WHEN SHELDON came forward about being abused by Graham James, he revealed there was one other player who he would not name. Everyone knew I was associated with Graham, so there was a ton of speculation as to whether it was me or Joe Sakic. I don’t think Joe was molested. He has never acted out and has always been a very even-keeled, nice guy. Graham did hang out with him and a lot of other players—it was part of what he did to protect himself. He took guys like Danny Lambert and Joe to the movies too. They were friends—just friends. It removed suspicions. It was part of his game. Friends could testify that they spent nights with Graham, went out for Chinese food, went back to his house to watch a movie and nothing happened. I believe Joe never had a clue as to what Graham was really up to.
In January 1997, Graham was formally charged. It was big, big news. So every single day for two months I had to say, “No comment.” We had CNN reporters in the dressing room after games. News outlets tried everything to get me to talk about it. A typical encounter was the time I was in the hallway after leaving the dressing room, where I had been asked the same question for almost half an hour. This good-looking female reporter came up to me and said, “So you are one of the guys, right?” I asked her what she was talking about. She said, “You’re the other guy, right?”
I said, “I just stood in front of you for twenty minutes and said I can’t answer these questions. How do you get ‘You’re that other guy’ from that?”
“Well, there’s a lot of speculation going around right now,” she said. “Yeah,” I said, “that’s what it is—speculation. Until you hear it from the horse’s mouth, you don’t know squat.”
It became really frustrating and I started hitting the cocaine hard. I had been drinking and partying on a regular basis, but drugs had been kind of like a treat. If coke was there, sure, of course I’d do it. But in my circle of friends, nobody was into that kind of stuff. After the Sheldon thing came up, I bought some for the first time. I was in a bar, I gave a guy some money and he gave me a little packet. I did the drugs in the bathroom cubicle. I’d pull out my car key, pour a little on the blade, stick it up to my nose, sniff. Clean, simple, done.
Coke, drinking and chicks were how I dealt with it on the outside; inside, I wasn’t dealing with it at all. I was upset that the whole matter was creating a distraction for my teammates. Here we were, trying to win hockey games, and after every practice and every game there was a media scrum around me. One reporter, Mike Board from the Calgary Herald, asked me the same question for two months!
I could not handle the scrutiny. Everywhere I went, I was asked about it. Every media hound in the world wanted to be the one who broke the story, and all I would say is “No comment.” Sometimes they asked me openly, sometimes they tried to sneak it in. For instance, we might be talking about the game that night and the next thing you know—bam!—they’d hit me with the James thing. But I would totally clam up. “No comment.” I knew if I said anything, it would become the focus of every interview, every media story, everything ever written about me again. “Theo Fleury scores his thousandth point despite growing up abused by his hockey coach.” “Sexually molested hockey player Theo Fleury sets an NHL record for short-handed goals.”
This went on for more than nine months. I didn’t want to deal with it in a public forum. I knew I could get tons of sympathy, but I didn’t need that. I needed to forgive myself, because I felt responsible. I’d allowed it to happen. I felt that, in order to get noticed and move forward in the NHL, I’d given up my soul. Both Sheldon and I lost the innocence most kids have. We grew up way too fast. The day I walked out the door in Russell I was on my own, and it was going to be like that for the rest of my life. But carrying it around all the time was wearing me down.
I had zero tools. None. So I looked for an escape hatch. Whenever we were on the road, I started going to strip joints. Sheldon dealt with it by talking about it, through therapy and self-discovery.
THE KEY TO ABUSE is secrecy. Once the secret is out, the spell is broken. If you look back at my story, you’ll find that what Graham did was make me believe that if I ever told anybody, there would be serious consequences. It was the same as holding a knife or gun to my head. He held my career in his hands. But now, Sheldon’s secret was out, so he was able to start dealing with it. Mine was not. Graham still had control of my life.
At the end of that year, before any of the investigation was made public, we went on a golfing trip to a resort in Phoenix with the guys. One day, Sheldon and I sat down, had a few beers and snorted a few lines. We were in a drunken, coke-induced delirium. We sat in a room and talked for ten hours. I had suspected this and he had suspected that. We even talked about what really went on during that trip to fuckin’ Disneyland. It cleared the air between us.
The truth about what Graham did to Sheldon came out in court. Graham called Eric Francis from jail the day after he was sentenced and gave him a worldwide exclusive interview. In that jailhouse phone call, Graham told Eric, “Sheldon and I were in love.” He went on to say something convoluted about how he should have been born in Roman times, because back then it was acceptable to have boys as partners. It was the manly thing to do.
Eric called the whole conversation “chilling.”
Graham made contact with me once by phone, and I said, “You know what, man? Don’t ever call me again. I have nothing to say to you. I’m glad it is finally over. You deserve everything that you are getting. Have fun in jail.” I look back on it now, and I know that son of a bitch has to lay his head down on that fuckin’ pillow every night and I know he doesn’t go to sleep.
Some of my teammates were sympathetic about all the unwanted attention I had been getting, while others were frustrated and disappointed that it had become such a big deal. On the ice, I’d hear comments. Some jerk-off from the other team would say things to get me off my game. It was nasty out there. Really nasty.
Finally, Brian Sutter came to my defence. There was a headline on the front page of the paper: “Leave Theo Alone!” I thought it was a class act because up until then nobody else had stepped up for me. It was a terrible amount of pressure to shoulder alone. I mean, who was putting butts in the seats in those days? I was. Who were people coming to watch? Me. It was just me out there. I was the guy who played with energy, skill and the desire to win. It wasn’t right to put all that on a guy who is five foot six.