Healing from Hate by Michael Kimmel

Author:Michael Kimmel
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520292635
Publisher: University of California Press

While he talked, I snuck glances at the other lost souls of the Badlands. Not ten feet away from us, a man who looked like a corpse unzipped his pants and plunged a needle into his penis. The horror registered on my face. My homeless helper followed my eyes to the man, now slumped against the wall, a blissful look on his face, the needle hanging limply from his dick. “Only veins he’s got left,” the beggar said. He flicked his index finger hard against the pulsing vein in my right arm. “You got nothing to worry about. You got great veins.”

I was still staring at the corpse man, thinking, “At least I ain’t that bad,” when I felt the needle prick my skin. Three seconds later, I gladly would’ve shoved a three-foot needle up my dick, through both balls, and all the way north until it came out my eye if that’s what it took to stay feeling the way I felt when that heroin rocketed through my body. Mainlined directly into a vein, heroin is fucking nirvana. It’s a feeling you can’t possibly imagine until you’re inside it. Unfortunately, it’s a feeling you can’t ever forget once you’ve been there.9

Jessica left him, and took their daughter with her. Distraught, he checked into rehab, and when he finally stopped stealing other people’s meds to get high, he started to stop. He started to get clean.

It was sports again that helped him turn his life around, turn it back toward his family and toward a self he now barely recognized. He saw his experiences in prison as a kind of template around which he could work with young people of different races. If sports could break down some of the hatred that he was carrying around under those tattoos, maybe it could work for other kids.

The big break came by accident. In 1996 he was invited to speak at an Anti-Defamation League (ADL) luncheon event. By chance—or celestial design—he was seated next to Jay Snider, whose father, Ed, just happened to own the Flyers. They talked hockey most of the afternoon, ignoring everyone else at the party. Frankie offered an idea of using hockey as a way to build relationships among different groups of kids. “Like taking kids from different backgrounds and coaching them in hockey, but also coaching them in life,” he says. Frankie had stumbled on one of the most venerable axioms of social psychology: the contact hypothesis. Want to break down stereotypes? Put different people together and give them a common task.

The problem was that hockey is expensive. Really expensive. This isn’t soccer in some Brazilian favela where all you need is a ball and a place to kick it. There are skates and pads and uniforms and sticks and helmets and ice time. It’s more expensive than skiing. And it’s just about the whitest sport there is.

Joined by the ADL regional director, Snider approached the Flyers’ front office. Within a week, Frankie enlisted a local lawyer

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