Retired NHL player Patrick O’Sullivan suffered through horrific abuse at the hands of his father growing up and now, in a new a piece for The Players’ Tribune, the former NHL journeyman is sharing some of the shocking details.
Since the age of five, O’Sullivan says he endured daily beatings from his dad who hoped to “toughen him up” into a better hockey player.
From the moment I got my first pair of hockey skates at five years old, I got the living [expletive] kicked out of me every single day. Every day after hockey, no matter how many goals I scored, he would hit me. The man was 6-foot-2, 250 lbs. It would start as soon as we got in the car, and sometimes right out in the parking lot.
The beatings only got worse as O’Sullivan got older.
He would wake me up at 5 a.m. and force me to work out for two hours before school. I remember I had this heavy leather jump rope, and if he thought I wasn’t working hard enough, he would force me to take my shirt off and he’d whip me with it. If the jump rope wasn’t around, he would use an electrical cord.
The entire piece is gut-wrenching and hard to get through, but well worth your time. By sharing his story, O’Sullivan hopes to help kids in similar situations avoid the same fate.
Though O’Sullivan’s father eventually went to jail for the beatings, adults around him knew about the abuse for years but let it continue.
Nobody called the cops. Nobody ever confronted him. The overall mentality back then, especially in the hockey community, was “whatever happens in their house, stays in their house. That’s their own business.”
It’s sad, shocking and possibly all too common behavior that O’Sullivan hopes people will stop turning a blind eye towards.
It just takes one person to act on their instinct and stand up for that child. That’s real courage. The kind we don’t always glorify in the hockey world.
