Breaking Away

by Patrick O'Sullivan

  “We thought there was more to the story,” Wagner said, “but if you were just going to say that you got hurt playing hockey, there wasn’t anything that we could really do.”

  I didn’t remember anything like this, but it all fit. I tried to put myself in my default psychological mode back at that time. My only concern had been getting through the day, one hour at a time. My concern then wasn’t getting out of an abusive relationship. It wasn’t saving my life. It was getting home without getting beaten. Getting home without getting left on the side of the road. I know the calculations that I must have made: telling Ed Wagner and the others in the Flyers office about being beaten by my father wasn’t going to help me get through that night. Telling them could only lead to some sort of confrontation with my father, and that would have led to two things: a blanket denial, and a beating when we had left the arena and I was unsafely out of sight.

  So I lied.

  Then I made myself forget. It was tough enough to live with the secret. I wouldn’t want to remember being complicit in the abuse I was suffering. I wouldn’t want to remember the missed opportunity to escape.

  “Really, it couldn’t go much farther than that,” Moffatt said. “We thought that we should tell the police, but if you weren’t going to tell us what happened . . . if you just told the police that it was from playing hockey . . . then there really wasn’t any point to it. If there’s nothing other than bruises—no witnesses or anything like that—our hands were tied at that point. Looking back, we should still have told someone—it should be up to us to make that call about following it up. We didn’t tell the police, but we should have. If it was innocent, then it wouldn’t have been a problem.”

  I believed Wagner and Moffat when they said that had been their thinking. They didn’t seem to consider options out there. They could have pushed me harder, could have still called in law enforcement that night, either with me there or after the fact. Hypothetically, if they hadn’t believed me, they had options. They could have made a call to Children’s Aid—it wouldn’t have had to have been authorities in Michigan. Any call to an official with a child-protection service in the Alvinston area would have been followed up and a message would have been passed on to authorities in Michigan.

  My father dodged a bullet in Alvinston and almost certainly didn’t know anything about it.

  I asked Wagner if anyone with the team had said anything to my father.

  “I don’t remember if I did,” Wagner said. “Probably not. He really didn’t have much to do with us at the arena. I don’t think there would have been much of a point. We know what he would have said.”

  That would have been true.

  I asked Wagner and Moffatt if my father spoke to anyone at the arena. They had only one suggestion.

  “Pat Stapleton came out to a lot of our games, almost weekly,” Wagner said. “We’ve always been an affiliate team for Strathroy for years, and Pat would come down to see the players. For sure you were our best prospect, and Pat talked to your father about moving up to play for the Rockets.”

  “Pat asked us about you and your father,” Moffatt said. “We would have told him what we thought. We wouldn’t have held back. We’d have told him that we thought you were a good kid, mature for your age. And we’d have said that we thought your father was a strange character . . . that he might be an issue.”

  42

  STRATHROY

  It’s a lot to expect teenagers to have picked up on any signs of abuse or even to have sensed any trouble between my father and me. You’d consider very few teens worldly and wise, and you’d have found nothing to change your opinion in Strathroy’s dressing room back when I played there. Still, the Rockets might have seen the behavior of a teammate more clearly than any adult involved with the team would have. Teams benefit from the wisdom of a crowd—they know who fits in and who doesn’t. Maybe some kids fly under the radar, but I wouldn’t have in Strathroy. I was the new kid, the youngest in the room, the kid who was going to play major junior, maybe even pro. And the players in Strathroy were older than any I had played with in youth leagues, some in university, others a year away. They were almost adults.

  I didn’t really know any of them. I never saw any of them away from the arena. I never had a conversation with any of them outside the dressing room, never rode the bus with them to road games, never went to team functions except the end of the year banquet. The players’ way of including me and making me feel included was by at least acting like I was one of the guys, receiving no special attention.

  The teammate I knew best of all was Steve Benedetti. Steve was a three years older than me—not the oldest on the team, but a sharp guy, heading to the University of Western Ontario. He played a little minor pro hockey, and these days coaches a Junior B team in London.

  Steve said that he and the rest of the team sensed that there might be a shadow that fell across the scene. As much as I tried to conceal everything, there were telltale signs.

  “There would be times when you were really upset after games,” Steve says. “It seemed like you didn’t want to leave the room. You were so much younger than everyone, we just thought it was your age. Some of our guys were seven years older than you. We really couldn’t know what was going on in a mind of a kid that young. You were on our team, but we only really knew you in the dressing room and on ice. If you were older and had been billeting or going to school with us, something would have come out. But you were pretty well isolated from us. But we heard stories—about how your father made you do push-ups in the van or run after games. We even heard a story that John had a stationary bike built into the back of the van.”

  I told Steve that he could believe just about everything except the stationary bike, though I would have preferred it to running down the 402 in a blizzard at midnight.

  “We would see him pushing you—there was no question how talented you were, how hard you worked,” Steve told me. “It seemed extreme. We would say to each other, ‘Geez, his father has got to tone it down a little.’ But we never said it to him.

  “I remember pulling up to a game in Chatham one time. You and your father were there early and he had you running and working out in the parking lot. I thought then that was crossing the line . . . That was obvious. Coming up in minor hockey, I had never seen anything like it, not even close, but then you were the most talented kid that I had played with at that point. That was probably why we didn’t think anything of it. It was working. It seemed like he knew what it took for you to play at that level.”

  I didn’t prompt Steve about what Wagner and Moffatt told me about the bruises on my ribcage in Alvinston, but he had noticed the same thing in Strathroy a few times. “You would come into the dressing room and we’d see that you had a lot of bruises,” he said. “We wondered if John actually had you signed up in another league and you were getting banged up there. But as far as it being something worse than that, I don’t think anyone would question it if a hockey player had bruises.”

  Maybe someone would question it, but another teenager probably wouldn’t. Neither would another player. Or at least none did in Strathroy.

  The bruises were in plain sight in the dressing room, but it would have had to have been a player who spoke to the coach or manager or trainer. No adults were around when we were getting dressed or undressed. In fact, I usually didn’t dress before or undress after a game. I’d be in my equipment by the time we pulled into the parking lot. After a practice or game, I wouldn’t shower. I’d change into my sweats and pile straight into the van for the drive back to Michigan.

  Still, Benedetti thought the adults around the team in Strathroy should have had at least a suspicion that there was something seriously wrong with my father. “I don’t know what the coaches and the officials saw or didn’t see,” Benedetti says. “I don’t know how hard they looked. We saw stuff that maybe they didn’t or at least didn’t pick up on. But they couldn’t have missed everything. Just the way John carried on, screa
ming, someone should have stepped in and taken a long, hard look.”

  I told Steve that the Rockets staff had had more than suspicion to act on.

  * * *

  Strathroy, Ontario, November 2014

  I drove out to Strathroy. It had been more than half my lifetime since I had been in that town. I pulled up to the arena and passed the back door where my father used to park his van in a tow-away fire zone. After games he used to rush me out of the arena, never hanging around, never talking to parents or team officials, always rushing to get on the drive back to the border and always yelling. A few minutes later I’d be chasing the van out on the highway.

  The arena has been updated a little. They’ve replaced the glass at the end of rink that my father used to stand behind, shouting at me. Still, it’s old-school—no seats, just benches, three rows up from ice level, spots on the bench reserved for local fans, mostly farm folks and retirees. On a Saturday night when the NHL is Canada’s game, the Rockets are Strathroy’s. Things don’t change. The stickboy when I was a player is now in his mid-twenties and still volunteering as an assistant trainer. The equipment manager then is the equipment manager now. The president of the team when I was with the Rockets, David Honsberger, has stepped down but still comes to the arena to do play-by-play on the local radio broadcast.

  Honsberger was easy to pick out in the crowd. He was still wearing a bow tie on game nights, still wearing a loud suit and probably still hadn’t cut his hair since I played there. He had just climbed down a ladder from the booth up in the rafters and didn’t recognize me when I walked up to him. No surprise—when he last saw me, I was five inches shorter and had never shaved.

  Honsberger seemed happy to see me. “I was just talking about you the other day . . .”

  And he went on for ten minutes, talking about the playoffs back in 2000. It seemed like he could rattle of every goal and every game that spring, in detail. He talked about a point streak I had through the playoffs. He remembered every name. Again, no surprise: he puts together the team’s website, and it has a registry of every player who has ever played for the Rockets.

  “It was strange,” he says. “It didn’t feel like you were part of the team in a way. There were at least a couple of times when we had back-to-back games, Friday and Saturday night, away and home. I think one was Mount St. Bridges. And we suggested to your father that maybe you could stay over with one of the other players and his billet families. We thought you were going back with us to Strathroy on the bus. Then we saw your father pulling away with you in his van.

  “The last conversation that we had with your father. End of the season, after the awards dinner, and he said, ‘Thanks a lot.’ Said it with a sort of finality that I didn’t expect. He said something like, ‘We got everything we’re going to get here.’ I thought you were going to be back with the Rockets the next year and be a real leader on the team. I was surprised that you ended up with [Ann Arbor].”

  I had to interrupt Honsberger’s reminiscences to tell him that I was looking to do a book. I mentioned that I had heard that there was a report that someone had seen my father kicking me in the parking lot after a game that season. It registered with him as clearly as the first goal I scored on the first shift in my first game with the team. “We heard about that. We wondered about it, and we watched things after that,” he says. “It was an awful thing.”

  Honsberger’s voice trailed off. His discomfort was plain.

  I walked around the arena after the Rockets game that night. I hadn’t been back in years. My father never parked in the main lot before games. I walked around to the back door, where the Zamboni dumps off scraped snow. Often we had been pressed for time just to make it to the game and I had to start getting into my equipment in the van, so instead of pulling up to the main door, my father would park at the back of the arena by the players’ entrances. The same was true after the game. The back door made a quick getaway easy after a game. The back door also put that getaway out of the sight of most of the people at the arena. It sits at the far side of the arena from the main entrance, blocked off from view. It was just the two of us alone there. That would have given my father confidence to hit me without witnesses around. I thought about the times that I’d walked through that back door. It hadn’t been one time that my father had kicked me or done worse out there. There had been dozens of times, after most games, after most practices.

  The report was a fit—where my father would have been confident that he wasn’t going to be seen, that it was a kick, his favorite move.

  * * *

  I contacted Honsberger a few weeks later. We had cut our conversation at the arena short—he had a game to get ready for, and in fairness he could have been a bit distracted. I hoped that our conversation at the rink might have stirred memories, that details would have come flooding back to him. That wasn’t the case, though—in fact, it was the dead opposite, at least when it came to the report of the kicking incident behind the arena.

  “The more I thought about it, and I talked it over with Pat Stapleton, and we couldn’t remember when we heard about it. I couldn’t tell you if we heard about it at the time. It might have been after you left Strathroy . . . might have been only after all those awful things had come out already. A lot of years probably passed.”

  It seemed weird—a guy whose memory was photographic when it came to my first goal losing grasp of a detail like that.

  I asked who would have told him about the kicking incident, and again he struggled.

  “Pat and I talked about that and we couldn’t remember who it is. He mentioned LM [name withheld by authors], a scout. It’s a shame. Can’t really know because LM died a few years back.”

  Again, it seemed weird that someone who could remember a casual conversation with my father at the end-of-season banquet, word for word, would struggle to remember something that would seem a lot more disturbing. It also seemed an unlucky coincidence that the possible witness he held out there was impossible to reach.

  As Honsberger laid it out after he had time to reflect after talking to Stapleton, all the dead ends made it hard to find fault with anyone involved with the team—at least anyone who was still alive. What might have seemed messy seemed to have been cleaned up by failures of memory and the passing of the likeliest witness.

  I was more than a little suspicious about the holes in Honsberger’s memory.

  I was able to help him fill in the blanks.

  When I met Honsberger at the arena in Strathroy, I hadn’t mentioned how I had heard about someone seeing my father kicking me in the parking lot that season with the Rockets. I hadn’t known about it when I was playing there. I had found out about it some three years after the fact. And the person who recalled the moment was, in fact, David Honsberger.

  I had the notes from the ESPN reporter I had spoken to in 2003. I read them for the first time more than eleven years afterward, when I started kicking around the idea for this book. The original story the reporter filed with the magazine on May 19, 2003, said:

  If Patrick missed a breakaway, John told others at the rink that he’d have Patrick doing push-ups when they got home. “We assumed he was joking but then after players talked with Patrick we realized he wasn’t,” said David Honsberger, the Strathroy team manager. “Then we had a report that someone saw John kick Patrick after a game. We didn’t know what to do about it other than watch Patrick and John a little more closely.”

  Though it didn’t make it into the original story, the reporter did remember that Honsberger had an explanation of why he and the Rockets hadn’t done more than just put my father on watch: Honsberger said that the team didn’t know which authorities to call because my family was living in Michigan. The reporter also remembered that Honsberger had expressed regret that he and the team hadn’t done more to follow up the report.

  If Honsberger’s version of events as he told ESPN in 2003 was correct, the timing seems clear cut. The sequence: (1) My father said he was going to
punish me for missing a breakaway. (2) I told my teammates that it was true, and Honsberger and other adults running the team had an idea of what my relationship with my father was like. (3) Then Honsberger and the team had the report of my father kicking me after a game. (4) The team mulled over what to do and decided that watching my father more closely was the way to approach things.

  In 2015 Honsberger was saying that he couldn’t remember when he had heard about my father kicking me, and even suggested that it might have been after my story went public. In 2003, before my story went public, he told the ESPN reporter that the team had started to watch my father more closely—which wouldn’t make any sense if the “report” came years after the fact. There would be no way “to watch Patrick and John a little more closely” if we had already gone.

  Let’s say that the incident happened in mid-season. The next two years were the worst of my life. There had been a chance there to head off my father, a chance for a real, meaningful intervention.

  The inaction or indecision by Honsberger or others is in retrospect hard to accept.

  * * *

  Pat Stapleton has been out of the game for a few years now. He also has a reputation for screwing around the media over the years. For four decades he has given reporters the runaround when they call about the 1972 Summit Series—at the end of the final game, he picked up the puck, hockey’s ultimate talisman, something that should be in the Hall of Fame, something that might someday yield a fortune when put up for private auction. Stapleton consistently denied having the puck and sometimes claimed one of his teammates came away with it.

  In 2003, when my story was first reported, Stapleton took a defiant position with the media, blew off questions about my father.