Former hockey player opens up about sexual assault in Swift Current
Swift Current, a harrowing documentary, chronicles Sheldon Kennedy’s nightmare of abuse
The title seems innocuous enough: Swift Current. It’s not. It was in this small Saskatchewan town where a hockey-playing teen intent on living the Canadian dream had his world turned upside down.
The documentary Swift Current — making its world TV première Saturday at 9 p.m. on Global — chronicles the nightmare that Sheldon Kennedy underwent at the hands and twisted mind of his predatory coach Graham James. It is a harrowing, heart-wrenching doc yet also one that can offer hope to victims of sexual abuse.
Many are aware of parts of the Kennedy story: He was molested by James as a junior star with the Swift Current Broncos. He went on to an erratic eight-year NHL career — with Detroit, Calgary and Boston — which was essentially undone by his selfdestructive behaviour, entailing excessive consumption of alcohol and drugs. He went public in calling out James, who served 3½ years in prison for his crime before his release in 2001. The disgraced coach is now in a Laval, Que., prison serving a seven-year sentence after being convicted of sexual assault on former NHLer Theoren Fleury, his cousin Todd Holt and another player — all resulting from Swift Current Broncos days.
Kennedy rollerbladed across Canada in 1998 to raise awareness and funds for sexual-abuse victims, and he is the director of the Sheldon Kennedy Child Advocacy Centre for victims of child abuse in Calgary.
The nightmare didn’t end for Kennedy after going public with his charges against James and his tour of Canada. If anything, it intensified. His demons persisted, and nearly drove him to the brink.
Director Joshua Rofé does a masterful job of filling in the holes and getting Kennedy to open up once-secret compartments.
Rofé goes back to Swift Current to dig up another piece of the puzzle: the 1986 bus crash wherein four of Kennedy’s teammates died, and coach James “denied therapy” for the survivors, perhaps because he feared that revelations of sexual molestation of players might surface.
Rofé also focuses on Kennedy’s family life in their native Brandon, Man. His dad was aggressive and physically abusive and thus Kennedy proved to be an easy mark for James, who was viewed as a “hockey god.” Kennedy was naive and was also terrified of James, who he said once threatened him with a shotgun. And so began his descent with drugs and drink in order to forget. He also started cutting himself.
Kennedy’s life further deteriorated in the NHL. Marriage and a daughter didn’t settle him down. He was consumed with guilt for not speaking out about his “ugly secret.” When he spoke out, he feared no one would listen, because of his bad-boy reputation. As Kennedy put it: “hockey didn’t want to hear about sexual assault.”
But eventually the league and the public did want to hear about it. And suddenly bad-boy Kennedy was cast in another role: “But I wasn’t ready to be a superhero.” Uncomfortable with sudden adulation after his rollerblade mission, he fell further. His marriage came apart. His daughter drifted away. He hit rock-bottom.
He sought counselling at seven high-end treatment centres. He wanted to end it all.
Then, through the auspices of the NHL, he entered a rehab facility in 2004. And Kennedy has not only remained clean and sober since but has also helped provide much needed therapy for others who have had to deal with similar abuse dilemmas.
The dramatized TV movie, The Sheldon Kennedy Story, didn’t really get to the heart of the story, largely because it was released in 1999 — before his big slide. Kennedy’s 2006 autobiography, Why I Didn’t Say Anything — The Sheldon Kennedy Story, filled in
What I like about this film is that it shows the ugly side but it also shows that there’s a way to get your life back.
many of the blanks. But Kennedy feels Swift Current really hits home.
“When (director) Joshua first approached, I said we’re not just going to tell the Sheldon Kennedy story all over again, one that many were already familiar with,” Kennedy, 46, says in a phone interview from Calgary. “I felt we really had to focus on the impact of abuse on the victims, which I think society has a hard time understanding — because a lot of it is invisible.
“What we know today is what kind of impact early childhood trauma — sexual and severe physical abuse — has on developing brains. And when kids are living in a state of fear and anxiety and shame constantly, it changes the brain. Whereas back in the day, it was pull ourselves up and we’re good to go.”
Kennedy notes that the hardest thing for a victim to do is to come forward to address the abuse.
“That’s because most of the time they know the abuser or it’s a family member and that when they tell their story, it’s over. But what we really wanted to nail in the film is that it’s just the beginning and victims probably become more vulnerable after.”
Kennedy is armed with some alarming stats about how the lives of abuse victims unfold: “Kids that are abused are 26 times more likely to end up in the streets; 30 per cent less likely to graduate from high school; 72 per cent of those who have gone into detox have said they were abused as kids; 80 per cent of those with mental-health concerns are all driven from early childhood abuse and trauma. Yet we always wait until someone’s on the street or addicted or in prison to try to help them.”
“It’s all about connecting the dots. If you look at me and (the two victims appearing in the film), we all had suicidal thoughts. We were all self-harmed. We all acted out various addictions. It’s very consistent. And if you look at the impact on our families, it has a huge ripple effect.”
One of the more revealing moments in the doc comes when Kennedy’s mother describes how disgusted she was to learn so many years later that she was putting James up in her home, serving him meals and treating him like royalty all the while he was molesting her son.
“The way abusers like Graham James operate is by gaining the trust of parents more than anyone in order to have access to their kids. My mother then felt so awful that she could have fallen for that. But the reality is that I don’t know why she would have thought anything different,” the candid Kennedy adds.
“Today we understand that when an adult is spending a disproportionate amount of time with a young person, we need to ask questions, because that’s not normal. It hurts when I look at my mom and see the enormous shame and guilt and pain that she’s had to live her life with.”
Nor did Kennedy’s hockeyplaying brother Troy emerge unscathed. Initially, Troy felt jealous about all the attention Sheldon was getting from James.
“Troy, too, carries this shame and guilt about not saying anything. There were whispers and innuendoes about James, and Troy was also playing in the Western Hockey League. But I don’t hold grudges against people for not saying stuff. Many just didn’t know what to do.
“Yet if we look at Hockey Canada today, it has set in place a mandatory system where every coach gets abuse-awareness training,” he says. “What I like about this film is that it shows the ugly side but it also shows that there’s a way to get your life back. And that’s the message we have to give to people, because sometimes when you’re in those situations, the only way you see out is through suicide. We need to show them that they can be who they believe they are.”
Despite programs and public scrutiny, Kennedy is well aware that predators are ever lurking. His Child Advocacy Centre does 125 investigations a month — just in Calgary alone. “And we believe we’re only getting 10 per cent. In 95 per cent of the cases we see, the child knows their abuser and in 47 per cent of them, the abuser is a parent or a guardian.
“There’s no question that we’ve come a long way and Canada is probably leading the pack around the world in terms of creating awareness, but there’s still a long way to go. The Graham Jameses of the world operate on levels of ignorance and indifference, and the best thing we can do is create knowledge within ourselves and have the conversation with our family. We may never be able to stop this, but what we can do is give people the courage to come forward, to nip it in the bud before it becomes a terror.”
Kennedy concedes that in his wildest dreams he would never have envisioned himself ending up as an advocate for the abused.
“Absolutely not,” he says. “But I don’t think I’ve ever made a conscious decision to say that this is the work I’m going to do. It just kind of evolved. When I received the Order of Canada last year, I was chatting with Governor General David Johnston and telling him that 10 years ago the issues that I represent would never be recognized on a level like this — and that I would have been the last person that anyone would have ever thought would get an Order of Canada.”
Clearly, times have changed.