FROM VILLAIN TO TRAILBLAZER
Carcillo encouraging others to open up about abuse in hopes of changing a hockey culture he calls toxic
HOMER GLEN, ILL. The pads and jerseys he wore through two Stanley Cup seasons are strewn across the concrete floor in a dark basement closet. The framed newspaper stories chronicling his rise to the NHL are down in the basement, too, shrouded in bubble wrap.
This stuff used to hang in the home of Daniel Carcillo’s grandfather. But he died in 2015, before Carcillo got to tell him how he had been abused in hockey, how he had been one of the abusers, how there was no way his kids would ever lace up skates. Carcillo retrieved them from his grandpa’s walls and buried them down here.
The only place hockey lives in Carcillo’s house now is upstairs on his laptop, where he runs a Twitter account, @CarBombBoom13, that has become a depository for the sport’s darkest experiences and a megaphone to demand change across the sport.
Since retiring from the Chicago Blackhawks in 2015, Carcillo has reinvented himself as an unlikely advocate for hockey players who have suffered concussions or been physically or emotionally abused by teammates and coaches. He started by sharing his own stories of injury, hazing and depression. Then, last year, former NHL player Akim Aliu spoke out, too, accusing Bill Peters, then coach of the Calgary Flames, of calling him the n-word years before in a minor league dressing room.
Aliu’s revelation sparked a moment of catharsis — and reckoning — in hockey, with some even dubbing it “hockey’s #MeToo moment.”
Current and former players shared stories of mental and physical abuse. Coaches lost their jobs or faced discipline.
The NHL responded in December, announcing a hotline for players to anonymously report abuse and becoming the last major North American sports league to create a code of conduct for players and coaches.
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 biggest and most competitive junior league. Most never reach the NHL. The ones who do arrive having been long-indoctrinated into a system of sometimes violent 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 anyone with a story of hockey abuse to share their accounts with him.
His inbox was flooded: More than 300 people messaged Carcillo, he says, most with stories from their days in junior hockey. Many said they were telling their stories for the first time. With their permission, Carcillo shared a handful of messages.
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 before he quit the sport. Another told Carcillo, in graphic detail, how she was repeatedly raped by her high school teammates, attempted suicide and quit. Another told Carcillo how he and his junior league teammates were forced to tie their genitals together with skate laces for a painful game of tug of war.
“For some of these, I could only get through half a paragraph before I had to stop,” Carcillo says over a bowl of Caesar salad at his home in suburban Chicago.
When he’s not travelling, Carcillo, 35, 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 outside.
Making coffee across the kitchen, listening to Carcillo read from his Twitter inbox, Ela breaks her silence: “Who thinks of this s---?”
“These guys who are traumatized,” Carcillo says, not missing a beat. “It’s the most racist and homophobic environment you’ll ever get put into because everybody’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 easy to be abused, and it’s easy to do it to the next person.”
Carcillo has turned some of the messages into controversy, tweeting screenshots from people accusing 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 message that forces him to confront his own role in what he calls hockey’s “culture of abuse.”
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’ll read next.
It’s the most racist and homophobic environment you’ll ever get put into because everybody’s a tough man, and you don’t talk about ... feelings
Looking at Carcillo, the only clue of the hell he put his body through playing hockey is on his face. He also tore the labrum in his left shoulder so many times the connective tissue has disintegrated. He has had his abdomen stapled back to his pelvis. He has had nine knee surgeries. He had seven documented concussions.
Ask guys who played against him and they might tell you it was all earned, karmically speaking. In nine NHL seasons, Carcillo was suspended for dirty play nine times and twice led the league in penalty minutes, earning a reputation as a reckless enforcer willing to fight over the slightest affront. In 2015, after Carcillo slammed his stick across Mathieu Perreault’s lower back, sidelining the Winnipeg Jets centre for 11 days, a writer for the Hockey News described him as an “unrepentant on-ice cannon ball.” When he returned from his six-game suspension, a reporter asked whether his playing style might change.
“No,” Carcillo said.
Carcillo didn’t begin his hockey career as an enforcer.
“He was such a beautiful player,” says 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.”
Yet Carcillo took easily to the uglier aspects of the game. When he was 15, he played junior hockey with future NHL winger Anthony Stewart, who is black. In the dressing room, Carcillo says, he and several teammates chanted “white power” at Stewart.
“He was the number one prospect in hockey,” Carcillo says, “and we just f---ing wanted to chop him down. Stupid. Just stupid. I mean, Anthony f---ing snapped, as he should.”
Carcillo says coaches routinely deployed racial slurs and homophobic epithets against players. The motivation to avoid those labels was as strong as the desire to excel on the ice. Parroting them came naturally.
In 2002, Carcillo landed with the Sarnia Sting, a Canadian Hockey League club that treated extreme hazing as cherished tradition, according to Carcillo and teammates. When he was 17, Carcillo was beaten with a sawed-off goalie stick and stuffed in a bathroom with other rookies while teammates spit tobacco juice on them, he says. He was also subjected to the “shower train,” he says, in which he and other rookies were seated on a shower floor while veterans spit and urinated on them.
The next year, Carcillo was playing for Team Canada’s Under-18 club. At a team dinner, he talked about the beatings and the shower train and the bus bathrooms.
“Their jaws hit the floor,” Carcillo says.
It had never occurred to him to complain to the league. But Team Canada’s coach, Brad McCrimmon, 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 investigation,” Branch said in an interview.
Carcillo was drafted 73rd overall by the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2003. After a trade, he debuted in the NHL with the Phoenix Coyotes in 2006 and led the league in penalty minutes (324) in the 2007-08 season despite playing in just 57 games. He was self-medicating for depression with alcohol, he says, and his playing time diminished. He was traded to the Philadelphia Flyers, but his minutes kept slipping, so Carcillo turned to rehab.
Sober at 25, he realized that Stewart, among dozens of others, deserved an apology. They were working out together in a small group that off-season 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.” In December, he requested a meeting with David Branch, the same minor league commissioner who 15 years before investigated Carcillo’s Sarnia allegations. This time, Branch invited him to the Canadian Hockey League offices in Toronto.
Branch told The Washington Post — and Carcillo — that the league has been working to improve players’ experiences for “many years,” and that “the revelations 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 protocol only once, Branch says, in 2006.
Still, Carcillo has an idea for Branch and the CHL: He wants to spearhead a group of travelling 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 Patrick O’Sullivan, a former NHL player who wrote a book about abuse at the hands of his father; or even Stewart, Carcillo’s one-time victim.
For Carcillo, such an initiative would mean reimmersing himself in a game he walked away from only three years ago, a prospect he never imagined then. But he gets closer to unearthing those relics in his basement.
“As I get better,” he says, “I start entertaining the idea of, like, keeping the s--- that I have downstairs from my grandfather.”