It was called ‘the hotbox,’ a junior hockey initiation where veteran players would make the team’s rookies strip naked and jam into the tiny bathroom at the rear of the team bus for several hours, with the heat turned high. All, supposedly, in the name of team unity.
It was an archaic, confusing and likely illegal right of passage for numerous junior hockey players over the not too distant past, although it is highly unlikely that particular initiation still exists.
But for Guelph school teacher and former OHL player Justin Davis, it is one of the many bad memories that came flooding back when he started jotting down notes for a memoir he was writing for his three children.
It started as a way to help them understand their father, what he went through and the numerous concussions and injuries that continue to take their toll on his body and memory. It ended up being Conflicted Scars: An Average Player’s Journey to the NHL, a no-holds barred book that explores some of the things junior hockey knows about, but rarely talks about.
“I’m not an angry person out to get people. I just want people to talk, figure out what my role is and how I can help,” says Davis, 44, who teaches in Orangeville and also acts as an independent mentor and liaison for Guelph Storm players.
“I’m not out to get junior hockey. I just want to make it better and make it safer.”
On Saturday Davis will be joined by ex-NHLer and Hockey Diversity Alliance co-founder Akim Aliu, journalist Rick Westhead and former Guelph Storm player Andrew Long for a book launch and discussion at The Bookshelf in Downtown Guelph. It starts at 2 p.m.
Davis played four years in the Ontario Hockey League with three different teams. He was picked in the fourth round of the NHL draft by the Washington Capitals and would later become the all-time leading scorer at Western University.
After two years of pro hockey in Germany he wrapped up the competitive side of the sport with several years of senior hockey.
“I started writing a memoir for my kids that I thought they could read in 10 to 15 years because I was having some memory issues. Then it just exploded,” Davis said.
The book is helping Davis come to terms with some of the things he went through and he hopes it can have a small impact on making the game a little bit more accountable.
“I initially wrote it just to say how good my career was, how much fun it was and how funny the stories were. Then when I started writing it triggered some memories. I started to realize that some of the things that happened to us just weren’t right, and that just started triggering more and more memories.
“There’s a lot I love about hockey, and my career. But there’s a lot I can’t believe that happened,” Davis said.
It starts with being shunned by his own local hockey association when the family wanted him to play up an age group.
Then there were the parents, giving him the finger, screaming abuse and threatening – at the age of 11.
Junior C at 15, Junior B at 16. Initiations at both levels, including some too disgusting to detail.
He was 17 in 1995 when he was one of seven Kingston Frontenacs rookies submitted to that hot box initiation, which lasted several hours.
Davis thought the hazing was a right of passage. It made him a better teammate. That cramming players naked into a small space was actually normal, at least as far as hockey culture was concerned.
“It’s the kind of thing you don’t really realize it’s wrong. It’s not until you have a normal job that you realize that’s not normal.”
Davis said he doesn’t want to “glorify the hot box story and the hazing.”
“That stuff was terrible … but it was something we all did and didn’t think was abnormal. But then I started to think: the coach was sitting there, three seats in front of me, just sitting there.”
Where were the adults? he now wonders.
“I now realize that we never understood the word culture. We used the word as an excuse, or an alibi, to carry out these hideous acts on minors that had been a tradition for decades,” Davis writes in the book.
From overt racism by coaches to being placed in billet homes where domestic abuse was likely happening upstairs.
A low point came when he suffered a nasty concussion during a game in Plymouth, Mich., while playing for the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds. The coach wanted to drive back to Sault Ste. Marie before getting him to a hospital (to save costs?), but the trainer insisted he go to a hospital in Michigan, where he spent several days.
The team ended up sending his family a $15,000 hospital bill, which they eventually paid after a lengthy fight between them and Davis’s agent.
Davis said the “low of all lows” was his time in Sault Ste. Marie, where he hated his billet situation, with the couple arguing constantly upstairs, with little food in the house and no one to talk to in the pre-smart phone era.
“You’d be a healthy scratch, coming off a concussion, sitting in the basement in a room with no television, no roommate and just a landline for a phone in the kitchen where you would have to go up and sit in front of everybody to talk.
“From a mental health standpoint you realize how bad it was. That was my low of all lows ... It just didn’t go well.”
Davis writes that he hates hockey, but in conversation admits it is more of a love/hate relationship.
But he found peace with his third junior team, the Ottawa 67s, and a coach he respected in Brian Kilrea. Davis was the top scorer in the 1999 Memorial Cup, won by the 67s.
He had a great time at Western, winning a national championship, making lifelong friends and getting the education that led to him being a teacher.
Davis says the scandals that have come to light in the sport in recent years – from the abuse NHLer Kyle Beach suffered to the World Junior alleged sexual assaults – will only lead to positive change if people realize it is the culture that has to change. That these are not isolated incidents.
“I think the (Hockey Canada) board stepping down is a good start, but we lose focus pretty quickly on why we even got to this point. Do we talk about the 2018, 2003 WJ teams now? Do we talk about Kyle Beach and have we put safeguards into place?” Davis asks.
“I think in this culture we always make one or two people the fall guy, force them out and then we move on without addressing the issue. How can we make hockey safer at all levels? Is Hockey Canada’s job to win the WJC and Olympic gold or do we pay fees for grassroots hockey and for kids to play a great game?
“We need to make the game accessible for kids who can’t afford $4,000 a year and that’s where HC can start changing the culture. Let’s put leadership in place that can change the focus and still produce elite level hockey ”
Davis knows there are those who will “demonize” him for speaking out. For telling stories many believe should stay in the locker room and coaches offices of the game.
“I’m no longer afraid of the blowback. I’m not perfect and I have witnessed things I should’ve stopped hundreds of times. I was led to believe that these things were normal within hockey culture,” Davis writes.
He said he isn’t afraid of any negative reaction from old teammates. In fact, he’s finding it just the opposite.
“I’m still nervous, but I’ve had so many people reach out to me telling me that (the book) has actually helped them. That they can actually talk to their wife about what happened and my kids.
“A guy I played with in Kingston that I hardly knew sent me a huge long text today that just said ‘thank you. I went through the exact same stuff in Kingston.’”
