Rick Westhead’s new book, We Breed Lions, explores Canada’s troubled hockey culture

Author and TSN correspondent Rick Westhead joins Kent Morrison to talk about his book 'We Breed Lions,' which examines junior hockey culture.

Hockey has been undergoing a reckoning in Canada recently, highlighted by the trial and acquittal of five former World Junior Hockey players accused of sexual assault. That case is finished, but the examination of the culture inside the game continues. Rick Westhead, TSN Senior Correspondent and author of the new book We Breed Lions, joined Kent Morrison to discuss the need for better consent training and cultural change among young players.

This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Kent Morrison: In this book, you hear from people inside the game. What did they say about their experience in the game?

Rick Westhead: It’s interesting to a person and I wanted to make sure that the reporting on this book was current. One of the questions I asked myself repeatedly while covering that case in London, Ontario was how we got here. Because that case is not the only case. Even as that case was unfolding, we also saw two junior players in Quebec who pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting a young woman in a hotel room and they’re now serving three years in prison. I wanted to understand how we got here.

I interviewed 58 men in their 20s who have played either major junior hockey or tier two Junior A within the last 10 years and the answers I got were really interesting. What they all said is that they love hockey. Hockey is an amazing sport. Some of my best friends are in the game. I still play three to four times a week. I coached my son through his minor hockey and there’s amazing people who are working and volunteering in this place. However, I think two things can be true. That can be true and it can also be true that there are some real systemic issues. Issues with the commercialization of minor hockey. Questions about junior hockey and what happens when 14 to 16-year-old boys move away from their families to live in billet homes hundreds of miles away, where they’re trying to fit in into the locker rooms that’s often dominated by alpha male leaders, veteran players who are 20 to 21. That’s a huge age gap. Those young boys, rookie players, will often do whatever it takes to be accepted and to fit in. That’s at least according to the players that I spoke with.

Kent: There’s a part in the book where you speak to a father and son. The son opens up about hazing and abuse and the dad didn’t have any idea. What kind of advice would you have for parents in terms of finding out what’s really going on within those locker rooms that you speak of?

Rick: I would hope that parents want to know what’s going on. That scene was really striking. I was sitting at a restaurant in Toronto for breakfast with a player named Markus Paterson, who played Junior Ray and his dad. Marcus shared that he’d had to go through something called “The Hot Box.” This is where they go on an early road trip in the season, the rookie players are tapped on the shoulder and they have to go to the back of the team bus and they’re told to strip and they jam themselves inside the bathroom at the back of the bus. In Markus’ case, there were five or six first-year players in there. Then somebody throws in coins through a vent and they’re told they can only get out if they’ve collected an exact amount of change.

In some cases, I’ve talked to players who’ve been in that situation with the lights off in that bathroom with five or six naked teammates for upwards of half an hour. I don’t understand how that actually can lead to team building, if I’m honest. I should also point out that that story from Markus was way back in the old days in 2019. I think it’s evidence that these issues are not only historic, that we’re not only talking about things that happened in the 1990s, but they’re happening in recent years as well.

Kent: Who’s helping at this point? A lot of this conversation has come to the forefront lately. Are there people in the game who are trying to fix things?

Rick: Yes, there are. There is a chapter in this book about a path forward and I spotlight how some teams and leagues are actually trying to do things differently. They’re outliers.

Many junior teams, if they do consent training at all, what that means is they’ll bring in someone from an agency that works on gender-based violence to confront it. They’ll have somebody come in like once a year in September for an hour during training camp, they’ll talk for a while, maybe they’ll play a video like the “Tea Consent” video that many people are familiar with now, and that’s it.

There are some teams that are doing things differently. One example is the Peterborough Petes in the Ontario Hockey League. They opened their locker room to an Australian man named Luke Bentvelzen, who has training in issues of consent and how to educate on it and healthy masculinity. They gave Luke unfettered access. Think about the difference that makes. Doing that kind of work is a lot like what we do as reporters. It takes time to build up trust with people, to convince them to be vulnerable and really open up to you. By letting Luke be there every day, he showed these players that he was willing to put in the time to really get to know them and that he was interested and invested in this. I think that if your team is wondering what to do, that could be a starting block.