had abused someone else.

  I was responsible for what I was seeing in the news. I was the reason Sheldon was dealing with his pain. I was the reason Sheldon was living his own version of my hell. It was all my fault.

  Any meaningful chance at a fully functioning life was all over. Graham was everywhere in the news, and not a moment went by without me thinking about it, about all of it, and wanting it all to be over. I was in no way ready to come forward. I wasn’t even dealing with the abuse myself so I was in no position to tell anyone else about it. I couldn’t try to help Sheldon or to join him in his suffering. And that made it even harder for me.

  Who are you? Why can’t you stand up? Why can’t you step forward and deal with this? Why didn’t you stop him when you had the chance? You knew he was going to do it to somebody else, you knew all along, you thought it had already been going on with others. This is on you. What right do you have to live?

  I was deeply suicidal. I explored various options—jumping off a building, overdosing, hanging myself—and settled on jumping. I made plans, and several different times at the office I dropped out of sight during the day to test a plan.

  If only I could figure out a way to unlock the exit door just down the hall around the corner from my office that opened on to a portion of the roof. If not that door, what about the one on the floor above, the very top floor that housed our corporate boardroom?

  We were, after all, occupying the top floors of the tallest building in Winnipeg, each with access to different parts of the building’s sculpted top, to high level walkways that would be perfect departing platforms.

  I organized my belongings so that they could be easily delivered to my family after I’d jumped. I wrote a suicide note. I left a list of all of my personal contacts on my bedside table with instructions about which bankers and investment advisors to contact for which accounts, and where my insurance information was, in case one day I didn’t make it home. These steps weren’t cries for help, because nobody else knew about them. I took these steps to make sure everything was ready if I ever found the courage to jump.

  I learned something awful about myself. The reason I didn’t kill myself wasn’t because I didn’t want to, but because I was afraid I would jump but survive and be physically wrecked with no future ability to end it all, forced to continue living and in even greater misery. Given the hell I was already enduring, that would be a fate worse than death.

  Imagine working in an office on the highest floors of the tallest office building in the city, in an office with floor-to-ceiling windows everywhere, expansive views of the world beneath you, when you’ve decided you’re going to kill yourself by jumping to your death. It’s slightly distracting.

  FROM THE MOMENT Sheldon came forward, I could barely go through the motions of living. I knew that at some point I would have to either come forward and deal with things or else check out of my pathetic joke of an existence. I didn’t know which would win out. I didn’t really care.

  Sheldon was incredibly strong. He stood alone and faced the world of hockey, declaring himself a victim at a time when the abuse he had suffered carried homosexual implications, which were distasteful to much of the general public and certainly to the macho sports world. He stood alone while many in the hockey community rallied behind Graham, who had been named the Hockey News 1989 Man of the Year after coaching the Swift Current Broncos to the Canadian Junior Hockey championship. Sheldon became an easy target for those who wanted to preserve their illusions about the nobility of Canada’s favorite sport and Graham’s role in it. And he stood alone because I and others weren’t yet ready (in my case a nice euphemism for “too afraid”) to come forward.

  Graham pleaded guilty on January 2, 1997, to hundreds of sexual assaults against Sheldon and an unnamed player who came forward after seeing Sheldon in the news. In an attempt to lighten his sentence, Graham secured character references from respected hockey people and former players. He claimed he didn’t understand that his relationships with Sheldon and the other player had been immoral. Whatever his lawyer said worked, as he received only three and a half years. I was ashamed that I lacked the inner strength to step out of my own hell to support Sheldon.

  Nobody knew what I was dealing with, but I was rapidly falling apart. I was trying so hard to run away from who I was, what I had done those years ago, what I wasn’t able to do now. I wanted to be anybody but me, I felt an incredible pressure to be anybody but me, better than me, different from me. I couldn’t just be me. I tried to do everything at the office, to know everything, to be involved in everything, to be essential to everything, bizarrely figuring that my only protection if everybody eventually found out and scorned me was to be indispensable. It was the beginning of a very dark time.

  Yet, in many ways CanWest helped me cope. With so much individual responsibility and so much traveling, I was often on my own, and that allowed me to pursue my self-destructive habits without fear of detection and to manage my work schedule around my bad habits when I was away from the office.

  Graham’s sentence of only three and a half years was a mere slap on the wrist. Even worse, he would eventually be paroled in 2001, having served only eighteen months, this for hundreds of individual sexual assaults. Justice?

  There was one glimmer of hope. On Hockey Night in Canada, after Sheldon had come forward with his story,
noted hockey commentator Don Cherry was asked about the situation and what he thought should be done. I sat there, watching with tears in my eyes, already feeling responsible for everything. Yet Don Cherry put the blame exactly where it belonged: on Graham. “I’d have drawn and quartered the son of a bitch,” he said. Graham was the bad guy, not me. His words meant so much to me.

  Graham, of course, sought advice on how to go about suing Cherry. Poor Graham James, now a victim for having been called out by Don Cherry.

  I would lie in bed and stare at the ceiling, trying to figure out if it was even worth getting out of bed. He’ll always be there, after all, meaning I’ll always feel this way, he’ll always win, and I’ll always be nothing more than his discarded garbage.

  Stop thinking like that! Stop it right now!

  If only I could sleep. But sleep meant nightmares, and he was always in them. I was always running from him, and those eyes, his dead eyes, his shark eyes.

  Leave me alone! Let me sleep!

  But if I sleep I lose control over what I can think of and he’ll be there.

  Oh, like that’s any worse than now when you’re awake, when all you can do is think about him, about it?

  Please, let me sleep.

  Please, don’t let me sleep.

  Please, I just want to live.

  I just need to get through this, I just need to get through tonight and see what I can do tomorrow. Substances numb the pain. Food lets me control my body. Bingeing and purging let me think about nothing other than bingeing and purging. Cutting and digging into my body lets me feel what true pain feels like and takes my mind off him, off the past. Take. Drink. Gorge. Purge. Cut. Dig. Repeat.

  I’m exhausted. I can’t take it anymore.

  WHILE I WAS at CanWest’s head office we acquired Fireworks Entertainment, a small film and television production and distribution company based in Toronto with secondary offices in Los Angeles, and London. I was parachuted in to work with the management team at the head office in Toronto, a position nobody in his or her right mind would take, as I became the outsider inserted to report back. I took it so that I could leave Winnipeg.