It’s one of hockey’s unwritten codes, and anyone who has played can tell you it’s ingrained young: What happens in the dressing room stays in the dressing room. As fundamentals go, it’s well taught and quickly learned.
For too long it’s a concept that’s been allowing coaches and players, from peewee to the pros, to get away with behaviour that shouldn’t be acceptable. Prolific profanity is commonplace. Verbal abuse has gone unchecked. And as we found out this week, with Akim Aliu’s revelation about a long-ago run-in with coach Bill Peters, this when Peters was running the bench of the Chicago Blackhawks’ affiliate in the American Hockey League, the occasional racist tirade has laid buried for a decade while its perpetrator has risen through the sport’s ranks.
But Friday’s news, that Bill Peters resigned as head coach of the Calgary Flames, ought to be the latest signal that hockey’s unwritten code is in the process of being reworked, if not scrapped altogether. If the cone of silence endured for decades because it was enforced by the sport’s overseers with the implicit threat of career-ending repercussions, it’s being blown apart by a generation of players who’ve mustered the courage to call out misconduct.
In other words: Wayward coaches and bully players, beware. What happens in the dressing room might no longer stay in the dressing room. It might one day surface on, say, your social media feed. And it could have life-changing consequences.
There’s reason to think November of 2019 might go down as a tipping point in the transformation of hockey culture. Remembrance Day brought the end to Don Cherry’s three-decade run on “Hockey Night in Canada,” this after Cherry used his first-intermission bully pulpit to trade in anti-immigrant rhetoric. And it was the Nov. 20 firing of Mike Babcock, and a port-mortem analysis of the questionable mind games Babcock used during his four-plus seasons in Toronto, that appeared to inspire Aliu, who was born in Nigeria, to tweet an accusation that Peters used the N-word to disparage the hip-hop music Aliu played in the dressing room during his time with the Rockford IceHogs, the minor-league affiliate of the Blackhawks. Aliu, in one of his tweets, referred to Peters as Babcock’s “protégé” — alluding to Peters’s one-time status as a long-time assistant to Babcock.
And just as Babcock’s firing begat Aliu’s tweet, Aliu’s tweet begat more revelations. Michal Jordan, a defenceman who played under Peters with the Carolina Hurricanes, took to Twitter on Tuesday to accuse Peters of kicking him and punching an unnamed teammate during an NHL game — an accusation that was confirmed by now-Hurricanes head coach Rod Brind’Amour, who was one of Peters’s assistants at the time of the incident.
“It for sure happened,” Brind’Amour said.
More accusations on social media followed. And the accusations only raised more questions. The folks who hired Ron Francis as general manager of the new NHL franchise in Seattle might be interested to know why — considering he was the general manager of the Hurricanes at the moment in question, and considering he was approached by players who informed him that Peters had physically assaulted players — Francis later gave Peters a contract extension. Peter Karmanos, who owned the Hurricanes at the time, told the Seattle Times on Wednesday that had he known of Peters’s physical abuse of players he would have fired the coach “in a nanosecond.” But speaking of the culture of dressing room silence, Karmanos said he only learned of the incidents reading news reports this week.
Why did this stay buried until now?
“Because players are afraid to speak up,” Brind’Amour told reporters. “To be honest with you, everybody under the coach (is) afraid to speak out at times because there’s a big gap in the power structure.”
All of that said, Brind’Amour hypothesized that things might, indeed, be changing before our eyes.
“The players have way more power now and I think they realize that, and I think it’s important for them to speak out on whatever is important,” said Brind’Amour, who played 20 seasons in the NHL. “They definitely have more power and they need to speak up.”
Still, speaking up years after the fact is one thing. Speaking up in the moment, when coaches wield so much power, is a different thing altogether. Aliu said that after Rockford captain Jake Dowell confronted Peters about using racist language, Peters petitioned Blackhawks management to demote Aliu to the East Coast Hockey League; weeks later, Aliu was indeed sent down. Now 30, Aliu, who made a name as a junior with the Windsor Spitfires for refusing to participate in a hazing ritual, said his pro career never got traction from there. Though he was drafted in the second round, he has played just seven career games in the NHL. You can make the case that, once labelled a troublemaker, he was made to disappear.
To that end, when Peters issued an apology Wednesday it made no mention of Aliu. Addressed to Flames general manager Brad Treliving, Peters’s mea culpa acknowledged he’d used offensive language in a professional setting a decade ago, but claimed “it was not directed at anyone in particular.” The apology didn’t make even veiled reference to the two instances of physical abuse of Hurricanes players.
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Aliu, in a statement posted on his Twitter account, called Peters’ attempt at an apology “misleading, insincere and concerning.” Lawyers and money might have been responsible for that. Peters has another season after this one on a contract that pays him $2 million (U.S.) annually. Firing him with cause could have theoretically unburdened the Flames of that financial obligation, although any labour lawyer would tell you these matters are never so simple.
What’s easier to see is the change happening before our eyes. The dressing room door, once locked shut, has suddenly sprung open, and some of the secrets once hidden within are being aired in a cold but welcome light.
