To hell and back

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/03/2018 (2742 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

For someone who wrote a book called I Am Nobody, Greg Gilhooly is really quite somebody.

Gilhooly’s survival of a series of sexual assaults by a prominent coach when he was a young, elite hockey goaltender in Winnipeg is like adding cream to coffee, because Gilhooly’s lifetime battle to recover from the nightmare of long-ago abuse means his black despair has been largely changed into the enlightening freedom and majesty of self-worth.

As a result, in I Am Nobody Gilhooly is becoming the victor, and his notorious sexual molester is ending up where he began and where he should stay: on the dung heap of reviled behaviour.

Remember the name: hockey coach and serial sexual predator Graham James. Gilhooly remembers, and so do Theo Fleury, Sheldon Kennedy and who knows how many other talented youngsters in Winnipeg and elsewhere who had stars in their eyes for the NHL and a slimy grown-up who masterfully exploited their boyhood dreams hundreds of times to satiate his perversions.

Gilhooly was born in Winnipeg in 1964 and was 14 when he met James. James groomed him for abuse and molested him for several years, into the early 1980s, before Gilhooly left Winnipeg for university, taking with him horrific psychological pain, crippled self-image, confusion about his sexuality and rage, rage, rage.

In 1983 James started molesting eventual NHLers Fleury and Kennedy. In 1997, in Winnipeg, and again in 2015, James plead guilty to sex crimes. Last we heard of him on the ice, he was coaching in that hotbed of hockey called Spain.

This is not a book for everyone.

Gilhooly is a man of shocking candor and writes in detail of the way James groomed the then-teenager in meetings at a restaurant here and refashioned him from a young innocent into a programmed mannequin, there to satisfy the coach’s sick pleasures. Gilhooly ended up feeling he was nothing, nobody, used.

James, also a substitute teacher, molested Gilhooly once at school, but it was most often in James’ apartment.

At one point in his teenage years, Gilhooly was so filled with anger that he wanted James to be forced to stand naked in front of a hockey net, with everyone shooting pucks at him until he couldn’t stand up.

Begging for help, James would look up at Greg and apologize. “And then,” writes Gilhooly, “I (wanted) somebody to shove one of my skates down his throat and kill him.”

It hurts to read Gilhooly’s story, his dehumanizing at the hands of this monster, but it’s worth it for the insight into abhorrent human behaviour — and the knowledge of Gilhooly’s valiant journey back to health that goes on even today.

Gilhooly lives in Oakville, Ont. He has been a successful corporate lawyer in Toronto and in Winnipeg, and is in demand as an authority on male sexual victimization and sexual victimization in sports. (Gilhooly calls James a brilliant manipulator, the “Rhodes Scholar of sexual predators.”)

In this courageous bloodletting of facts, Gilhooly exposes his demons to the light.

As a result of James’ exploitation, he developed depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and crippling guilt. He engaged in self-loathing, self-sabotaging, self-destructive and self-abusing conduct, digging his nails into his body until blood flowed and liking the pain. He wanted to be anybody other than himself.

Much later in life, Gilhooly twice came close to suicide. Any successes he had he thought himself undeserving of, a fraud, and would seek ways to hurt himself. At one point, he was on disability.

Gilhooly still has frequent nightmares. In the worst one, and the most frequent, James sexually assaults him repeatedly. However, his therapy is helping him see these nightmares as what they are — the past.

Gilhooly believes our legal system treats abusers better than the abused. It has to change, he says, and he’s trying to help. James spent only four-and-a-half years in a soft prison for hundreds of incidents of sexual molestation on three acknowledged victims — a total that doesn’t include what he did to Gilhooly and others.

Why didn’t Gilhooly just walk away from James?

The first time James molested him, in a training session, he didn’t see it coming and froze in disbelief. This was his mentor, his friend — a man of influence who said he was going to get Gilhooly a hockey scholarship.

James said if what had just happened between them was exposed, hockey people would have nothing to do with Gilhooly. The clear message: he better not say anything if he wanted that scholarship.

He said nothing. And Gilhooly has spent nearly 40 years trying to forget.

Barry Craig is a retired journalist.

Greg Gilhooly is speaking at the University of Manitoba’s Robson Hall on Tuesday at noon.