In coming forward to reveal years of agonizing abuse at the hands of his father, former NHLer Patrick O’Sullivan showed as much bravery as any professional athlete or or person can muster when their lives roil in the worst manner imaginable.
The 30-year-old overcame incredible odds to play for five teams over the course of six NHL seasons, but suffered excruciatingly every step of the way to hockey’s greatest league. Forget his considerable talent on skates. None of it could make him forget about what was waiting when he stepped off the ice. To O’Sullivan, the man who should’ve protected him from all others was instead his biggest nightmare, and the world around him didn’t want to get involved.
Who among us could be expected to handle that reality at the age of five years old and still excel at an elite-level sport? Who could compartmentalize it and excel at anything? Who wouldn’t feel hollowed out and turn to the closest substance or sin for whatever consolation they could get?
O’Sullivan, who last played in the NHL with Arizona in 2012, has penned a new book with veteran hockey writer Gare Joyce about his turbulent upbringing and his inspirational survival of it. He also recently put together a harrowing column for the Player’s Tribune detailing how reprehensible his father, former minor pro hockey player John O’Sullivan, was in physically and mentally assaulting him regularly and without a shred of mercy.
And horrifyingly, there was no one willing or able to see him for who he was – an innocent young boy drowning in the silence of others as his father tried to pull him down deeper every day – and rescue him from a real-life mortal threat. Not his mother. Not his coaches. Not his teammates, their parents, the leagues in which he played, or the communities in which he lived. He was utterly alone, and it’s no small miracle there’s any of him left.
But there is, thankfully, and Patrick O’Sullivan now is driven to prevent children of future generations from being abused. And he’s not alone in his battle, or even in his profile of an ex-hockey star victimized by heinous acts and those of us comprised more of hatred than humanity: another former NHLer, Sheldon Kennedy, has been leading the battle against abuse for years and is the focus of the phenomenal new documentary Swift Current.
The film, directed by Joshua Rofé, chronicles the criminal acts perpetrated on Kennedy by disgraced junior hockey coach and sexual predator Graham James, and Kennedy’s personal, often-rocky road to wellness and his present-day work to eradicate this social cancer from sport and society. Kennedy isn’t perfect or all-knowing, but he’s singularly dedicated to the cause and a credit to it and the sport he loves.
Together, O’Sullivan and Kennedy represent victims of the many tentacles of abuse – the physical, the sexual, the mental – and the undeniable evidence of its existence in hockey arenas. Wherever the game carries enough status to be used to entice, seduce, punish and reward its players, there will be authority figures using their status to degrade and destroy powerless young people as some sort of balm to momentarily soothe their own sickness.
In laying bare their painful personal lives, O’Sullivan and Kennedy are working in the service of hockey (not to mention, basic decency) and should be given hero’s welcomes wherever they go. The least we owe – to them and victims of abuse we haven’t done right by – is to be far more vigilant and courageous in confronting the evils that live behind the shield of “that’s none of my business… and “it’s not for me to say….
In previous generations, the embarrassment of a potentially false accusation was enough in and of itself to prevent parents or other authority types at amateur games from following through on suspicions of abuse. But O’Sullivan says an embarrassing situation is a small price to pay if it means more criminals are stopped in the long run.
“I can understand why a lot of people worry, “But what if I’m wrong?… O’Sullivan writes in his Players’ Tribune column. “If you are wrong, that’s the absolute best case scenario. The alternative is that child is a prisoner in his own home. What you’re seeing in the parking lot or outside the locker room — whether it’s a kid getting grabbed and screamed at, or shoved up against a car — could just be the tip of the iceberg.…
In other words, while the average hockey parent’s first instinct in a suspected case of abuse has traditionally been “better safe than sorry… to avoid that embarrassment, it now needs to be “better sorry than safe… to root out this plague.
Abuse isn’t a hockey problem. It’s society’s problem. But too many of us fail to grasp that hockey is part of society and thus not immune to it. We shouldn’t need O’Sullivan or Kennedy to make us understand how pervasive this plague truly is, but we damn sure ought to be eternally grateful for their efforts to stamp it out.