The kid had talent.
When he played minor hockey, he always made the rep team in his first season in each age group. He played on a provincial champion. He played in KIBIHT.
Geez, all the kid wanted was to be a hockey player. It was his dream until the dream was taken away from him. Now the kid is into his 40s. To this day, he has vivid memories of a dressing room in an arena in B.C.
How good could the kid have been? We'll never know.
But his older brother won a scoring championship in a junior A league and then went on to a major U.S. college on a hockey scholarship. And the kid remembers being told by his brother that he -- the kid -- was going to be the better player of the two brothers.
But it never happened.
The kid made his town's midget rep team in his first season of eligibility. The excitement coursed through his veins like spring water in a mountain stream. Until one day when it all came crashing down.
He showed up for practice and discovered that the team was going to initiate him. Today, it's called hazing. The kid wanted nothing to do with it. He left the dressing room in tears. Confused. Bewildered. Hurt more than anyone might have imagined.
As he rushed away in a panic he told everyone -- players, coaches, parents who were lined up in the hallway -- that he wouldn't be back if it meant he was to be initiated. No one followed him. No one attempted to comfort him. No one called out for him to come back. No one said it was all a mistake. No one cared. And why should they have? After all, their kids had made the team. Speak out? Not then. Not ever.
True to his word, he didn't go back. Not then. Not ever.
The kid's competitive hockey career ended that day. In a cruel rush of blinding tears.
"I went from playing hockey every day to making models in my basement," he says.
He told his parents, who were divorced, that he hadn't made the team, that he was too small, so he had chosen to quit the game. They didn't question his decision. A lot of years went by before he played hockey again.
Today, the kid is an adult. He is in his 40s. He learned to deal with it by learning to accept that it is part of him.
Just the other day, he spent four hours driving on a business trip. He thought about it for almost the entire time. How can something that happened so long ago seem like it occurred only yesterday? And why, 25 years later, do these kinds of things still happen in minor hockey?
Oh, he has learned to deal with it, and he is a successful professional. But it took counseling and a loving and supporting wife to get him this far. He also has read and reread the book Crossing the Line. Written by Laura Robinson, it is subtitled Violence and Sexual Assault in Canada's National Sport. He found it to be enlightening and encourages anyone involved with young people to read it.
His attitude toward life, relationships, children, his career . . . in fact, his attitude towards everything that matters has been impacted in some way by what happened in that dressing room.
"It seems unfair and it is difficult for people to appreciate the situation," he once wrote in a letter that was part of his search for freedom, "as it has been difficult for me to even realize what has taken place.
"Remember, I left the room before I was humiliated physically, but mentally I have unknowingly carried the burden for a long time. Perhaps 'doing it for the team' would have made life simpler, but that was not the case."
And now, with the Kamloops Minor Hockey Association mired in the sludge left after an Oct. 20 party in the home of its president, a party involving the midget AAA North Kamloops Lions, the man who once was a kid with a dream is offering to meet with the KMHA board of directors. A player off that team ended up in Royal Inland Hospital that night and, judging by his signed statement, he was force-fed liquor in what was an initiation or hazing.
The man recognizes that his experience is not anything like what happened on the night of Oct. 20. But he wants the KMHA executive to know that, as he puts it, "there is an expectation that adults will help us learn right from wrong, protect us, and offer encouragement or advice when we need it as kids or teenagers. Adults are supposed to know better and to provide positive leadership."
And he wants the executive to know what can happen when that leadership isn't there.
Rather than deal with the issue of underage drinking, the KMHA's board of directors has chosen to discipline Monica and Ladd Maloski for bringing the incident to the attention of the media.
That doesn't sit well with a lot of people, including this man who left our game under such horrible circumstances.
He has written to officials with Hockey Canada and B.C. Hockey, demanding that someone take an independent look at the situation in which the KMHA finds itself embroiled. This is, he feels, the very reason for Speak Out -- Hockey Canada's plan that is aimed at preventing harassment and abuse.
He is enraged at the fact a 15-year-old player was placed in harm's way in a situation that was condoned by adults and, through inaction, condoned by minor hockey institutions.
He looks back at where he has been and what happened on that Saturday night in October and wonders if anything has changed. He talks of going to a lawyer and discussing his options. He wonders if there might be a class-action lawsuit in all of this. He wonders how many people there are out there like him? How many youngsters are there who ran -- or perhaps didn't run -- from the dressing room, felt humiliation and shame, and grew into adults who have struggled to live with one incident from their pasts?
He is afraid that the teenager who ended up so intoxicated on Oct. 20 is being forgotten in all of this. And, in that, he sees himself. He knows the anguish he has gone through and he doesn't want anyone else to have to face that.
"I think about young people who are abused," he says. "Some may not think another day about it, others it drives them to drugs, alcohol or other abuse of themselves or others. Why is it that for some it is just a part of life, but for the majority it becomes a significant event that affects them in some way?
"Many people could never understand how after so long the thoughts still linger in your mind. You can imagine going to the rink with the same friends and parents for years, and then one day you walk by them in tears telling them they won't see you at the rink ever again.
"And they don't.
"But not one even calls to see if you are OK . . . or alive . . . or can we help you out . . . where have you been?"
The silence, even 25 years later, is deafening.
Gregg Drinnan is sports editor of The Daily News. He is at gdrinnan@kamloopsnews.ca.
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