The class action suit filed in Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice on Thursday by retired hockey players Daniel Carcillo and Garrett Taylor poses a stark question to the world of Canadian hockey: Is this, finally, enough? Are you going to strike a committee and tweak some policies? Or are you going to face the simple fact that major junior hockey is an incubator for child abuse by dint of its most fundamental design?
Carcillo’s tale:
Senior players on the 2002–03 Sarnia Sting allegedly took the “hot box” — the well-known practice of forcing eight naked teenage rookie players into a bus washroom — to another level, namely by pouring tobacco juice and urine through the bathroom vents. Carcillo’s account includes being forced to “sit in the middle of the shower room naked while the elder players urinated, spat saliva and tobacco chew on them.” He alleges older players taped a rookie to a table and whipped him with a belt; when the head coach came across this, he joined in laughing. He says players were beaten with a “sawed-off goalie stick” so severely they couldn’t sit down at school. He recalls bobbing for apples “in a cooler filled with the older players’ urine, saliva and other bodily fluids.” Older players organized “orgies” at house parties, he said, and rookies had to participate.
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