Sex, Lies, and Hockey Pucks

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Before we begin, this episode contains some adult language.

AC Rowe is a documentary producer with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

And recently, she was contacted by a woman who'd had this really strange experience.

Yeah, her name is Jane McDougal, and she was all like, do I have a story for you?

It's about sex and sports and scandal.

Three S's.

Jane is a longtime media type, host, columnist.

She was once approached to be on the real housewives of Vancouver.

She turned it down.

She's polished and put together.

Everything about her from her perfect blow dry to the punctuation in her email says, I am in control.

But she was like, this story, this thing I want to talk to you about, it is not in my control.

It's been reigning chaos for 30 years and I need it set straight.

I've spoken to my editors over the years about it and they've said, why would you want to bring this up?

And I keep thinking,

because it's my reputation.

So AC agreed to talk to Jane.

Jane shows up to the interview like she is ready to defend a graduate thesis.

She's got this stack of papers full of dates and names and notes and quotes.

In fact, I learned that this is a thing she does.

She's constantly quoting people, like she's collected their wisdom the way other people collect stamps.

Tina Fay, Voltaire, Scarlett Johansson, Mark Twain.

If you hold a cat by the tail, there are lessons that you will acquire that you can learn in no other way.

And armed with all this material, Jane tells AC a story.

So, the stories that have started with the 1994 Stanley Cup playoffs.

The New York Rangers against Vancouver!

For Americans who don't follow hockey, the Stanley Cup is the NHL's championship trophy.

Winning it is like winning the Super Bowl, but for hockey, so you know, it actually matters.

I'm kidding, don't come for me.

Anyway, the game on June 14th, 1994, almost exactly 30 years ago, is a big deal.

It is the final game in the series.

Whoever wins tonight wins the Stanley Cup.

If the beleaguered Vancouver Canucks can find a way to pull it off, it would be the first championship in the team's history and deliverance for their long-suffering fan base.

The Canucks' improbable ride to the seventh game has warmed the hearts of die-hard fans and filled the bandwagon to overflowing.

But first, the Canucks have to get past the favorites, the New York Rangers.

The Rangers are playing on their home ice at Madison Square Garden, and you can hear it.

Now, on the ice for the Canucks are a couple of key players to James' story.

First, we've got Jeff Brown.

Jeff Brown, very upset at that call.

He was a defenseman, and I'm told, a very good defenseman.

Earlier in the season, Jeff had assisted on a game-winning overtime goal.

Jeff and that goal are a big reason the Canucks are even in the finals.

Our second key player is Captain Kirk, Kirk McClain.

Goalie for the Vancouver Canucks.

He's Jane's link to this story.

Kirk and I were married.

And that's why she knows the play-by-play.

So the series was one for the record books.

I mean, they went the distance.

The first goal was scored by the Rangers.

As was the next.

But in the second period, the Canucks rallied.

Anyway, it all came down to one goal.

So here comes the place off then.

Clare of Manhattan.

That unfortunately went against Kirk.

Anyway, as much as the Rangers were the victors, everyone back in Vancouver presumed, okay, but we got them next year because like, look at us go, right?

Yeah, well, that is not what ended up happening.

When the following year came around, the Canucks did really badly.

The power play is all that's working for the Canucks, and it only works part-time.

The next season was a major letdown.

The only thing worse than their performance was their luck.

Canucks win the battle, but don't show up for the real war.

And no one could understand why.

The point was, well, look what you did with the same batch of guys last year on ice.

What's going on?

so when fans don't understand what's happening they need to find an explanation an explanation for why the canucks a team that had just come off a stanley cup final a team that had been magic on ice last season were falling flat

that explanation became that their beloved goalie kirk was being cuckolded by a teammate.

And I was the one allegedly sleeping with my husband's teammate, Jeff Brown.

That became the explanation for why the 1995 team wasn't as good as the 1994 team.

Their bond had been torn up by adultery, betrayal.

In some people's estimation, I wasn't just a home wrecker.

I was a franchise wrecker.

And this is the story that Jane needed to tell AC.

A story that has been following Jane around ever since, totally messing with her life because she'd been accused of committing a Canadian cardinal sin.

Don't mess with our national game.

Don't mess with hockey.

This is Dakota Ring.

I'm Willa Paskin.

And I'm AC Rowe.

That locker room rumor has been dogging hockey and Jane McDougall for 30 years.

When you hear it, you might think, it seems like no big deal.

Come on, get a thicker skin, who cares?

But for someone inside gossip like this, for someone like Jane, that's a different thing.

In this episode, we're going to study where this story started, how it survived for decades, lingering and festering, what it's done to the people caught up in its vortex, and what it is about sports fandom that makes stories like this so common.

Because this rumor, it is bigger than Jane.

So today, on Dakota Ring, once a rumor takes over over your life, how the puck do you get it back?

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AC's gonna stick handle things from here.

This rumor that's been following Jane McDougall around for the past 30 years.

It's salacious, crushing, dramatic, and one other thing too.

None of it was true.

Jane had never even met Jeff Brown, the man she supposedly had an affair with.

The whole thing, the rumor?

It's utterly false.

It all seemed to start in 1995, the year after the Stanley Cup run.

The Canucks were losing.

Kirk McClain, the goalie, had lost his edge.

Clearly, something was off with the team.

And then, suddenly, just before Christmas, Vancouver traded Jeff Brown away to the Hartford Whalers and got very little in return.

The best they could get for him was a couple of journeymen who already have a lot of miles on their young bodies.

It was as if the Canucks were trying to dump Jeff Brown in a hurry.

Right away, sports reporters started asking the new Canucks coach, Rick Lee, about the trade.

Is it something that he did off the ice or something like that?

That's between him and I.

But it didn't take long for a story to start making its way around the fan base.

The oldest written record I can find of the rumor was posted on a Usenet board back in 1996.

It's read here by one of my colleagues.

You'll be hearing them read comments like this throughout the episode.

I was wondering if anyone knew why Brown was traded.

I heard a nasty rumor about him and a certain other player, and I think I believe it.

The source was reliable, and it does explain a lot.

I tracked down the guy who posted that nearly 30 years ago.

Are you able to?

He says he heard it indirectly from a sports analyst.

It would have been like third hand.

So it would have been

a sports analyst told one of our sales reps, and then he came and told me in the lunchroom.

I went, oh my God.

I went and put it on

the silly chat there.

I shouldn't have done that.

He has no idea who the sports analyst heard it from, and he couldn't remember the guy's name anyway.

He feels embarrassed about the post now.

Because I feel like maybe it wasn't true.

But his post, it was far from alone.

Within a few years, hockey message boards were flooded with posts just like it.

Jeff Brown had an affair with Kirk McClain's wife.

Brown ended up getting traded because of it, and McLean supposedly went into a deep depression.

Brown fucked McClain's wife way back when and got traded shortly after.

Vancouver had a huge slump.

Jeff Brown was traded to Hartford for literally a bag of pucks.

It's part of the lore of the team.

So it's got to be thousands, if not tens of thousands of people who must have heard this rumor.

This is Mark Lewis.

I'm a longtime and long-suffering Vancouver Canucks fan.

Mark grew up playing hockey in Vancouver.

He went to university there in the 90s and now works as a lawyer downtown.

The Canucks have been his team since he was a kid.

And he remembers that magical 1994 run, the 1995 letdown, and the rumor that followed.

I'd certainly heard it.

I don't know if I really give him a lot of thought to whether I did believe it or not, but it was something that you heard a lot over a period of years.

I mean, this was a word of mouth spread fan to fan rumor that made its way around the fan base.

But if the rumor started out in the 90s, being shared friend to friend of a friend, more than a decade after the rumor started, not only was it still going, it was growing.

And by the early 2000s, it was beginning to show up in Jane's real life too.

i just started noticing sort of a change in the weather shall we say change in the weather what do you what do you mean by that

uh women were a bit frosty to me

if i was talking to their husbands and some men also seemed to be behaving oddly they weren't frosty they were the opposite of frosty they were frisky

yeah it was a problem and i kept thinking i'm doing nothing to encourage this but somehow something's on the table here.

And whatever it was, it didn't go away.

It only got more pronounced.

Like drunks at Christmas parties would make remarks.

Jane told me about a friend of hers, a contractor working in her home who overheard the crew talking about the rumor.

I talked to the contractor who confirmed this.

I also talked to a friend of Jane's who has tried tirelessly and uselessly to convince his colleagues the rumor's not true.

And just earlier this year, like a few weeks ago, a 92-year-old woman Jane knows told Jane that her grandson had come home talking about the rumor.

And some people, some have just said it right to her face.

For example, having dinner one night with a director friend from LA, and he had a friend with him, the producer, a big hockey fan.

And finally, my friend said, go ahead, just ask her, because he was clearly just

vibrating with this question.

And he asked me about my affair with Jeff Brown.

And I thought, wow,

no.

And things like this happen to Jane all the time.

She pegs it at about once a month.

And it's not like I go around asking people, hey, have you heard the story about me?

It just comes up completely unprovoked.

The worst thing that happened went down when her kids were still in elementary school in the 2000s.

Jane has two children, a son and a daughter from a previous marriage to her one with Kirk.

My son would get into fights on the playground at school, and I would get called in.

And he would never actually reveal in those meetings with the principal and

what the nature of the problem was.

But I would eventually come to discover that he was defending my honor on the playground.

And the things they were saying were just things they were parroting that their parents had said.

So

my kids had to pay a price for this.

For Jane, the whole thing is distressing, confounding, out of her control.

And there is this one odd quirk that makes it even more bewildering.

The rumor, at first, it had nothing to do with her.

I didn't even know Kirk during the Stanley Cup run of 94.

We didn't meet until the rumor had been well established.

Originally, the rumor, it wasn't even about Jane.

I had inherited the rumor.

How the fresh heck does something like that happen?

When we come back.

Final seconds on the first period.

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In 1995, when all this started, Kirk McClain was not yet married to Jane McDougal.

In fact, he was married to someone else entirely.

And the rumor?

It was originally about her.

Hi,

my name is Leslie Shaddock and I'm happy to answer any questions about this crazy story, I guess.

Leslie Shaddock, formerly McLean, was married to Kirk during the 94 Cup run.

So was the rumor true about Leslie?

I actually laughed the first time I heard it.

I was, you know, it was just so silly.

I did never feel the need to address it because I didn't want to give it life because it was just nonsense.

Nope.

Leslie also did not have an affair with Jeff Brown.

She first heard about the rumor from Kirk.

He'd called to warn her that it was circulating.

Called because by then the two were getting divorced.

Conspiratorial-minded fans saw this as evidence for the rumor itself, but Leslie says it was nothing so scandalous.

We were very, very young when we got married.

I was 19 and we grew up together.

So we were together for 10 years.

And,

you know, people change from 19 to 29 or 30.

And I mean, after we separated, I stayed in touch with his mom and dad.

I still on social media am friends with his nieces and his sister.

Like, it's, yeah, there's unfortunately nothing too exciting, but we could make something up, I guess.

We could start something new.

Around the time of the divorce, Leslie moved back home to Ontario, most of the country away from Vancouver.

It's far enough away that she rarely heard about the rumor, even as it continued to spread.

Jane started dating Kirk a few years later, and she remembers hearing about the rumor for the first time around then.

At that point, we understood it was a falsehood about Leslie, but we didn't realize that it was as pernicious as it was.

In 1998, Three years after the rumor started circulating, Jane and Kirk got married.

That same year, he was traded from the Canucks to to the Carolina Hurricanes, and Jane went with him to the States.

So effectively, I was leaving the jurisdiction of the rumor.

But fans noticed something about the trade.

It has to do with Jeff Brown, the other guy involved in the rumor, the defenseman who had supposedly betrayed Kirk.

Jeff was also with the Carolina Hurricanes, the team Kirk was heading to, except Just as Kirk was coming to town, Jeff got traded away.

The forums lit up.

The Hurricanes traded Jeff Brown to the Leafs one day before they acquired Kirk McLean from the Canucks.

This little fact gives the whole rumor some legit legs.

The thing about a rumor, just like any conspiracy, is that once you believe it, it becomes pretty easy to find stuff to support it.

Everything starts to look like a clue.

So, even though after just eight games with the Hurricanes, Kirk is traded again, this time to Florida, and then again to, of all teams, the New York Rangers.

None of it mattered because back home, the rumor is still alive.

The rumor is festering in Vancouver.

Only now, it's also mutating without any of the key players there to check it.

Kirk, Leslie, and Jeff?

None of them are in Vancouver.

So in 2001, when Kirk retires, hangs up his skates, and he and Jane go home to Vancouver, Jane discovers that the rumor has just been waiting there, and now it's ready to attach to her simply because she's Kirk McClain's wife.

Leslie leaves the picture.

I enter the picture.

The rumor gets assigned to me.

You know, they're overlapping who she is and I am.

We need to populate the rumor and you're it.

The rumor is like a demon.

It just needs a host.

And ever since, that's the way it's been.

Contractors, colleagues, strangers, kids at her son's school, to this day, they all think they know something about Jane.

The rumor enters the room before I do.

Jane has only publicly addressed the rumor once before, March 2015.

She and Kirk had been amicably split for years by this point, and Jane wrote a column for the National Post, a Canadian newspaper, with the title, I Was a Hockey Wife, and It Just About Killed Me.

The article was not about the rumor.

It was about Jane's life as a bride of the NHL.

Which we jokingly called no home life.

That's what NHL stood for.

At At the end of the article, there was this one line.

Just one, almost a throwaway.

Oh, I just said that I'm supposed to have had an affair with a man I never met.

Well, that lit up the Twitter sphere.

So is it just me, or does naming Jeff Brown make it seem like there's some validity to the rumor?

It's like what I said before.

When you believe a story like this, you can find a way to make anything look like a piece of evidence.

There was just tons of remarks around around that.

My favorite being, well, I happen to know for a fact she's lying.

I thought, wow, for a fact.

In this mindset, there really is no way to prove or disprove this story.

But there is a much simpler and truer explanation for what happened to the Canucks in the 90s.

To hear it, all you have to do is ask the men involved, which did.

That's next, when we come back.

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Okay,

recap.

The whole story of what happened to the Canucks in 1995 is that they should have had this incredible season because they were this fantastic team in 1994.

They almost won the Stanley Cup and the scene was set for them to do it again.

But then everything fell apart because of an infidelity in the locker room.

Crushed morale, sad Kirk traded Jeff, yada, yada.

But when you talk to the people who were there,

yeah, that's not exactly right.

Okay, remember this guy?

The power play is all that's working for the Canucks, and it only worked part-time.

The only thing worse than their performance was their luck.

That's Eric Dwyer.

He's retired now, but he reported on hockey for decades for CBC in Vancouver.

And he was there at Game 7 in 1994.

What was it like watching that game?

I guess we we were wondering when things were going to go bad.

Just inevitability, I guess, when you're a Canuck fan, you just knew it was too good to be true.

And this is what I learned from die-hard but clear-eyed Canucks fans.

What was surprising was how well the team played in 1994.

That was what was unusual, not anything that came after.

When it comes to the Canucks or comes to any team, how reasonable is that expectation that just because a team did well the last year, that they should do well the next year?

You have to have a super team to do that.

So they're kind of flopping in 1995.

That is not particularly strange.

No.

Things happen, I guess.

The expectation of the players, well, they expect more of everybody else than of themselves.

So disappointment seems to set in and

they go backwards instead of forwards.

And in 1995, the players were disappointed.

Kirk McLean, Jane Zach, the the goalie, the alleged cuckold, he certainly was.

You know, I don't think people realize what it takes out of you to get that far and to be a professional athlete.

There's a lot of pressure.

Kirk still works with the Canucks as an ambassador.

I caught him on the phone between meetings, and I asked him about something I've seen bandied about as proof that the rumor is true, that in 1995, he was depressed.

Depressed?

I'm probably depressed because we didn't win.

But it's not the depression that they're directing their their rumors at.

You know, you're upset.

You go to a war to get to a point and unfortunately can't close the deal.

So you're a little ticked off and you're a little heartbroken and you try to regroup.

And it doesn't mean that you're going to

get to the finals again.

Obviously, you never did the rest of my career.

Kirk isn't sure when he first heard the rumor.

The few times he's chatted with Leslie since he warned her about it after their divorce, it hasn't come up again.

But he was surprised to discover how much it's affected Jane in the years since their divorce.

I didn't realize that

it was such a topic whenever she was on a date or at a function and

talking with people and people bringing it up.

I didn't realize that.

How has it impacted you, this rumor?

It hasn't really.

There's something else that Kirk and I talked about, something else that throws the whole premise of the rumor into question.

It's about how the Canucks played in 1995.

You know, we didn't get to the Stanley Cup again, but I think we got into the conference finals, I think.

I'm not sure.

I can't remember that.

Everything's a blank.

I tend to forget all about that stuff.

All this talk about how bad the Canucks were in 1995, but they made it to the semifinals that year.

In fact, they also made it to the playoffs the next year.

They only stopped making it into the playoffs the season after they traded Jeff Brown.

And I did finally get to talk to Jeff Brown, the last piece of this gossip puzzle, or as he refers to it, that bullshit that went on 30 years ago.

Jeff lives in St.

Louis, Missouri now, where he played for the Blues before the Canucks.

He retired from the NHL in 1998 after one too many concussions.

And Jeff blames these for why he doesn't remember where he was the first time he heard the Canucks rumor, but he does remember his reaction to it.

Where the heck are they getting this crap from?

Like, it's just Kirk and I were friends.

I barely knew his ex-ex-wife.

That being Leslie.

As for Jane?

Yeah, no, never met Jane.

Like Kirk, Jeff doesn't hear about the rumor too often.

Certainly not in person and only occasionally online.

Some of my buddies would like joke about it and say, oh, apparently on Twitter, you slept with Curry's wife.

Is that true?

And I'm like, no, it hasn't really affected me.

Even so, Jeff does have some insight into his mysterious trade back in 1995, the thing that is held up as the longest-standing bit of proof that the rumor is true.

It turns out it did have something to do with locker room dynamics, a power struggle behind the scenes.

Only it wasn't between Jeff and Kirk.

Me and Ricky Lee didn't get along.

Rick Lee, the coach who took over in 1995 after the cup run.

Jeff got a new boss and they butted heads.

Is it something that he did off the ice or something?

Something like that.

That's between him and I.

He'll find out about it.

I was not his favorite player and then my game suffered.

Yeah, so it was time and move on.

And if you go back 30 years, that story, it's out there too.

It's online way back in 1996.

Rick Lee traded him away because the two didn't hit it off.

It's even in Eric Dwyer's reporting at the time.

Jeff Brown's days were numbered from the moment he started taking pot shots at his coach.

Lee and Brown eventually agreed to disagree in private, but they never did kiss and make up.

I just want to state the beyond obvious here.

Players having tension with their coach, players getting traded, an elite athlete being down because he lost the Stanley Cup, a team not making it to the finals two years in a row.

All of this is extremely normal.

You don't need adulterous explanations for these things.

And yet, for decades, the rumor felt more believable.

So why?

Maybe it's easier to believe that something pulls your favorite team apart than the fact that maybe the players just aren't as good as you thought they were, or that it was lightning in a bottle in 1994 and that lightning has evaporated.

Mark Lewis, the longtime and long-suffering Canucks fan, he thinks the explanation is pretty straightforward too.

Time is the enemy.

Players age.

That might simply be the reason why they didn't do as well in the following years.

But I think for a lot of sports fans and for those who

have been athletic themselves, they don't want to hear that.

That's not comforting.

You're great forever.

And your heroes are great forever.

And maybe part of it is this rumor just to help make people feel better about.

the people they idolized and they weren't forced to point their fingers at them and they were able to point their fingers elsewhere.

And it's not just the Canucks who are plagued by these kinds of rumors.

I've read a lot of threads about the rumor at this point.

The oldest was that Usenap post from 1996.

The most recent one was from this year on the Canuck subreddit.

For the older fans, why did the Canucks trade Jeff Brown?

I think it was because he slept with Kirk McClain's wife.

But I've noticed a shift with the newer threads.

Fans have started pointing out that many, many teams have lore exactly like this.

We hear the same story about countless players on every team with zero evidence.

Go to any team sub of any league of any sport and they'll have their version.

This is the story every time a player left.

Every city and every sport in the world has these stupid rumors.

And the fans making these posts are right.

These rumors are everywhere.

If you're into sports, you might have even heard a few.

In 2016, The Sportster published a listicle with the headline: The top 12 NHL players who allegedly slept with a teammate's wife.

The Canucks rumor?

It's only number 11.

Kirk told me that even the current 2024 hockey season had a rumor like this.

It's everywhere.

It's everywhere.

And it's like, come on, man.

I mean, it's just ridiculous when you start drawing this kind of stuff out.

It's been three decades since the rumor was born.

Another Stanley Cup run is just finishing off with underdogs and heavyweights, hopefuls, and favorites.

The Canucks, still in search of their first championship, made it into the playoffs again this year and again exited before making it to the finals.

Jane told me this kicked off renewed whisperings about her.

The rumor is 30 and flirty and thriving.

It's still alive.

You know, it's like some weird thing living in the New York sewer system.

Jane has spent decades living with this story, having it walk into rooms ahead of her, make the rounds, shake people's hands, whisper in their ears.

For almost 30 years, she's had to try and read strangers' faces to see if, when they hear her name, if they're thinking about the rumor.

And so she's spent a lot of time thinking about the rumor, trying to make sense of it.

This is an absurdity,

but it makes me question: what is it in human beings that needs this type of narrative?

On the one hand, she knows the answer is simple.

Because it's sensational.

It involves sex and sports.

What a combustible combination that is.

On the other, she thinks there are very specific reasons rumors like this one keep coming down on the wives.

Why people have come down so hard on her.

This fabricated rumor, it wasn't fair to anybody.

But there's a reason it wasn't the men who came to me with this story, determined to clear their names and defend their reputations.

And there's a reason sports are not the only place where this kind of scapegoating happens.

Just ask Yoko Ono.

You are being judged, and you are being judged, because we judge women very harshly for this.

And I think that's why Jane treats the rumor like she's writing a graduate thesis on it.

In order to survive sharing her life with this rumor, she's had to study it.

It's been a way for her to take back some control.

I don't know if Jane was always a philosopher, but this experience has made her one.

She's become a scholar of scarlet letters, of rumors.

Well, Bertrand Russell was the guy who said that no one gossips about other people's secret virtues.

But we do love to talk trash.

We do.

We should, I think, however, be careful when it comes to piling on when the rumor is salacious and when there's no capacity or proof.

I mean, you got to love that guy saying he knows for a fact.

You can choose how you respond to something,

and I've chosen to be edified by this.

I'm not a victim, I'm someone who's had a front-row seat at some of the core dynamics of humanity.

This is Decoder Ring.

I'm AC Rowe.

And I'm Will of Haskin.

If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at decodering at slate.com.

this episode was written reported and produced by ac row you can and you should find ac and all of her work on the cbc podcast storylines everywhere you get your podcasts this episode was edited by me and evan chung we produce decodering with katie shepherd and max friedman derek john is executive producer and merit jacob is senior technical director Storylines is part of the CBC audio doc unit.

Julia Pogle is the senior producer of audio docs.

Anna Lazowski is the senior producer of special programming at the CBC.

Thank you to Professor Frank McAndrew and everyone who voiced the forum comments.

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See you in two weeks.

Today, we're exploring deep in the North American wilderness among nature's wildest plants, animals, and

cows.

Uh, you're actually on an Organic Valley dairy farm where nutritious, delicious organic food gets its start.

But there's so much nature.

Exactly.

Organic Valley's small family farms protect the land and the the plants and animals that call it home.

Extraordinary.

Sure is.

Organic Valley, protecting where your food comes from.

Learn more about their delicious dairy at ov.coop.