D6 eZ su the washington post.monday, february 24 , 2020
of them,” he says.
He also doesn’t know what to
do with them. He has asked a
handful of people to forward
their accounts to journalists who
have reached out to him. Some
said they weren’t interested in
retribution; they only wanted to
be heard by someone they ad-
mire. He says he and two lawyer
friends have discussed a class-ac-
tion lawsuit against the Canadian
Hockey League, where most of
the abuse is alleged to have taken
place.
Whatever he decides, impor-
tant people are watching. In De-
cember, a representative from the
Western Hockey League, a junior
league, asked Carcillo to share the
accounts in his inbox, the official
said, to investigate the wrongdo-
ers. Carcillo didn’t trust the
league and declined. Later that
month, he requested a meeting
with B ranch, the same minor
league commissioner who
15 years before investigated Car-
cillo’s Sarnia allegations. This
time, Branch invited him to the
Canadian Hockey League offices
in To ronto.
Branch told The Washington
Post — and Carcillo — that the
league has been working to im-
prove players’ experiences for
“many years,” and that “the reve-
lations by Akim Aliu did not cause
us to take any further steps.” The
CHL, he says, has “zero tolerance”
for hazing and an investigatory
protocol for alleged incidents of
hazing or coaching abuse. But the
league has had to use that proto-
col only once, Branch says, in- “That’s the only one that
has been brought to our attention
and investigated,” he says.
“We don’t even allow first-year
players to pick up pucks after
practice,” he says. “A ll of that has
been removed. And I’m satisfied
with our zero-tolerance that all of
that has been removed.”
Carcillo says, “He’s just ex-
tremely out of touch.”
Still, Carcillo has an idea for
Branch and the CHL: He w ants to
spearhead a group of traveling
former players and a mental
health professional who can
speak to players from experience
— perhaps Brock mcGillis, an
openly gay former oHL and pro
player; or o’Sullivan, a former
NHL player who wrote a book
about abuse at the hands of his
father; or even Stewart, Carcillo’s
onetime victim.
“A nd then you have your men-
tal health professional here,” Car-
cillo says. “ ‘Tap into this person if
you need any help.’ The message
gets delivered so much better
when you have former players
who’ve been to the top.”
Dennis says, “I think he loves
the game. He just hates the insti-
tution — and with good reason.”
for Carcillo, such an initiative
would mean reimmersing him-
self in a game he walked away
from only three years ago, a pros-
pect he never imagined then.
With every day, every message
and every new idea about ways to
intervene, he gets closer to un-
earthing those relics in his base-
ment.
“A s I get better,” he says, “I start
entertaining the idea of, like,
keeping the s--- that I have down-
stairs from my grandfather.”
[email protected]
games for elbowing a linesman
on his way to the penalty box. In
2015, he cross-checked Perreault
for another six-game suspension.
He won the Stanley Cup with the
Blackhawks in 2013 and 2015, and
then he retired.
He went immediately into
coaching, taking on a group of
under-15 players in Illinois.
“I was miserable, man, misera-
ble, and trying to teach kids to get
into a sport that f---ed me up,”
Carcillo says. “I realized, you’ve
got to get away f rom this sport. As
soon as I finally had the full
picture of everything that I’ve
been, how I’d been lied to and
how dangerous this sport is and
then thinking about the abuse, I
realized I can’t teach kids to get
into this sport.”
In 2018, Carcillo shared his
Sarnia story publicly for the first
time, in a string of tweets. Some
former teammates backed up his
claims, but it didn’t exactly spark
a movement. minor league coach-
es and pundits insisted that hock-
ey’s dark days had passed. And
players weren’t keen to follow
Carcillo’s example. He was, after
all, “Car Bomb.” He lacked the
credibility to lead this movement.
That fall, Carcillo was among
300 former NHL players who won
a $19 million settlement from the
league over its handling of head
injuries, but Carcillo opted not to
take the money, choosing to sue
the league as an individual. That
case is pending. “That settlement
was an insult,” he says.
The NHL declined to comment
for this story, citing Carcillo’s
lawsuit.
That settlement offer also hap-
pened to come as Carcillo’s con-
cussion symptoms climaxed. He
was sleeping until 2 p.m. every
day. His speech was slurred. He
was anxious and depressed and
having suicidal thoughts. Carcillo
says a call from a former team-
mate, who introduced him to
CBD and other alternative medi-
cines, saved his life.
“Three and a half years of
doing what the white coats were
telling me to do,” he says, looking
out at his backyard, where his
children are speeding around on
a mini four-wheeler, courtesy of
Santa Claus. “A nswering that
phone call saved my life and
allowed me to keep doing the
work I’m doing.”an inbox explosion
much of Carcillo’s new life is
spent on planes, which isn’t that
different from his old one. He has
flown to more than 50 speaking
engagements in 2019 and 2020,
including e vents across ontario
this winter, in dressing rooms
and firehouses and police sta-
tions, where he spoke about men-
tal health with youth players and
first responders. He a lso travels in
pursuit of alternative brain-
health remedies: Last month, he
went to Peru for an Ayahuasca
retreat with American veterans
from the wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq. He has a hard time saying
no.
So the avalanche of messages
from players who had suffered
abuse has become as much an
emotional burden as a logistical
one.
“I can only get through so
many, because there are just tonsjected to the “shower train,” he
says, in which he and other rook-
ies were seated on a shower floor
while veterans spit and urinated
on them.
The next year, Carcillo was
playing for Te am Canada’s under-
18 club. At a team dinner, he
talked about the beatings and the
shower train and the bus bath-
rooms.
“Their jaws hit the floor,” Car-
cillo says.
It h ad never occurred to him to
complain to the league. But Te am
Canada’s coach, Brad mcCrim-
mon, alerted David Branch, who
was president of the CHL and
commissioner of the ontario
Hockey League, where Sarnia
plays. Branch came to Sarnia to
inquire but took no action.
“In speaking to certain people
in charge of the club and a couple
of players, I did not see a cause to
move forward with an actual in-
vestigation,” Branch said in an
interview.
Carcillo was drafted 73rd over-
all by the Pittsburgh Penguins in- After a trade, he debuted in
the NHL with the Phoenix Coy-
otes in 2006 and led the league in
penalty minutes (324) in the
200 7-08 season despite playing in
just 57 games. He was self-medi-
cating for depression with alco-
hol, he says, and his playing time
diminished. He was traded to the
Philadelphia flyers, but his min-
utes kept slipping, so Carcillo
turned to rehab. Sober at 25, he
realized that Stewart, among doz-
ens of others, deserved an apolo-
gy. They w ere working out togeth-
er in a small group that offseason
when Carcillo pulled him aside
and apologized.
“I forgave him as we were
13-year-old kids,” Stewart said in
an email. “It was one of a few
incidents I had to deal with as a
minority playing hockey.”
rehab helped Carcillo get so-
ber, but it did nothing to alter his
approach to the game. In 2014, as
a member of the New York rang-
ers, he was suspended for six
might change. “No,” Carcillo said.
“I talk to guys who used to play,
and they don’t understand,” says
his childhood best friend, An-
drew Dennis, a former high
school teammate and minor
league rival. “They’re like, ‘Dan
used to do all this s---.’
“What they don’t u nderstand is
that Dan’s trying to change the
way things are. All these players
think Carcillo is trying to expose
them. But he’s exposed himself,
too. He’s trying to change things.”
Carcillo didn’t begin his hock-
ey career as an enforcer.
“He was such a beautiful play-
er,” s ays robb Gibb, who coached
Carcillo’s youth hockey team in
ontario. “He wasn’t this bruiser
that you see, this ‘Car Bomb’ guy.
He was just an incredible goal
scorer.”
Ye t Carcillo took easily to the
uglier aspects of the game. When
he was 15, he played junior hock-
ey with future NHL winger An-
thony Stewart, who is black. In
the dressing room, Carcillo says,
he and several teammates chant-
ed “white power” at Stewart.
“He was the number one pros-
pect in hockey,” Carcillo says,
“and we just f---ing wanted to
chop him down. Stupid. Just stu-
pid. I mean, Anthony f---ing
snapped, as he should.”
Carcillo says coaches routinely
deployed racial slurs and ho-
mophobic epithets against play-
ers. The motivation to avoid those
labels was as strong as the desire
to excel on the ice. Parroting them
came naturally.
“I would even tell white guys
they were playing like n-words,”
Carcillo says. “It was learned.”
In 2002, Carcillo landed with
the Sarnia Sting, a Canadian
Hockey League club that treated
extreme hazing as cherished tra-
dition, according to Carcillo and
teammates. When he was 17, Car-
cillo was beaten with a sawed-off
goalie stick and stuffed in a bath-
room with other rookies while
teammates spit tobacco juice on
them, he says. He was also sub-was a long time ago.... I ’m s itting
here watching my 8-year-old son
have a blast at his practice this
morning and hope it stays that
way for him for a long time. I
don’t want him to ever have to go
through what countless other
players had to go through. Keep
outing the bad guys and telling
the good guys’ story.”
Carcillo shifts in his kitchen
bar stool. There are too many
anonymous victims to apologize
to, but he does his best, sifting
through the Dms in free moments
and bracing for what he will read
next.
“That’s the one you should put
on Twitter,” Ela says.a ticking ‘Car bomb’
Looking at Carcillo, the only
clue of the hell he put his body
through playing hockey is on his
face. His plump upper lip is
pursed and turned slightly up-
ward where a puck once sliced
through to the gums. His two
front teeth, casualties of a stick
blade to the face, are replaced
with veneers. It gets worse the
further down you go. He tore the
labrum in his left shoulder so
many times the connective tissue
has disintegrated. He had his
abdomen stapled back to his pel-
vis. He had nine knee surgeries.
He had seven documented con-
cussions.
Ask guys who played against
him, and they might tell you it
was all earned, karmically speak-
ing. In n ine NHL seasons, Carcillo
was suspended for dirty p lay nine
times and twice led the league in
penalty minutes, earning a repu-
tation as a reckless enforcer will-
ing to fight over the slightest
affront. In 2015, after Carcillo
slammed his stick across mathieu
Perreault’s lower back, sidelining
the Winnipeg Jets center for
11 days, a writer for the Hockey
News described him as an “unre-
pentant on-ice cannon ball.”
When he returned from his six-
game suspension, a reporter
asked whether his playing styled epression. Then last year, for-
mer NHL player Akim Aliu spoke
out, too, accusing Bill Peters, then
coach of the Calgary flames, of
directing the n-word toward him
years before in a minor league
dressing room.
Aliu’s revelation sparked a mo-
ment of catharsis — and reckon-
ing — in hockey, with some even
dubbing it “hockey’s #meTo o mo-
ment.” Current and former play-
ers shared stories of mental and
physical abuse. Coaches lost their
jobs or faced discipline. Peters
resigned. To ronto maple Leafs
coach mike Babcock was fired
after allegations of emotional
abuse, including asking a To ronto
rookie to rank his teammates’
effort — then sharing that list
with the team. Blackhawks assis-
tant coach marc Crawford was
suspended, accused of kicking
and choking players and deploy-
ing homophobic slurs at former
player Patrick o’Sullivan.
The NHL responded in Decem-
ber, announcing a hotline for
players to anonymously report
abuse and becoming the last ma-
jor North American sports league
to create a code of conduct for
players and coaches.
“Times are evolving. We have
to evolve,” Brendan Shanahan,
the maple Leafs’ president and a
former NHL player, told reporters
that month at the NHL Board of
Governors meeting. “We all came
from a certain generation where
things occurred to us as players
that we just accepted. We all have
to do a better job of just creating
that kind of work environment on
the ice and off the ice.”
But Carcillo believes the NHL’s
influence only goes so far — that
in Canada, this culture takes hold
among teenagers who travel far
from home for an opportunity to
eventually play in the Canadian
Hockey League, the sport’s big-
gest and most competitive junior
league. most never reach the
NHL. The ones who do arrive
having been long indoctrinated
into a system of sometimes vio-
lent and humiliating hazing.
Carcillo wanted the wider
world to know this, too. So in the
days after Aliu’s disclosure, he
opened his private Twitter inbox
to the public and invited every-
one with a story of hockey abuse
to share their account with him.
His inbox was flooded: more
than 300 people messaged Carcil-
lo, he says, most with stories from
their days in junior hockey. many
said they were telling their stories
for the first time. With their per-
mission, Carcillo shared a hand-
ful of messages with The Wash-
ington Post.
one told Carcillo about her
nephew, a young, black player,
who was taunted with bananas in
his team’s dressing room and
called racial slurs on the ice be-
fore he quit the sport. Another
told Carcillo, in graphic detail,
how she was repeatedly raped by
her high school teammates, at-
tempted suicide and quit. Anoth-
er told Carcillo how he and his
junior league teammates were
forced to tie their genitals togeth-
er with skate laces for a painful
game of tug of war.
“for some of these, I could only
get through half a paragraph be-
fore I had to stop,” Carcillo says
over a bowl of Caesar salad at his
home in suburban Chicago.
When he’s not traveling, the 35-
year-old Carcillo lives in sweats,
helping his wife, Ela, corral any
combination of their three young
children and their cousins as they
stomp from the basement to a
living room lit by floor-to-ceiling
windows to a leafy paradise out-
side.
making coffee across the kitch-
en, listening to Carcillo read from
his Twitter inbox, Ela breaks her
silence: “Who thinks of this s---?”
“These guys who are trauma-
tized,” Carcillo says, not missing a
beat. “It’s the most racist and
homophobic environment you’ll
ever get put into because every-
body’s a tough man and you don’t
talk about your feelings and you
do this to people. Like it’s some
kind of rite of passage to be able
to degrade a minor. It’s so hard to
stop the cycle of abuse. It’s e asy to
be abused, and it’s easy to do it to
the next person.”
Carcillo has turned some of the
messages into controversy, tweet-
ing screen shots from people ac-
cusing coaches of mistreating
them. mostly, though, he’s unsure
of what to do next. Tip off local
media? Help file a lawsuit? Work
to create solutions with leagues?
occasionally, he opens a mes-
sage that forces him to confront
his own role in what he calls
hockey’s “culture of abuse.”
“Hey Dan, you don’t remember
me and have no reason to,” a
former minor league referee
wrote to Carcillo. “I’ve got to say,
you were one of the worst people I
dealt with in the game of hockey.
You were awful to all of us.
“But that was a game and that
abuse from D1
Former enforcer now fighting against player abuse
david Zalubowski/associated Presscharles cherney/associated PressFormer NHL enforcer Daniel Carcillo, above left, h as become an advocate against physical and
emotional abuse in hockey. akim aliu, top left, spoke out last year, accusing bill Peters, then
coach of the F lames, of directing the n-word toward him years earlier in the minor leagues.