Former Canuck latest to allege abuse in junior hockey
Ex-canuck Smith latest former pro to allege abuse, mistreatment in junior hockey
Documents filed in Ontario court earlier this month by a former Vancouver Canuck allege shocking tales of sexual abuse in junior hockey more than 40 years ago.
Doug Smith, drafted second overall by the Los Angeles Kings in the NHL Entry Draft in 1981 and who went on to play more than 500 games in the league, including 40 for the Canucks, alleged in an affidavit sworn earlier this year that he suffered “constant” abuse over a three-month period as a rookie during the 1979-80 Ontario Hockey League season with the Ottawa 67's.
“I suffered abuse during this time that I have lived with for the past 40 years,” he said in his affidavit.
“Telling my story has been extremely difficult, but I am telling it because I do not want any other child to go through what I did.”
James Sayce, the lawyer representing Smith and other plaintiffs, including former NHLER Dan Carcillo and former WHLER Garrett Taylor, said the former players' names have been redacted from the documents his firm has posted online out of courtesy — their names are publicly available in court records — but Smith agreed to have his name published.
In an email, Smith declined further comment for this story.
The other plaintiffs, including several who played junior hockey in British Columbia around the same time as Smith, also allege they endured sexual, physical and emotional abuse from authority figures and teammates from the late 1970s right up until a decade ago.
In his affidavit, Smith says older players on the team taunted him for months before he was finally “rooked.”
“I was paralyzed waiting for it to happen. It's like being on the front lines in a war and having people shooting at you with nowhere to hide. I knew it was coming,” he said.
“I was jumped in the change room. I was blindfolded. The older players held me down, tied me up and took off my clothes. I was naked. They shaved my genitals. They slapped me around. They threw cold water and hot water over me. They covered my genitals in Rub A535. It was terrifying and extremely painful.
“I was taped up, then they placed me in a metal grocery cart and then taped (me) in it. I was completely confined. They rolled me into centre ice at the arena and left me there. They closed the doors and turned off the lights. I do not know how long I was there for. It could have been an hour, but I can't say for sure. Eventually, a trainer came out and released me.”
He said the abuse in his first three months of his 67's career was constant.
“If you couldn't take it, you were out. No exceptions. Some players left the team as a result of the hazing,” he said.
Despite these early traumas, Smith went on to play professional hockey for a decade, his career coming to an end because of a horrific neck injury: he broke vertebrae and tore ligaments in his neck when he crashed head-first into the boards during a game in Austria in 1992.
The father of two young children suddenly found himself paralyzed from the neck down. According to his personal website, he spent the next 13 years learning to walk — and to skate — again.
He now lives in Ottawa and works as a motivational speaker and life coach.
“I believe that the hazing I suffered impacted my emotional/ mental health to this day. It should never have happened. I still live with it to this day,” he says in the conclusion to his affidavit.
Sayce said Smith's case is just one of many similar stories from the last four decades of hockey.
Another player who has sworn an affidavit as part of the proposed class-action played in the Ontario Hockey League until 2014.
“These are tough guys. A lot of them have been holding it in for decades,” he said. “I think a lot are getting a lot out of sharing their stories.
“It takes a lot of courage and a lot of conviction and selflessness to come forward and tell these stories. The affiants should be applauded,” he added. “(This abuse) can never happen again. It needs to be examined. There's no need for this to be in hockey culture. No one here is attacking hockey ... We're talking about fixing this system. Junior hockey has a place in Canada, in the development of players. None of this type of abuse makes better hockey players.
“There's no gold medals being won because of this.”
Sayce and his colleagues at Koskie Minskie have a lot of experience in filing and winning class actions and are confident Ontario Superior Court will certify their case as such, which names every league and current team in Canadian major junior hockey as a defendant.
Sayce himself has won cases involving the rights of mentally ill prisoners, residential school victims in Newfoundland, the Volkswagen diesel emissions scam and smartphone hacking.
“We feel we have a case,” he said. “We've made a lot of case law.
“It's not a stretch to say that Canadian junior hockey is a system,” he added.
“There's an obligation to protect children.”
While Smith isn't speaking publicly about the abuse, it's clear from reading his life stories and comments he has made in the past about his hockey career, that what he experienced as a young man has driven much of his work over the past two decades.
He told an audience in Brockville, Ont., in 2019 that former Canucks boss Pat Quinn, who first coached him with the L.A. Kings, was the first man who sat Smith down and asked him what he wanted to achieve, according to the Brockville Recorder and Times.
Smith said Quinn “saved his ass” twice in the NHL, first by trading him away from the Kings — the team that had drafted him and where he was struggling emotionally — to the Buffalo Sabres, and then trading for him several seasons later in bringing him to Vancouver from Edmonton.
Smith played 10 games for the Canucks in the 1988-89 regular season and 30 more in 1989-90 before being traded to the Pittsburgh Penguins, where he played another 10 games before moving to Austria for the final two seasons of his professional career.
Quinn was a player's coach, a man of his word, Smith said in the Brockville story.
“What you saw is what you got.”
That was a change, he said, from how he had been treated before. A star in junior, Smith has said he wasn't ready for the demands of the big stage. The 1981 draft was only the second year that 18-year-olds were eligible. As has been noted time and again, being thrown into professional hockey while you're still a teenager can be a huge emotional challenge and for Smith, it was no different.
He wasn't ready, he told the corporate breakfast crowd last year.
Asking for help was a sign of weakness, he had been conditioned to believe after his experiences in junior hockey. It left him struggling to control his emotions, something he still struggles with.
“They sold me a bill of goods,” he said.