BARRY TRAPP made Graham James quit the Moose Jaw Warriors.
The Warriors’ executive board offered Barry the general manager’s position in the spring of 1985, and Graham was totally pissed off about it. He wrote a letter to the board saying he didn’t want anyone to tell him what to do. He did not want to lose the control he had—and he had everybody eating out of his hand. At our hockey banquet in April, Graham was the master of ceremonies, Graham was the guest speaker, Graham told all the jokes and Graham gave out the awards. But Barry is a super hard ass. He was there to do a job, no matter what.
The team had gone 21–50–1 and finished thirteenth in a fourteen-team league. Barry told Graham he wanted to get together over the May long weekend to look at the direction the team was heading in, discuss what they wanted to do with the players and get things ready for training camp. But Graham refused to co-operate. He said he was going to be in Minneapolis to watch a ball game. So Trapp offered to go with him. Graham said that wouldn’t work because he was going with some friends from Winnipeg. Barry decided to phone some of the players himself. He placed a call to one of the 16-year-old rookies, and the parents told him the kid was in Minneapolis with Graham. This set off alarm bells in Barry’s head.
There had been whispers going around the Regina Pats, where Barry was the assistant GM before joining us. And he had heard a couple of former Warriors talking amongst themselves, saying things like “James is a fag,” which had planted a couple of seeds of doubt in Barry’s mind. But being gay was a long way from being a pedophile.
Barry went to the board in Moose Jaw and said Graham lied to him and he didn’t like the situation. He said he’d had an offer to work in the NHL as a scout and he would leave if the board didn’t let him get rid of Graham. The board told him to do what he thought was right.
Barry decided he would coach the team himself and offer Graham the assistant’s job. That way, Graham would quit for sure. But the community of Moose Jaw was totally invested in our team, so before he could do anything he had to go to a public meeting. That stirred up a shit storm. People were outraged. How could you do this to this guy? Graham James is the nicest person who has ever been around here. Look how he treats everybody. Graham had just about everybody fooled. But he didn’t fool Barry. Barry knew there was something going on, he just couldn’t prove it. Practically no one in Moose Jaw believed him. Later, when the Swift Current Broncos turned around and hired Graham, no one called Barry for a reference.
So Graham quit, and when he called me on the phone and told me he was leaving, I was literally jumping up and down, raising my fist in the air, I was so happy. It was a freeing experience. He tried as hard as he could to get me to go with him to his next stop, a Tier II Junior A team in Winnipeg. He worked on me night and day, just grinding me. “You need to come with me on this route now. I won’t be in Moose Jaw to give you the ice time you need.” And I was thinking, “Fuck you, man. I can make it on my own. I am a good hockey player. I’m doing good here.” Graham even typed up a letter to Trapp saying that I was quitting. I signed it, but Trapp gave me call and said, “You know what? If you’re not coming to Moose Jaw, you won’t be getting a release from me. So I guess you’ll be a hell of a high school player in Russell, Manitoba.”
So who was the first guy at camp in Moose Jaw that fall? Me.
Of course, this was unfortunate for Sheldon Kennedy, who went with Graham to the Tier II team in Winnipeg. (I spoke with Sheldon while I was writing this book, and he told me to go ahead and talk about this. It was very important to me to respect his privacy, as he respected mine when he wrote his own book.)
Sheldon and I first met when he was seven and I was eight. I was a friend of his older brother Troy—we called him TK. In the summer of 1980, I had just turned 12. My family didn’t have two nickels to rub together, and the Kennedys didn’t have much more, but TK had a cool new toy called the Rubik’s Cube. He handed it to me and I solved it right away. Sheldon says he remembers being amazed.
Sheldon and TK were both very talented on the ice. Sheldon was the best skater I have ever seen. Anyway, we grew up playing tons of minor hockey against each other. They lived on a farm in Elkhorn, about sixty miles south of Russell. Their dad was violent and left the family when Sheldon was young. Sheldon’s mom, Shirley, was looking for a father figure for the boys. Enter Graham.
Graham first spotted Sheldon at that same Andy Murray hockey camp he and Tommy Thompson scouted me at in 1981, the summer after my injury. Graham cultivated a relationship with Sheldon and me by isolating us from our families and from the other players. Graham was a very personable, smart guy. He wasn’t a guy who sat on the corner of your sleeping bag, drooling. In Sheldon’s case, he gained the trust of everybody around him, including his mom and his brother. He hinted that Sheldon was headed for trouble and claimed that Sheldon was a drinker. Graham set himself up to look like he was Sheldon’s saviour. In truth, Sheldon didn’t start drinking until Graham got hold of him.
Anyway, the first time Sheldon was assaulted by Graham was when he was 14 years old. He came to Winnipeg for the Lions tournament. I was playing for the St. James Warriors and Sheldon was playing for Elkhorn. Sheldon arrived to stay at Graham’s, and the fat fuck went after him. I feel badly about it now, but I was too involved in my own shit to worry about what was happening with anyone else. I was just trying to survive. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on and I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t go to Sheldon for support, and he couldn’t turn to me, because it was too hard.
The first time I ever got drunk in my life I was at Sheldon’s. I was 16 and staying with his family for a four-team tournament. By this time, Sheldon had been in Graham’s clutches for a year—and it had been two years for me. Sheldon had started some serious drinking in order to cope. I hadn’t got into it yet because my dad drank enough for three families. That Saturday night, when I first tasted beer and kind of instantly became an alcoholic, I got into the O’Keefe’s Extra Old Stock around a bush fire and passed out after trying to tippy-toe into the campfire. Sheldon and his buddy scooped me up and threw me into the back of a van and tore up fields on the way home. Sheldon says he can still remember hearing the sound of me retching and the bumping of my body bouncing off the metal walls of the van. The next morning, each of us was extremely worried that Graham might find out. Although we never talked about it, I think that was when Sheldon knew about me and I knew about him.
Anyway, Graham was desperate for me to quit Moose Jaw and to go back to Winnipeg with him. He tried crying and begging, and when that didn’t work, he decided to try to bribe me and Sheldon by driving us to Disneyland. It was insane. A twilight zone trip. It was so bizarre. The shame, the guilt, the self-hate. I hated myself. Sheldon hated himself. Sheldon is actually quite shy, but he is one of the funniest fuckers I have ever met. He says he didn’t want people to look at what was really happening, so he went overboard to make sure he came across as really funny and happy. That kept people at arm’s length. Anyway, Sheldon kept me laughing and relatively sane on that trip to Disneyland.
As we set out on the trip, Sheldon and I started to wind each other up. Sheldon would make some comment or other toward Graham, razzing him, which would make me laugh, and that would get Sheldon going again. Before long we were both calling Graham names and laughing like crazy. At first, Graham pretended he thought it was funny, but then he started getting mad. It was the strangest dynamic. At night, Graham was creeping around the room accosting us, and during the day we did our best to punish him. At the hotels along the way, he would book one room with two beds and each night he’d switch back and forth. Think about how sick that is. The room would be still, no sound or light, and then all of a sudden he would grab you. The most horrible part was the wait. I just wanted it over with so I could check out.
When it was Sheldon’s night, I was so exhausted from dealing with Graham all day I would pass out like a dead person. But when it was my turn, Sheldon says he would lie awake, and no matter how he tried, he could not block out what was going on. Poor buddy.
Day by day, Sheldon got bolder, which I thought was hilarious. I had been so intimidated by this monster, and here was Sheldon putting him in his place. Sheldon was relentless in hounding him for booze. “Go get me some beers, you fat bastard. Move that fat fuckin’ walrus butt of yours!” Graham would grumble at him to keep his mouth shut and show some respect, and Sheldon would look at me and we would laugh like maniacs. When we got to San Francisco, Graham finally went out and got a six-pack, which Sheldon downed in about half an hour. All the while, Graham was pouting and acting like he was a victim of Sheldon’s meanness. In Graham’s mind, the bad guy was the 15-year-old kid who was begging for beers so he could deal with the sexual abuse Graham was subjecting him to. It was like when you have a girlfriend and you go to a party, and you and a bud get to talking about a camping trip you went on before you knew her, and she gets pissed off. Being pissed off was part of the way Graham controlled us. He was an angry man. We would pick on him because we hated him, and he got so sick of it that by the time we got to Disneyland he was barely speaking to us, which was great. We checked into our hotel and he told us to go to the Magic Kingdom by ourselves. Yeah!
We got on the Mad Tea Party ride and said, “Let’s see how fast we can get goin’.” We spun the wheel of our teacup as hard as we could, and it was flying around. We were having a gas and could not stop laughing. I stepped off and fell flat on my face, and Sheldon got off and fell right on top of me. This started us up again, and everybody around us was laughing too. We just went crazy—it was so much fun.
On the way back to Manitoba, Sheldon and I did all the driving. Neither of us had a licence. After Sheldon’s book came out, there was a story in the paper about me sleeping in the back seat while Sheldon was being abused in the front seat. It is true. Sheldon says that while he drove, Graham would reach over and start doing his shit, but I don’t remember any of that. I was asleep. Fuckin’ deep asleep. As I said, when you were with Graham, any time you could get some quality sleep you took full advantage of it, ‘cause you knew you were going to be up all fuckin’ night.
When he dropped me off at my parents’ place after that trip, that was it. It was over. I was out, home free. We still maintained contact. I would go to Swift Current to golf with him, but I never once let him near me again. He would try to get me to stay over, but I’d always say something like, “Nope I’m headin’ ‘er back to Moose Jaw.”
By that time, I had a girlfriend, Shannon Griffin. She was one of the prettiest girls at high school in Moose Jaw. She was a typical small-town girl, a sweet, innocent cheerleader. The local guys hated us hockey players because we got all the women. I went to Peacock Collegiate, and she was a cheerleader at Vanier. We were both 16. She was the first girl I slept with. We did it in the back of my dad’s car back in Russell when I took her home for a visit. It was a huge relief for me because, thanks to Graham, I was worried I might be gay, even though I felt absolutely no attraction to men. It was a hard situation. She’d ask, “Why do you have to go to your coach’s house all the time? Why are you always over there?” And I would make up excuses. She never suspected the truth, and I never said anything. I was very, very conflicted and really pissed off.
Shannon would fight with her dad and I would mediate and calm her down. I laughed at her jokes and cared about her feelings. We would have had the perfect high school romance if she hadn’t become pregnant. What did we expect? We didn’t use contraception. We were young, ignorant and horny.
I still considered myself Roman Catholic, and she was one too. Abortion was definitely a thought, but we both felt it would be killing our baby. Her parents were willing to raise it, but we did not want that either, and so the next option for two young people who are not prepared to have a child was adoption. We thought the right thing might be to give him to a family that wanted, and was waiting for, a baby. Because we were in the process of making the decision, we knew that if we had anything prepared, like clothes or a crib, we would just take the baby home, so we did not purchase any baby items at all. Zero.
The night before Josh was born, I didn’t have a clue what to do. I switched into survival mode. The Moose Jaw Warriors had finally won after a long, dry streak, so I did what we players always did: I went out and got absolutely shit-faced drunk. Of course, I slept in, and Shannon had to call me from the hospital the next morning to get me up.
I was bagged but wanted to do the right thing, so with each contraction I hopped up and held her hand, enduring it with her, then I would plop back down on the chair and sleep until the next one came. Josh was born at 7:45 p.m. on November 18, 1987.
Once he was laid in my arms, that was it. In my mind, there was no question we were going to keep him and do what we needed to do. That meant we were going to make our relationship work.
Shannon’s grandmother was 91 years old. She took a taxi to the Sears store and bought every last thing you could possibly think of. She was not a wealthy woman—she was living on a fixed income—but she showed up at the hospital and behind her was the taxi driver carrying a car seat and bags full of washcloths and bath towels and sleepers and a few outfits—everything needed to get started.
I was 18 and still living at a billet home. I was getting paid by the Warriors, maybe a couple of hundred a month, but not enough to support a family. Shannon and Josh moved back with her folks. We did eventually move in together when Josh was a year old, and I proposed to Shannon, but a few months before the wedding, I called it off. She was really loyal and took care of me. The laundry was always done, food on the table, that kind of thing. But we still had these issues with her family and I acted like a single guy. As soon as I left the house, look out—it was on. I had no business committing to her.
My drinking was escalating. I liked rum and Coke, but whisky made the feathers come out. I knew I had to stay away from it because of something that happened during my last year in Moose Jaw. I was at a social, downing Crown Royal, and I picked the biggest guy in the crowd and decided to beat the shit out of him. I went over and said, “Hey, man, that your girlfriend?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “I saw her go down on one of the guys after the game the other night.” He told me to piss off, so I said, “Yeah, you’re right. It couldn’t have been her—she’s too fat and ugly.” That was over the line. He took a swing at me and I said, “Let’s go outside.”
I had to get the first couple of shots in or get killed. We stumbled out through the front door and started squaring off, doing the old bare-knuckle shuffle. I was unsteady thanks to the two-six. We each threw a few; he landed a few puffballs on my head and I got him in the nose a couple of times. Finally, we both fell to the ground and my teammates came and broke it up.
When I was drunk, I wouldn’t feel the fight until the next day, but after a few of these incidents, I woke up one morning with a black eye, my nose swollen to about three times its normal size and a broken rib or two, and I looked in the mirror and said, “Okay, I better stop drinking whisky. I could get seriously hurt.” That last year in Moose Jaw, a lot of the players spent their spare time getting wasted.
I remember smoking a lot of hash because it was always available. We’d put it on the end of a cigarette, hot-knife it or rig up some kind of tinfoil pipe or whatever. I never had to buy it because somebody would always bust it out. How could our coaches or management not know what was going on with that team? They saw us every fuckin’ day.
In January 1997, after Sheldon made his revelation about the abuse, Maclean’s magazine said that when Graham coached the Moose Jaw Warriors, team officials had become suspicious. Dev Dley, who was the commissioner of the Western Hockey League, is quoted as saying that no one filed an official complaint, so the league didn’t investigate. Uh-huh. If the league indeed really knew of the suspicions about Moose Jaw, I find it incredible that without an official complaint it would simply turn a blind eye.
Moose Jaw was a great place to play junior hockey. Still is, to this day. Great community, great people there. But I will always ask myself, Did our trainer Stan Szumiak know? Or the assistant coach, Cam Ftoma? He says he was shocked when he found out. How about the director of marketing, Bill Harris—did he suspect anything? I dunno. One thing I do know is that I was a naive 16-year-old kid living away from home, and they were all grown men, and not one of them came to me and said, “Kid, is there anything you would like to tell me?”
And I know the Moose Jaw Warriors are ashamed now. Just go to their website. In our 1984 team picture there are nine guys sitting in the front row, and only eight of them are named.