Excerpt: “Playing with Fire” by Theoren Fleury

As previously mentioned in today’s “Morning Papers”, Theoren Fleury has admitted what was widely speculated, that he was a victim of abuse at the hands of Graham James.

Courtesy of Macleans.ca comes an exclusive excerpt of his soon to be released autobiography, “Playing with Fire”.

“Graham was on me once or twice a week for the next two years,” Fleury writes of the assaults, whose memories remain vivid to him. “An absolute nightmare, every day of my life.” James required him to sleep two nights a week at the coach’s house, rather than with the woman with whom he’d been billeted. He tried to fight off the coach at first, wrapping himself in blankets each night and pretending to sleep as James attempted to masturbate him and give him oral sex. But the fear of James’s advances left him sleepless, and exhaustion broke him down, he writes; so too did James’s frequent warnings that, without his coach’s support, he stood little chance of playing professional hockey.

To read more of the exclusive excerpt click here.