Episode 2 - Sports
[00:00:00] Degan: You can explain all the rules, the endless drills, the skates white cut perfect curves, the blind passes, the adrenaline shadow following you five feet back. But why would you? Puck in net. Simple as a shoulder check. In a dark bar north of Saskatoon, I met a former NHL goon who tore his calves.
[00:00:25] Lost his way, limped back home to factory work, poker, narcotics, and finally, poetry. Silence between us. Poetry? On the screen, two inch men passed back and forth like overdressed birds in a brilliant white cage. 
No other game with that finesse, he said. That rage.
 
[00:00:53] Chris: Hello, and welcome to What Kind of Men Are You? The podcast about men, masculinity, and how the heck are we going to get the Maple Leafs to a Stanley Cup? My name is Chris Garbutt. I'm a writer and communications professional. 
[00:01:10] Degan: I'm Degan Davis and I'm a writer and a Gestalt therapist. 
[00:01:14] Chris: We're here for episode two. 
Degan, I think the poem leads into our theme this week, so maybe, do you want to talk a little bit about where it comes from, and what it's about? 
[00:01:25] Degan: The poem is about a hockey player who was I'd say a goon and he has an injury and limps back home to narcotics and addiction and other things and lands on poetry. And we're in the dark bar together, talking, the narrator and the former hockey player.
And we're watching, these men pass back and forth on the screen like overdressed birds in a brilliant white cage. And I say, poetry? Silence between us. No other game with that finesse, he says, that rage. And I do think that hockey has these incrediblepolarities, as Al Purdy, the late great poet says hockey is a mixture of ballet and murder.
[00:02:16] Chris: Yeah. 
[00:02:17] Degan: Classic line of Canadian poetry. And so it is coming out of that. I think, about some of the vastness between those polarities, right? The finesse and the rage and the violence and that kind of thing.
I published this poem in the New Quarterly and they had done an issue on hockey. 
And so I got an email one day out of the blue by a poet named Randall Maggs, and he had written a book called Night Work, the Sawchuck Poems.
A beautiful book from Brick Books about Terry Sawchuck. 
[00:02:52] Chris: Really? 
[00:02:53] Degan: Yeah, and the second part of it is all about playing on the ice in Newfoundland on rivers and, just beautiful stuff. 
[00:03:00] Chris: The whole book was about Terry Sawchuck?
[00:03:02] Degan: And pictures, too, of, he didn't have masks
back then, or a lot of protection, so his, 
[00:03:07] Chris: Yeah, 
he was a goalie, right? 
[00:03:09] Degan: He was a goalie. I get this email, and Randall Maggs says, I really liked your poem and I'm going to be launching my book, what we might call the Cathedral of Hockey, at least in Toronto, the Hockey Hall of Fame.
Oh. Or one of the a cloister, part of. 
[00:03:27] Chris: The Basilica of Hockey. 
[00:03:29] Degan: That's it, the Basilica of Hockey. 
And he invited me and said, I'd like you to read this poem. And I was very happy to do and right behind us, as I read, was the Stanley Cup. 
[00:03:40] Chris: Oh my God. 
[00:03:41] Degan: And after I read and he launched his book and he said to me, actually, that's the replica.
It's out on loan. It's with one of whoever the team had, but I, it still felt, it would have sat there on that stand. Yeah. Yeah. So anywaylet's begin. W
e're going to talk about sports here. 
 As it will come to be known, I am not a huge sports fan.
I do love the the poetry around sports.
The intensity of poetry. 
We are Degan's office. And last week we were in the Toronto Public Library, which I want to give a shout out to. They offer free library access to AV rooms, that was a great experience. And in fact I have to say the technology part of this, we are still working out.We're learning a lot about how microphones hook up to computers and how sound works and recording and all that stuff.
[00:04:37] Chris: So lots of fun, I felt like our, I felt like our last Episode was I it felt like we weren't talking to each other as much. Yeah, it felt like we had things to say and we had an imagined audience and that's who we were talking to. And I thought maybe we could just chill and relax and just talk to each other this time.
I thought we would add a new segment to this episode and just to lighten us up, get the mood going. And I thought we would call it joke of the week. Okay. Since it's about men, this podcast, maybe we should call it dad joke of the week.
[00:05:22] Degan: Okay. 
[00:05:22] Chris: So I have a joke for you Degan. 
[00:05:24] Degan: I'm here. 
[00:05:26] Chris: Why do birds fly south for the winter? 
[00:05:31] Degan: No idea, Chris. 
[00:05:33] Chris: Have you seen the price of gas? They're not going to drive. 
[00:05:37] Degan: That's a, that is a true dad joke. 
[00:05:39] Chris: That was my personal joke. The real joke is. Because it's faster than walking, right?
Which is also good. 
[00:05:45] Degan: They both get the dad status 
[00:05:47] Chris: Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I felt pretty proud of that 
[00:05:50] Degan: I think I'm just going to say a couple of things about sports off the bat before we get into stories. 
Up to the age of about nine sports meant absolutely nothing to me. Even though I grew up in a town that was obsessed with hockey, minor hockey, the NHL, the all the farm teams there were skating rinks, but we lived opposite a river or on the banks of a river.
And that was a little bit too hard to skate on in the winter. But there were rinks everywhere. And until about age of nine, it was almost like it didn't exist. There was no sports in my house. We never played. There was not a single ball thrown between myself and another family member ever, 
 And then the age of about nine and ten, that's when sports became really important in school and it became your worth, it became your valour in a way, or that's how you were valorized, your ability or not in sports gave you your reputation, and so I'll talk about that because that was a tough time coming from my history, my house.
 Then as an adult, I came to, like sports, watch sports. I'm interested in talking about these elements and of course, what's around it, what it means for men, what it means for society and what it means for people. 
[00:07:03] Chris: When I think about being a little kid sports were really they weren't that important on one level until I was older, because when you were a little kid, you just ran around and did stuff.
They weren't organized games. You would play games, but it was more like imaginary games where you were pretending to be something or, I guess tag and stuff like that. But there came a point where actual sports became a thing. And I guess that's probably around the same age.
I would also say that watching sports, I cannot remember a time I was not watching sports. my feeling about sports was very different from yours. The one thing I will say though, is I was like the super skinny little kid. And I played all those games. and it was easier when you were little kids, cause everyone was scrawny or weak or whatever.
But then as you became teenagers, the sort of separated the jocks from the nerds, I don't know what it is, but at the same time, I never stopped loving to play sports, to watch sports. Hockey Night in Canada every Saturday night was my life for a very long time.
And even though I was not big and tough, I certainly never tried out for the rugby team. For example I did play soccer. I played baseball. A bit of baseball formally. I tried out for teams in high school and participated in all kinds of sports. So watching, participating, it was all there.
It was and to this day, I've moved, I've become a runner, which is more of an individual sport but I certainly have not stopped watching all the sports. You may recall in 2019, a certain basketball team in Toronto won the NBA championship. 
[00:09:07] Degan: The shot, Kawhi Leonard in a way I was just thinking, walking here, thinking about this podcast that with so much of the pain that Toronto has gone through with the Maple Leafs being, destroyed by Boston time after time and the 
[00:09:20] Chris: Seven games every time 
[00:09:21] Degan: that all of this, that, I'm thinking of that shot, Kawhi Leonard, I think from, almost foul 
[00:09:27] Chris: off balance.
[00:09:28] Degan: Throwing, throwing the ball and it bouncing on the rim four times and something in those moments help heal the enormous wounds of Toronto sports fans. Maybe I'll go in and talk a little bit about my experience with sports growing up. So I had mentioned first in the first podcast that my.
The fathers are going to come into this, right? 
[00:09:51] Chris: Absolutely. 
[00:09:51] Degan: Of course and mothers and siblings and the rest. And my father I'd mentioned him being very shadowy to me until I was about 14 years old. And my father had a number of obsessions. One of which was that he was a card carrying member, but not of any soccer club or any golf course, but of the Communist Party of Canada and England and at one point India.
This is relevant here. One day I'm in school. This is around grade four or five and I've torn my shirt somehow , in the schoolyard. So I borrow my friend's New York Yankees t shirt and you know how a shirt that is not yours It was relatively fresh, and it felt like you feel like a new person with a shirt on it's a different shirt.
 It was emblazoned with the Yankee hat, red white and blue. Can you picture the bat and the hat on the oh, yeah very yankee. And I'm at the front door. I'm coming into my house at the front door, wearing this shirt a little proudly, and my mother says she was from Salford.
She had a sharp English accent, which I will not imitate here. What the hell are you doing? Get that off right now. Jesus. If your father sees you he'll have a goddamn fit off. And she ran over. Tore it off my torso, washed it, put it in a bag inside a plastic bag, I think a paper and then a plastic, and left it like this.
And there's a this literal article of evil clothing there to be returned. New York Yankees represented literally the imperialist empire of greed. 
[00:11:23] Chris: So she had to wrap it up to not let the imperialism out. 
[00:11:27] Degan: Absolutely. So before that, as a young kid, I really didn't know sports.
We just didn't, we didn't watch, as I was saying I love swimming, canoeing, biking but from grade four on the schoolyard and the baseball diamond, in particular, for me, it became like a gladiatorial combat zone. 
Being picked for a team was a measure of your worth, learning a sport well, being able to play catch, to hit, to pass.
This was your citizenship into the world of acceptable boyhood. So I want to share a scene that I've never talked about publicly before. but I want to particularly mention it here because you said in the first episode, men don't want to talk about things a lot of the time. And I think our healing depends on being real with others. And just sharing, and I'd certainly invite, yeah, our listeners, those of us who have those, pieces, in us that burn to find someone who's going to listen because they do burn and they do impact us. So anyway, i'll tell you this story.
So I didn't even know the rules of baseball and I was often picked last for the teams which sucked right? It's public and I had this feeling the teachers were okay, the kids are playing baseball, let them play Lord of the Flies for a bit, I'm going to go flirt with the secretary, right?
This is the sense I had. I just, I don't remember a teacher around, right? Teachers and God disappeared. So I would often take the position of outfield. Partially because people said, just go out, right? You're not, you don't know what's going on here. So I'd be out in the outfield just to describe the outfield.
It was, I remember it as scrub grassy and a bit muddy if it rainedmixture of gravel and sand. And at the very end, if anyone was going to get a home run, it would have actually, there was a little gully where the ball would go down into and there was a fence.
And the fence touched the TransCanada highway. So you had all these big trucks going by. My world, my universe was being out, near this gully, right? And I'd be looking at the sky, and I tried to catch the ball. If a ball came near me, I would try and catch it. I just honestly don't think I caught a single ball in about, I don't know how many months. One day, one afternoon, I'm out there in this world and someone cranks out a hit. And some of these kids, some of them had failed a few grades. Some of them were just like, they worked on farms. They were pretty big. They were tough and they loved baseball.
Anyway, this hit comes out and it's coming into my world here, and I'm looking at this thing and thinking, I'm going to catch this one. I heard this a lot, the boys were like, Butterfingers, you can't catch, this kind of thing. Can't catch a cold, can't catch a beach ball.
And so I'm like, I'm going to catch this thing. So I get underneath it. It goes right over my head. It goes right down into the gully against the fence where the trucks are going by. So Something changed in me. Something shifted down in me. And I ran to that gully and picked up that ball and ran out toward the bases and whipped it with everything I had.
I lived on the river and so we, friends and I had been throwing stones into the river for a long time, skipping stones, how far can you throw this one? And there was a moment here where it was almost like grace, like it was a moment where, okay, yeah, I didn't know how to catch, I didn't know how to bat, I could throw.
And I didn't know I could really throw but particularly I think with that sense of alienation and that sense of humiliation, I want to do this and threw it and it sailed through the air and it just want to slow it down for him because in my body in that moment, if I return to it, it felt like grace.
It felt like my body was meant to do this. It could do this. And outside of any of the trappings of sports and what we might say around it, it was a beautiful moment. And the ball is whistling through the air and people watch a throw right people care about this. Is the guy gonna get in and where is the is the player gonna get through?
So it was quiet and to me that throw was almost like some glorious music right like the hallelujah chorus or something, right? And it's almost like love like if I think about that you're when your body is working smoothly It's a feeling of belonging for a moment because there is this quiet going.
Wow, nice job, right? And that love is it starts here and it extends out. So this is wonderful And there's something ancient in this, I think, if we think about going all the way back to the Greeks is what we think of with the Olympics, right? But the importance of sports, of sportsmanship it's ancient stuff, right?
And being in your body. And the throw was caught at home, the batter was out, and the cheers go up. And I'm going to pause it there because there's another piece to this story. In that moment. It was like I felt in invited into or in the clubhouse of boys and both individual in that sense, but also communal at this table of accepted citizenship.
Anyway, it felt good. 
So I'd love to ask you, if there's a moment in sports that, that could be that, or the opposite of that 
[00:17:02] Chris: Both. Sure. Yeah. Like I said, I was a skinny little kid. I was skinny. Skinny little kid. Go skinny. I didn't have a lot of power in anything, so I could not throw far.
I could throw if I was playing infield in baseball, I could throw pretty accurately. I wasn't a great hitter and I don't know that I ever would have hit a home run. In soccer. I wasn't going to do the clearing shots that got the ball all the way to the other end of the pitch.
 I played soccer and baseball formally in leagues. And I think in some ways I was not the best player on the team, but the first team I ever played for in soccer won the championship and I expected that from then on and, it didn't happen.
Never happened again. once our team won the standings, the league championship, but then we had a playoff and got knocked out. But the thing that I really liked about soccer is that you could learn to be good without the the power. my great moment in,my soccer memory is I generally played up front.
[00:18:16] Degan: The attacker 
[00:18:17] Chris: yeah, right attacker from the right. And, I scored a goal here and there. I didn't score a lot, but I could pass and I was pretty good at not getting offside and that sort of thing. But there was just one beautiful moment where we were tied.
It was fairly late in the game. Maybe, the games were shorter when we were kids, but maybe five minutes left at most. And we had a drive to the net. And we were driving in on the defenders and the goalie. I was coming down to the right side of the middle.
And my teammate was coming down on the left, like way off on the left. And hegot me a perfectly placed cross on the ground, like just a beautiful. And I, it was right in front of me and I put that ball in the top right corner and I was so happy and everyone, like it was one of these great moments.
I wish I had it on video because my coach was like, that was the most beautiful goal I've ever seen. 
[00:19:26] Degan: Wow. And when you talk about it, do you even feel it now? 
[00:19:29] Chris: Yeah. Oh yeah. it's like satisfaction and joy 
it was a great moment. And, 90 percent of that time, that ball skips over my foot. that makes it all the more sweet because because like I touched that with the lightest touch and yeah, and got it on the right part of my my foot and placed it perfectly.
The goal, it was one of those things where you see the goaltender leaping for it and he can't reach it.
[00:19:59] Degan: I paused on this moment of belonging and beauty and you have, shared this and I'm going to move to what happened right after this for me. And just to back up a little bit, so I made this throw and the batter was out runner was out. But just to back up. 
The town I grew up in was quite poor. And, there had been a sawmill that had closed down. There was a lot of alcoholism. There was a lot of violence. It was a tough place to grow up. A beautiful and tough place. Thinking about the pitcher who was on my team who was on my team here he was tough.
He was probably a couple of years older. Some of them had trouble in school, had failed a couple of grades. He was certainly a very dominant personality. He was actually very witty and scary. He was big, he was intense. And anyway, this ball is caught and there's quiet for a moment, and then there's some cheers, right?
[00:20:53] Chris: So where was it caught at home plate? Home plate. 
[00:20:56] Degan: Yeah. I think it was home plate, but wherever the batter was out. So anyway, this picture on my team, there's a pause after the little bit of cheering and that, and then start to move on. And he says what an arm on the queer.
 I'll give it to him. His timing, it was good, right? Yeah. Yeah. But if you, I just want to stay with those words for a moment because obviously I had not played well. This is not going to redeem me in the big picture. I didn't even know the rules here. But if you think about looking at these words, what an arm is probably
one of the most, lauded words you could give to somebody what he's got an arm. What an arm so he grants this and so there's this division, right? It was like that was a good throw. There's a recognition and the next three words are deadly and they were deadly to me and I want to share this because it is painful and he said the queer.
So here you have, it's already decided and I'm just going to name it. And here's this person has a lot of power. And that's the moment where sports was no longer fun. I wasn't escaping in a daydream. This was a moment of, okay, this is the gladiatorial combat zone, right?
And it came home very quickly. And in a strange way, I can almost thank the pitcher for this because this was a memory that I had for a while that I had to exercise, not on a treadmill, but with, the demon of this exorcise. Yeah. With, with a therapist and I thank God I did.
But I can almost thank the pitcher for this because it did mess me up. It is one of those other pieces of shame. And I've written about shame a lot recently. Anda lot of men have it for a lot of reasons. And we'll talk about that in a future episode. But in a way I can thank him because I really went into a lot of the places that were painful for me.
And now that's what I do. You know in this office that we're sitting in on that couch people come, a lot of men everybody comes but a lot of men and men have a lot of difficulty talking about shame. So I do it very carefully . But if you don't treat a traumatic moment and there are a lot in sports there are a lot of moments where someone's been ostracized or there have been expectations put on someone even if they are quite good at a sport but their father has been like you're never good enough or you know there's so many ways that you can look at the pain but you know those certain moments that are not expressed or transformed in some way they stay with you as if they've not stopped.
And in a way it's like through history, I almost imagine it's like painful burning metallic thread through your guts that is there. And if something touches it, some memory of this and that it's, you're back there. You almost might as well be as I was standing in the field, not being sure of how to speak back to this person.
 Now it's very easy to think what I would want to say to this person. And how I'd want to get support and learn how to play a damn sport. But so just to say. This is shame. This is the realm of shame and I think sports can absolutely bring it up.
I'm curious about you. I'm not saying you have to reveal it, but I'm wondering if you have any moments like that come to you 
[00:24:13] Chris: I just wanna follow up on one thing you said, because of course he had to go for the homophobia, right? Because 
God forbid that you be gay. As if that has any bearing on how good you are, so it's this idea of positioning yourself and positioning others and categorizing in ways that are not only directly painful. But also make a broader statement about where you stand on this stuff.
[00:24:45] Degan: And it's not even about being actually gay. 
[00:24:49] Chris: It's totally irrelevant to it. 
[00:24:50] Degan: Absolutely. Yeah. It's that you're not meeting a standard. Period. Yeah.
 
[00:24:55] Chris: Yeah. And that, that standard is, I can only we don't even know who on that field might have actually been gay.
And so there's a message going broader than just you as well. And it's multilayered and complex in the way we learn these things as children is fascinating to me. Sports is when I was able to just participate in the joy of it. There's this idea, I think there's this idea of the inherent goodness of sports And I get it, it teaches teamwork.
learning how to play a position is very useful in terms of knowing what role you can play in the greater goal and all that sort of thing. And all that stuff is, I think is true. But there's also a kind of, you were alluding to what I would refer to as boys will be boys, right?
Oh, look, they're playing a game. So they don't need to be supervised. And, I would hope that today, that if someone made a comment like that, some adult would say something about how that's inappropriate on the sports field. 
 Homophobia was so ubiquitous when I was growing up, but I don't have a specific example of that. But I certainly got a lot around being ashamed of being too skinny. And like people who were very muscular throwing me around or, this happened more in gym class because for some reason, all my friends, like as soon as they could.
But I loved sports and I loved being physically active and I took gym as far as I could. AndI wasn't the best at gym class and I particularly hated gymnastics cause that's the muscliest of all the muscly sports and gym classAnd in fact, I really injured myself on the parallel bars because I tried to do one of those dips that you go down and push yourself up again.
And I must've torn my pec muscles cause I was in so much pain and I wasn't strong enough to lift myself. And I didn't tell anyone cause I was too embarrassed by it. Also classmates would just say snide comments about me being skinny or whatever. 
[00:27:15] Degan: So it was more like, there wasn't a specific moment, but it was more this general sense of how you were seen and you were called on it. 
[00:27:24] Chris: I don't want to get too much into American politics, but there was a lot of talk about something that Donald Trump said, and he, everybody knows what it is.
I'm not gonna get into it, but, he referred to it as locker room talk. 
Oh, yeah. And then people were 
[00:27:39] Degan: like
 I think it should be said again. I can't I can't stop looking at beautiful women. I just kiss them, grab them by the, yeah. Yeah. 
[00:27:46] Degan: Yeah. 
[00:27:47] Chris: And so he's this is locker room talk, which by the way, the only locker room Donald Trump has ever been in is the is the locker room of a golf course.
And a lot of, at the time, a lot of people are like, I've never been in a locker room where they talk like that. 
I'm like I have, that was exactly how a locker room sounded when I was a teenager. 
[00:28:08] Degan: You know what we're talking about the locker room banter I'm I've been reading to prepare for this podcast a wonderful book called boys what it means to become a man by Rachel Giese came out about 10 years ago, wonderful book and in it, she mentions a high school athlete named Jerome Baker from 2014, who was a high school senior and a star football linebacker in Ohio.
And there had been a high profile sexual assault by two fellow football players nearby. And And I love this. I'm just going to read a little bit from it. He contacted boys he knew, the best players, the role models and leaders on teams throughout Northeastern Ohio. Within a year, a hundred high school athletes had taken the pledge, which reads in part, I promise to never commit or condone acts of physical or sexual violence toward women or girls.
If I hear someone making negative remarks about women, girls, or gender based jokes, I'm And I find what's really interesting about that, besides it just being really enlightened and decent, is the fact that he was savvy and he knew that those who were the best at what they were doing they hold a position.
They really do. They hold a position in our minds. From a psychological perspective, you can say we project our own desires of success and greatness onto them. That's fine. Whatever it is, they play a role. And he chose the leaders in this area, the great sportsmen and women, and said, I want you to sign this.
So I just think that was both savvy and so good hearted and the idea that there's another beautiful scene in this book where in the locker room gay slurs are everywhere I think this was a basketball team. But a quiet player stands up and just says, my dad's gay.
Can you guys not use the language? And. it was described as saying you could hear a pin drop and people admired his courage so much to actually stand, these are your people, these are your teammates, right? And to say that there, he was respected and in that locker room, the talk stopped.
So just to say, sometimes it feels like trying to stop a train, right? If you think about being in a locker room and people are saying whatever, all that stuff. To try and stop it feels like stopping a roaring train, but the courage to do that. 
It's almost like sports courage right in a moment, right to say so Anyway, just this idea that we can change and it probably Has to happen from within, and it just makes me think about this, how Hockey Canada, for example, responds right now to, I think they are allegations right against the six junior players, right?
Who have been alleged to have, I think, gang raped a young woman right after a tournament. And that's alleged but Hockey Canada, from everything I've heard, always comes out with these anodyne responses, never looking at the broader culture, right? Never really taking it on. So when I think about someone like that football player in Ohio, having that kind of organizational skill, we have the means in this day and age to really look at ourselves in the mirror and say, We will make a commitment because the truth is you said something about sports about that.
We were talking earlier about the glory of these moments, right? The beautiful pass and your beautiful goal. before the pitcher talked to me, the sense of belonging in that throw, I knew it was good and everybody did. And I became better at sports later on anyway, with some support, but those moments are glorious.
They're glorious for cities. It's that moment of kawhi Leonard throwing the basketball in that, Toronto winning the cup. How many years ago? Was 
[00:31:55] Chris: I don't know whether to say I was alive or not because. My mother was pregnant with me when the Toronto Maple Leafs last won the Stanley Cup.
[00:32:06] Degan: That says a lot, Chris. That says a lot about your undying faith.
 
[00:32:10] Degan: I'm 56 years old and this is a long time ago. 
Yeah, a whole thing. 
So just to say, it's not simple. Sports, I think, has this incredible power. It feels incredible to be part of a team, all of this. And then obviously we have profoundly systemic issues in a lot of areas and we've brought some of them out.
[00:32:32] Chris: There's a couple of things that this brings to mind, you brought up Hockey Canada and what's really interesting about Hockey Canada, I only know what I've read in the news about this, but It almost feels like even if they wanted to do the right thing, they don't even know how, and I think that says a lot.
[00:32:53] Degan: They need to hire us. So here we are. Let's here we are 
[00:32:57] Chris: Bringing them on the podcast. We'll talk it through with them. But I do think that, if someone tried to do what you're describing, that football player in Ohio did when I was a kid, I'm pretty sure it would have not been received well in my town.
[00:33:16] Degan: You mean in the nineties, in the eighties?
 
[00:33:18] Chris: In the eighties. Yeah. Yeah. It just, it would have been laughed at and it would have taken a hugely brave person to even say, yes, I agree with you. I will follow that up. The only thing I could see is if a teacher forced them to do it and maybe two or three guys would start to think about it. 
[00:33:39] Degan: I think in a way the shift has to be It has to be almost inner first, right?
[00:33:46] Chris: It has to be modeled too at the same time. 
[00:33:49] Degan: Sure. Oh yeah. I just mean it has to begin in his, and I think in an inner place of someone like that man from Ohio saying, that's a moment where you sit in your room, right? Who he's lying there looking at his posters of whatever, My Chemical Romance or something and going, that wasn't.
Brutal. That was brutal, right? That this is alleged or convicted rape here. And that's an inner experience, right? And I think, I have this sense almost when I said, the teachers let us play baseball and went to, flirt with the secretary or whatever and let us play Lord of the Flies.
I have a sense almost that's still what members of Hockey Canada are doing. Hey, listeners, Tell me if I'm wrong. I want to be proved wrong here But when I hear the political bs coming out, which I just did a few weeks ago I felt like you're not even trying And I think they're caring about They're caring about the money that comes in came out donors.
They're caring about advertising contracts. They're caring about their brand in a sense, but you want to see what a brand can do. You choose something that means something and really put your heart into it. 
I'm getting passionate about this, but you're not saying that, that you're a bunch of dumb jocks.
It's not a polarizing piece. It's hockey is beautiful, right? And it gives a lot of people an enormous amount of self esteem and it's wonderful. And we have the best hockey players in the world, correct? 
[00:35:17] Chris: For now. 
[00:35:18] Degan: For now or hanging on. And to say, and something is deeply wrong.
And I think this whole piece that I'm talking, and and this is, we're not going to speak about this here. I think we'll do a podcast on sex on sexuality. 
But of course there's the whole piece too around, sexual trauma which is vastly underreported when it comes to boys and young men.
And that absolutely happens too. My journey here, the reason I'm sitting here and the reason I'm a therapist is because I went through and I felt like a nobody, and I just want to say how profound chronic shame can feel.
for those years, luckily it didn't last. It didn't last through high school and it didn't last on. But for those three years, I felt like nothing. I did not have a place. And I'm saying that in the context of healing in a large scale sense.
 
[00:36:13] Chris: but then there's this kind of where it goes all, Hellish. And look at Maple Leaf Gardens. There was a serious scandal around sexual assault of boys in Maple Leaf Gardens.
And these were people who were so excited to be this, cathedral to hockey. And this is what they have to endure. I just came down Bathurst street to get here and went by St. Mike's college, a high school which is infamous now for having a hockey team that had a brutal sexual assault as an initiation.
These are things that We have to address and what I think about when I think about this, and, I'm constantly thinking about this one person who said, how do we raise our boys and even how do we talk to boys about these things? 
[00:37:14] Degan: Let's wrestle with this with an entire podcast, because one of the, my great interest is looking at the relationship between shame and violence looking at sexuality, men, relationships.
it's so big, like I can just feel it as we talk about it. And let's, if we can, put it aside for a moment and really wrestle with this and just returning back to what we've talked about in these first two episodes Men don't want to talk about things and the question of how we can invite, other ways of being, invite, respect, invite, all of these possibilities for safety.
If we can go to the very beginning, speak to someone who will listen to you about your inner experience and I say that right now not so much on the piece of how to you know stop sexual assault so much although there may be something but to stop the secrecy particularly around the boys you mentioned in both the school and Maple Leaf Gardens, right?
It just breaks my heart to think about both those particularly the Maple Leaf Gardens as you said Someone who is in this cathedral of hockey this place they've watched on television and their vulnerability there. And this sense that we do not speak and that comes from the home that comes from just saying how are you and we have to lead as parents to parents and teachers and coaches. We have to lead and say kids are not going to on their own know what can be said or not without being invited.
So I say to my kids. I have a son and two daughters. I ask them more specifically or talk about this if anyone does this or that we've changed as a society I think we speak about this more but there's still huge domes of silence 
[00:39:01] Chris: I won't get into it too deeply, but there are ways to teach respect and empathy andways to process your emotions as you talk about shame and those sorts of things.
I think that there is a way of raising, men who just think completely differently 
[00:39:23] Degan: and would stand up against talk or actions. just to say for a moment about this idea of healing, and this idea there, I want to speak to it a little bit from my therapist perspective, and I want to name what happened to me just to give an example in short. When it was about 20 years after that moment on the baseball diamond to me that I, finally, went to see a therapist and realized I really enjoyed talking about things but I found a great therapist and I brought this up after a time this moment thinking there was nothing that could ever be done because certain theatre of my life would always be darkened by this naming. 
And she used what's called psychodrama and she and I envisioned this guy the picture and she said simply, What do you want to say to this guy? I mean I say this line now i've said it to thousands of men and women on the couch that's sitting right there and What do you want to say to this guy and I know that we're a family show here so I will not repeat the language but I said what I had to say to and it really did feel good, right?
That's what's required. That thing is actually what's required just to say when we think about therapy, right? Some people think I've got to be vulnerable. I've got to be this right It's easy to make fun of this therapy You know just to say something someone the other day said they were talking about what it was like to be a therapist. Two therapists were talking I was overhearing one of them said Being a therapist is being a warrior talking about the sports image and this woman brilliant woman said Being a therapist is like being a rat.
She said, you go down into the cellars and you go down into the sewers. And you thrive there. It's not pretty down there And you've got to be as brave as anything and if you want to think about a heroics, there's an interior heroics of going into these realms.
So just to say healing ain't easy, right? It's its own Olympic
[00:41:19] Chris: sport 
I think my own growth as a man has required acknowledging darkness and, that I may have had gross thoughts and gross experiences and awful things that I've done that I had to come to terms with.
 
[00:41:39] Degan: And that could paint you, like your sense of worth at times. Where it's like, who am I? We all mess up. We all do things that are like, oh, I shouldn't have done that. We hurt people. But it's another thing to say, and this is what shame is, I am wrong. 
And that's chronic shame, which we can all have to some degree. 
[00:42:03] Chris: .Yeah. Yeah. 
We all have a responsibility to go inward and our responsibility to other people is to take ownership of our actions 
[00:42:13] Degan: Absolutely, regardless of where we come from. Yeah. That I always say that to people, your per personality, your, so your past is crucial because it did point you in directions that you did get caught in patterns, of course.
And what you do. With your actions and your limbs and your mouth now, and your respect or not, is also just as equally as powerful. 
[00:42:37] Chris: Why don't we take a couple of minutes and be back after this break.
 
[00:42:58] Degan: Welcome back to What Kind of Man Are You Episode Two on sports. We were talking about shame before and one thing that really surprises me as a therapist is when we take the time to go in to a memory or a painful, let's say it's a moment on the sports field or whatever it is that has really stayed with us.
What's remarkable is when that lifts when we transform that and a lot of times that's through therapy but it can also just be talking to someone who you trust. It could be someone on your team it could be someone it's just like man that really sucked and as long as that person is like man that happened to me, I hear you and you're not blamed or you're not ignored. 
That's a healing event, right? That's where it happens. What's beautiful about that, particularly around chronic shame which I experienced and a lot of people do, is when you begin to lift that, which takes a while, right?
Therapy is not always fast. It took me honestly like eight years of work to really let go of this sense of I'm not worthy in these ways, what's beautiful is it's almost like this enormous black cloud lifts and you can see the details of things that you couldn't even see. What that baseball diamond looked like, the sparkling of the sun on the green leaves or in winter, the ice forming on the trees, and almost this bell like creaking of ice, pine cones, all of these pieces, and the faces of your friends, the moments where you did get something that wasn't tainted by shame.
I guess what I'm saying is go see a therapist if you need toIn Toronto, and this will be like this in other towns, Gestalt Institute, G E S T A L T, Gestalt Institute has a 40 an hour student rate for people wanting a therapist. 
And 40 an hour for people who are well trained and supervised. Gestalt Clinic. I wanna put that out there to everybody, and particularly men. 
 It's professional. It's confidential It's very good and at your outside of Toronto There are a lot of places you just have to search and find or ask about people's sliding scales There is my shout out to their
 
[00:45:13] Chris: Ad for therapy.
Someday we will recognize that mental health is health and cover it under our provincial health plan. But until that day, therapy is available still. 
[00:45:26] Degan: Finishing off my trilogy of baseball stories.
My daughter was born in 2009. And we spent some time in a little town called North Hatley. I was about 36, I think, around that time. So I was just beginning this kind of healing. I used to walk with her in her stroller past a baseball diamond. It was on the little bit north of the town.
And I would pass it every day. And I guess it would give me a little feeling of these past times. One day, it was a beautiful July day, I had her in my arms, and I walked down onto the baseball diamond, I was holding her in my arms, and I stood at home plate, and I just imagined cranking that ball out into the wild blue yonder, and just with her around the bases.
Just walked. seeing her beautiful chubby smiling face, a glorious day, first, second, third, and home. And it was, it fills me now with a kind of joy of just, it's beautiful. 
I watched everything. When the Blue Jays came in 77, I was an immediate fan. The Toronto Argonauts I followed the Raptors when they came in the nineties, it was all 
[00:46:43] Chris: immediate. But hockey was the sport and the Leafs were the team. It was something my father and I watched on the CBC every Saturday night.
There was one time my parents were going out and I was being babysat by my aunt. And it was a Saturday night and I turned on the hockey game and she's we're not going to watch this, are we? And I just looked at her like she was crazy.What else do you watch on a Saturday night?
So 
my aunt obviously does not love hockey, and I could not understand it. The idea that someone would Not be watching hockey night in Canada on a Saturday night. 
it was my father who took me to Leafs,
Argos, Blue Jays and look, I don't want to make sports into this like male only domain. I don't think that's true, but I think that sports were this medium through which men learn to be men through interaction, especially with their elders, their fathers, their uncles, their grandfathers.
[00:48:00] Degan: And that, 
And that is different than growing up as 
as a girl 
or a young woman, right? That 
because sports 
 can be crucial. Not in, you're not on stage. Your personhood, your worth is not as nearly as directly attached to it. And I would love to hear if 
that's different, but 
I certainly didn't 
experience 
that.
[00:48:28] Chris: The thing I don't understand and the thing I've been trying to come to grips with is, why do I care so much? For example, When the Raptors made their run to the championship, first couple of rounds, I was watching every game, but then that series with Milwaukee and the conference finals, I had to wait until the fourth quarter started before I watched because it was too much.
And then, the championship same thing. And why does it matter? 
[00:49:04] Degan: Why does it matter? 
[00:49:05] Chris: I don't know. I've been asking myself this so much. 
[00:49:09] Degan: It's interesting in a way because you don't remember a time where sports was not as integral as your furniture and your father's presence. 
[00:49:18] Chris: Yes, absolutely. And, I don't know if my father watched with his father, but certainly my father played hockey. I never played hockey on skates. I always played on the road. Buthe played ice hockey with in a league. So he had that and his way of connecting,
I remember 
 a party that was my girlfriend at the time, her family and my family were at together and My dad wasn't excited by social occasions. But he got talking about the 60s Yankees with someone and 
And It gave him a way of connecting. 
[00:49:59] Degan: I don't like the Yankees, but they're not the emblemof evil, right? 
[00:50:01] Chris: The Red Sox on the other hand, that's a different story. 
[00:50:04] Degan: And the Boston Bruins. 
[00:50:05] Chris: Yeah. Every Boston team. But so that was a way he was able to belong in that party and you talked about it as, yeah, as belonging and I know that even if I know nothing about the team, I have access to language that will connect me to someone if I just ask someone about their team.
Exactly. And in fact, I had a little walk with my nephew a couple days ago. Years ago, it's quite a few years ago now and he wasn't he was quiet at the time and I would ask him about his unfortunately his favorite teams are all Boston but I'd ask him about how they're like what 
[00:50:52] Degan: He won't be he won't be invited on this podcast.
[00:50:55] Chris: Yeah, he's allowed we'll just have to shame him for his that's one thing men should feel shame for is supporting any Boston team 
[00:51:03] Degan: We need some shame you can't be shameless. 
 
[00:51:05] Chris: At heart i'm like an egalitarian right and I want people to cooperate and I want people to get along like that's the kind of person I am but when it comes to sports I want to win! 
[00:51:17] Degan: You said something that I want to pick up on which is that idea of being able to speak to someone, even if you don't know their team.
 I got into sports as an adult because I used to play music on the streets and I knew you then. And my friend Carl and I who you knew also, he played guitar. I played saxophone and we began playing in the subways just for fun after work. and he said one day, why don't we play in front of Maple Leaf Gardens?
The cathedral at least for Torontonians, good swath of Ontario and other places. And so we began to play and this was when the Leafs were playing the Kings in the 90s was it 92 or 93 when Gretzky was so they've made it to the final 
[00:51:59] Chris: No semi final concert conference final 
[00:52:01] Degan: Right at this time.
I knew absolutely nothing I know only just a little bit more than nothing at the moment but anyhow we started playing in front of the gardens and songs like We Are the Champions when they won a game hockey night in Canada, the themethe Bill Barilko song by Tragically Hip, 50 Mission Cap a bunch of Stones. Hey, we improvised and we had the time of our lives and we paid our rent sometimes, but all to say, in the midst of that's when I learned what hockey was about.
Carl would tell me the rules. I started, Oh, that's offside. This is the power play. This is what's happening. And I loved it. I loved it. I would be like, let's go and get a pitcher. And he's I don't know, this is listening on the radio. I want to go out and see this game. So I got really into it.
And all to say what I've loved from that is the passport I still have in my pocket to at least know the rules, to sit, to know a rough idea of what's happening. Because I am no sports fan like you,I'm a fairweather fan and quite happy about it. But I like the Leafs, I like Montreal I like the Blue Jays, I go see them sometimes.
 but I love being able to walk into a bar and being able to go up to the bar and chat with people about what game is on. And that feels like a kind of connection that I certainly didn't have growing up. And of course that's not just men, right?
But that is very much a male kind of connection. world or den to have communication through. 
[00:53:28] Chris: I, there is that element. I'm still not sure where my anxiety comes from with with not winning, but 
[00:53:35] Degan: we've got six or eight more episodes to figure out that. That's true. And the other thing is.
[00:53:40] Chris: If they lose, I'm frigging relieved. 
[00:53:44] Degan: next time. See, there's a couch right here. Listeners, so you can't see next time we'll get Chris on that couch and we'll talk and we'll figure this out. 
 
[00:53:53] Chris: Let's do a quick question. 
[00:53:55] Degan: Let's do it. 
[00:53:55] Chris: Oh, but the question I'm asking is very complicated.
Try it. 
Alright. Deegan, are you a feminist? 
 
Yeah, I'm a feminist, and I'm not an expert.
 society in general has been profoundly dominated by men not every society, of course, we have moments where there's matriarchal lineages and the rest of it. But in large swaths have been absolutely dominated by men to a point where if you look back at women were the the legal property of men even in the 1970s my mother could not have a credit card of her own unless her husband who was terrible with money, by the way signed for it. 
And let's just look at what's happening around reproductive rights, right? The United States is going back into a kind of medieval society. 
For example, the Supreme Court reversing Roe versus Wade. And now it being illegal in some states to actually cross a border to obtain an abortion. We have structures that are controlling women's lives, reproductive decisions and also we still do not have pay equity in many areas, particularly in corporations.
Tech companies and political representation. So to me, when you say, am I a feminist? 
It's saying let's look at society right now. Let's look at what it is. It's not even just about fairness, because that's another question. But we have forces at work here. That are controlling women's bodies.
 Yes, I'm a feminist, and we'll talk more about it in other episodes. How's that? Are you?
 I wouldn't call myself a feminist, but I also don't call myself a Marxist, but I feel that my worldview is defined by some Marxist thought and some feminist thought. 
[00:55:49] Degan: Let's try and find someone who's in the sports world, who's both a feminist and a Marxist and an extreme athlete.
I say that just to bring it back Okay, Chris, I've got a question for you. 
Can you tell me a book by a male author? Poetry non-fiction fiction. That has just impacted you. 
[00:56:10] Chris: Oh, my gosh. I could probably list a dozen off the top of my head. I'm going to say two.
Because one feels more.
Masculine than the other. And the one that's more masculine is Herzog by Saul Bellow. 
I used to refer to Saul Bellow's writing as muscular. I didn't read him till later in life, my forties or something like that. And it wasn't even
the content of the story. Although I think it is very male in its perspective, but there was just, I don't know what the writing style is, but I would read it and I would feel like this is really masculine.So there is that one. 
[00:57:06] Degan: It has poetry too. As well though, doesn't it. Sure. At the beginning of the podcast we were talking about. Finesse and rage, you know? Oh, that's a good point. Something in there because I remember reading that book too, and the sentences. I never feeling like he's a true artist. 
He's a true, has a lyrical style in the midst of that. 
[00:57:25] Chris: Oh, sure. Tail. And I mean, finesse and rage can be applied to art as much as, as much as to sports. We can talk about what a sexist Hemingway is and everything. But what a huge influence he had on me that sort of spare writing. That almost permission to not be flowery. 
The other one. Oh, God, it's so hard to narrow it down like this. But I would say that my personal favorite book is Underworld by Don DeLillo. And talk about sports the first 60 pages, and I've raved about it to you personally, many, many times the first 60 pages is set at that pennant game. 
 I think it's the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants or something like that. And, and it's 60 pages of what's happening as this famous home run where the guy shouts, on the radio, the Giants win the pennant, the giants win the pennant. 
[00:58:26] Degan: Wasn't Sputnik launched just around that time. Ah, full shadow of the cold war, right. You have war you have. Yeah. 
[00:58:35] Chris: And so you have this as the context setting of this whole book, which is really it's epic. It's sweeping. It plays with time as books in the nineties did. And . it is an American masterpiece, as far as I'm concerned. And just that idea again, almost completely from a male perspective, playing with words and language, but also the stories he tells and he at one point Starts writing from the perspective of J Edgar Hoover dressing up in drag for a party that Truman Capote is going to be putting on. 
 
[00:59:15] Chris: So. Yeah, so I got to go with both Herzog and and Underworld. Wonderful. Thanks, Chris. 
What Kind of Man Are You is hosted by Chris Garbutt and Degan Davis. Produced by Chris Garbutt at VQC Media. You can support us at buymeacoffee.com slash Chris Garbutt. Music composed and performed by Degan Davis. You can buy Degan's book at brickbooks.ca. 
Thank you to all our supporters and listeners.
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