“Playing with Fire”

PEORIA, Ill – “At 2 a.m., I reached over, picked up the gun, loaded it, flipped the safety off and put the barrel in my mouth with my finger shaky on the trigger. I sat there forever, shivering so hard the barrel was bouncing off my teeth.”
These lines are from the Prologue of “Playing with Fire” by former NHL player Theo Fleury.
…and to think that this point, where he was a twitch of a finger away from ending his life, he still hadn’t reached rock bottom.
Growing up with emotionally absent parents, Theoren Fleury felt he had to make his own way in life. At the age of six, he got invited to a hockey practice, threw on a pair of his father’s old skates and thus, set his future in motion.
That future included success at an early age and, although he was small, brought the attention of a coach from Junior hockey. He was thrilled to leave his parents behind (and they, thrilled to see him go). But this coach was Graham James^* and one of his teammates was Sheldon Kennedy.
Both Kennedy and Fluery would suffer years of sexual abuse at the hands of James. Fleury is honest, brutally so, as he speaks about the abuse.
Despite the abuse and the beginnings of an addiction to alcohol, Fleury was drafted by the NHL’s Calgary Flames and, eventually developed into an NHL super-star.
That brutal honesty in the prologue is a theme throughout the book. It ranges from his feelings about his parents, teammates, coaches, and even referees from certain senior league games.
His is also brutally and graphically honest about his own incredibly self-destructive behavior.
Told in a casual but not overly familiar first-person narrative, Fleury rehashes his exploits with alcohol, cocaine, strippers, gambling and their affect on his relationships, his game and his bank account. The author is extremely frank and graphic and to describe the book as a cautionary tale would be cliché if it were not also true.
Fleury stumbles in the book only when detailing specific teams and specific games. He often recounts, precisely, the goals and their order, game by game, through certain playoff series. They don’t advance the real story of how depraved one man can be and how he can, eventually, pull himself out of the morass.
This is a happy ending book. He doesn’t pull the trigger, but he battles with sobriety for five more years before sobriety and life win out.
It is a worthy tale.
Contact the author of this book review: Shaun.Bill@ProHockeyNews.com *Graham James was convicted of sexually abusing Sheldon Kennedy. Currently, James is awaiting trial on similar charges brought by Fleury and two other former players.