Why I Didn't Say Anything: The Sheldon Kennedy Story
By Sheldon Kennedy with James Grainger
Insomniac, 234 pages, $29.95
Dear Sheldon: Even though I started writing about you in 1996, and have talked about you since 1998, when my book came out about the rape culture of the locker room, I never did meet you. I don't think any of the messages I left with the hockey brass and your agent were passed on, and I figured as much. They knew you had seen way more in Swift Current than the inside of a hockey rink. They knew we might put it altogether.
I'd spent years digging into an alleged horrific rape of an innocent girl by two of the players on the Swift Current Broncos, and you'd been raped by the coach who coached the two players. They knew Graham James's victims numbered as many as 100 players. Might the ugly swath of sexual violence be cyclical? Might some of the victims already be victimizers?
The brass tried their best to let the smallest amount of information get out there, so people wouldn't connect the dots. Well thanks, Sheldon. Thanks for connecting the dots in your life, however horrendously painful the process was and still is, and thanks for putting those dots on paper in Why I Didn't Say Anything, because you have turned dots into an honest and terrifically important Canadian constellation, and I don't know how you did it.
Your story starts with an emotionally and physically abusive father in the isolation of the family's farm in Elkhorn, Man. He treats you like dirt until you put on a pair of hockey skates, and then finds the cash to send you and your brother to hockey camp. Here, James — predator that he is — can spot your talent and your neediness a mile away. James is the keeper of the gate to a Canadian boy's biggest dream, a junior career followed by an NHL jersey. He, like all the other men with great power in the hockey racket, can open and close the gate at will. This, combined with hockey's homophobia, and the chummy club where James plays golf with the people who are supposed to protect the players, keeps your lips, and the lips of perhaps a hundred other boys, sealed. You spiral downward from there.
Just interviewing young people about how they were raped, either by a coach or a player from the nation's most fawned-upon sport, sent me to a psychiatrist. Their pain sliced my heart open, and the silent compliance of the people "in loco parentis," whether billeting parents, general managers, owners, other coaches or CHL executives, made me so angry I had to run for hours just to dry my tears.
