Читать книгу I Am Nobody. Confronting the Sexually Abusive Coach Who Stole My Life онлайн

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And with that statement, without realizing it, I had crossed a line. I was now speaking disrespectfully about my own father to somebody outside the family, somebody who until very recently had been a complete stranger. The one thing Graham would most easily have learned about me and my relationships with my own family was that I wasn’t going to be like my dad. Graham instantly saw that as a way to connect to me, to bond with me.

Those seeds of doubt. Who was there to teach me? Who understood me? Who was there to champion me? After our meetings I would think long and hard about what he had said. He didn’t tell me that my parents were bad or that my coaches were bad. He left me to come to my own conclusions. He prompted me to ask myself what I wanted and how I might best achieve that. But before prompting me to ask myself those questions, he had already positioned himself as the answer to my dreams.

We increasingly discussed how I could best develop as both a player and a person. He now knew that I wanted to play varsity hockey at university, and there was no way I was ever going to change my mind about that, notwithstanding his position as a junior hockey scout. There were rumors of a new rule that would make those playing major junior hockey, the level of the teams for which Graham scouted, ineligible for NCAA university hockey in the United States (this rule was, in fact, adopted the next year), so he never pushed me to the Saskatoon Blades or the New Westminster Bruins or whoever else he may have been helping. Graham took great pride in steering players into what is now the Canadian Hockey League, but that was never on my radar.