'I hope they throw the book at people who should have known better'
There is so much wrong with the way the Chicago Blackhawks handled the Brad Aldrich situation. And it has mental health experts confused and angry
There are a lot of things about the way the Chicago Blackhawks handled Brad Aldrich that confound Dr. Shaunna Taylor. Too many of them to count, actually. From a mental skills coach trying to establish a relationship with young players by sharing pornography to the numerous people who had a duty of care to Kyle Beach and did nothing, the mental health practitioner and past chair of the Canadian Sport Psychology Association can only shake her head.
Granted, it was 2010 when all of this happened and perhaps we weren’t all as enlightened and aware of these things then as we are now. But it was still 2010. It wasn’t 1957. The hockey world had already lived through the Graham James nightmare and by that time most of us had a pretty good grasp of the effects sexual abuse can have on people. Sheldon Kennedy had shared his story. Theo Fleury had written a book talking about how he came close to ending his life. We had a better awareness of the need for boundaries, a greater appreciation for the power dynamic that can result in abuse and a clearer understanding of the importance of not keeping these things hidden.
So none of this should have happened. When the Blackhawks executives met in then-president John McDonagh’s office the night of May 23, 2010, just hours after being crowned Western Conference champions, they discussed Aldrich and the general feeling coming out of that meeting was that if the Blackhawks had handled the scandal head-on, they risked it becoming a distraction that would jeopardize team chemistry at the most crucial time of the season. At no time did anyone ever think that doing the right thing and protecting their players from a sexual predator might actually galvanize them in their goal of winning the Stanley Cup.
“If you were truly duty of care oriented, you would have seen this as an opportunity to demonstrate that blatantly and in solidarity of your players,” said Taylor, who is also a sport psychology professor at the University of British Columbia. “Player welfare is absolutely a priority for your organization and part of your team culture. I would have built the playoff run around that. There are so many ways they could have managed and the underlying tone could have been, ‘These guys care about us and I’m going to go to bat for them.’ Rally around the victims.”
It’s actually mind-boggling that the Blackhawks thought that immediately firing and turning in to the police a sexual predator could have derailed their Stanley Cup hopes, particularly given how dialled in the Blackhawks players would have been at that point in the playoffs. But sports psychologist Dr. Cal Botterill, who has long worked with NHL teams and Hockey Canada, pointed out there was probably one emotion that overruled everything with the Blackhawks in the spring of 2010.
“A big part of pro sport revolves around fear,” Botterill said. “Fear of failure, fear of disrupting team chemistry, fear of scandal. Rather than if you stand up for what’s right, things will work out.”
Dr. Taylor, in fact, has a theory that there are actually fewer boundaries and fewer checks and balances as the stakes get higher in sport and the money gets bigger. How an organization, for even one minute, could have allowed an environment where a video coach was having players at his apartment is unfathomable. As is how Jim Gary, the Blackhawks mental coach, handled the situation. Gary is not a doctor, but he is a licensed clinical professional counsellor in the state of Illinois. And as such, he had a duty of care to those with whom he worked, and that duty of care did not include sending naked pictures and crude jokes, as Gary acknowledged doing in order to establish a relationship with Kyle Beach.
“That is a blatant, blatant breaking of ethical codes for any counsellor or mental skills coach,” Taylor said. “He was also buying into the sexual undertones…and was kind of complicit in enabling that culture. I just can’t imagine a universe where I’m going to be sending nude photos.”
This is slowly changing, but Dr. Botterill said these things tend to occur because pro sports are often governed by an autonomous set of rules and those rules lead to a culture of silence and fear. It should come as no surprise that the Blackhawks put themselves in an isolated bubble because that’s what so many teams do. “I came to the conclusion after 11 years in the league that it is its own world,” Botterill said. “The people in it think they’re beyond the law and they function in a way to protect what they think they need to try to be successful. They’re entitled in that world because of the kind of control they feel. They start thinking that they’re beyond it and it has some serious consequences.”
That is changing, but far too slowly. Dr. Taylor talks about creating what is called an “autonomy supported environment,” where players have a voice. And that can be done by creating “transformational coaches”. Taylor teaches in the Master’s program of high performance coaching and technical leadership at UBC and has made these a cornerstone of the program. “A healthy player, both mentally and physically, is a high-performing player,” Taylor said. “So when are we going to flip that switch? Can you tell me? When can that become the norm?”
Dr. Botterill, meanwhile, has worked with athletes who have been subjected to sexual abuse from a person who had power over them and said the results can be devastating. “It really destroys people’s lives,” Botterill said. “The thing I’ve noticed with victims is that, unfortunately, it takes so long for there to be any attempt at justice that they’re often victims again. I hope they throw the book at the people who should have known better.”