There is one, basic human quest that we all make in our lifetimes.
It is a hard quest, and many of us never reach the desired destination.
It’s a search for “truth”.
A huge part of that quest is the defensive position we take as not wanted to get suckered into believing something that isn’t true—that what we believed was true.
Spouses go through this all of the time. They are married for years, decades, and then find out that the one that they have poured their whole life into is not who they thought they were. Could be their business trips were actually long-running affairs. Could be they were hiding a drug or alcohol problem. Could be they were gay.
That hurt is almost impossible to navigate.
Blackhawks fans are wondering who it is—who it really is—that we’ve been loving for the last 11 years.
Wind of trouble started to blow into Chicago when a lawsuit was filed against the franchise on behalf of a family whose son was sexually assaulted by a man named Brad Aldrich in 2013.
He pleaded guilty.
Aldrich had been the video coach for the ‘Hawks in 2010. He invited two players over to his residence, and sexually assaulted one of them. We found out last week that player’s name is Kyle Beach.
Beach went to the team’s front office to tell them what happened, and to look for recourse.
All of this is bad enough. It’s criminal!
What we now know came after that was worse. Way worse.
The ‘Hawks brass had a meeting. The team was working their way toward what turned out to be the first of three Stanley Cup championships in six seasons. Collectively, the people in the room made a decision not to rock the boat—ruin the momentum—of the team’s trajectory.
The players knew, too.
Beach says they teased him about his experience with Aldrich—in ways I cannot put into words in a publication like this one…or anywhere else for that matter.
Patrick Kane put that puck into the Flyers net in June of 2010 to win Game 6 and clinch the Cup, and the celebration was on—but not for everyone.
Knowing what had happened—the atrocities that had occurred to one of their own—they let a predator celebrate with them.
After the parade through downtown Chicago, there was another meeting. This one was to tell Aldrich that he wouldn’t be with the team in the fall of 2010. They still let him have his traditional winner’s day with the Cup.
Aldrich went to Michigan to apply for a high school hockey assistant coaching job. The school says the Blackhawks gave him a positive job review.
And three years into that job, Aldrich did it again.
For more than 10 years, more than two dozen people knew what happened, and they did nothing. Heck, we still wouldn’t know if not for the criminal charges and the lawsuit that followed from the case in Michigan.
I am admittedly slow to judgement. I really want to hear all sides of a story before I come to a decision on it.
So I wanted to hear from the players on that team. I wanted them to explain to me that it wasn’t like it sounded at all. I wanted to hear the other side.
The only one talking about it at all is Jonathon Toews. All we heard from him is how much those same front office people who did all of those—or did nothing to help Kyle Beach—meant to him and to the organization’s successes. Our beloved captain failed on the most basic level.
Nothing from anyone else. Not a thing. Total silence.
So it leaves the question for us fans: “What do we do with this?”
We’re horrified. We’re jilted.
They preached integrity and “paying the price” for success, then lived it out on the ice for all of us to see.
But like a cheating lover, they leave us with more questions than answers. We doubt all we thought we knew.
We feel stupid for being duped. We are reminded that we are human and we are surrounded by other humans who let us down. And sometimes, painful as it is, our only choice is to part ways with them.
In relationships, that’s a break up or divorce.
But in sports relationships, you can’t divorce yourself from a team that you cheered to a championship 11 years ago.
