Rick Westhead

Finalist for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize JOE MURPHY HAD IT ALL. In 1986, he became the first college-educated hockey player selected first overall in the NHL entry draft. He won a Stanley Cup in Edmonton four years later. But since then, his life has taken a tragic turn, largely due to the untreated brain injuries he suffered as a player. Murphy’s life didn’t begin on a track that would lead to homelessness. He was smart, dedicated to hockey and was a key player for the Oilers, Red Wings and Blackhawks, among other teams. But one vicious body check changed his life forever. Despite being shaken by the hit, Murphy was cleared to return to the game. Soon after, his entire life seemed to change. Murphy became a journeyman, moving from team to team. Along the way, other NHLers said they noticed something different about him, too. Murphy wasn’t acting like himself and soon found himself out of the NHL entirely. Eventually, Murphy became homeless. In the spring of 2018, Murphy made his way to Kenora, Ontario, where he lived in the bush, spending his days outside a local convenience store, muttering to himself and taking handouts of food and drinks from passersby. The player who had once set the NHL aflame now slept by the side of the road in the unforgiving North. In Finding Murph, Rick Westhead traces the true story of Joe Murphy and examines the role of the NHL in the downward spiral of one of the league’s most promising players.

How Joe Murphy Went From Winning a Championship to Living Homeless in the Bush

Finding Murph

A hard-hitting and powerful look at hockey's moment of reckoning in Canada, and the ways in which a game that is so universally loved has been rocked in recent years by court cases involving sexual assault and startling incidents of hazing and abuse throughout junior hockey. The allegations read like a scene out of a horror movie. Five National Hockey League players, all of them 18 to 20-year-old Canada World Juniors at the time, were alleged to have sexually assaulted a young woman in a London, Ontario, hotel room in June 2018 over several hours. When the players learned that the alleged victim had reported the incident to the police, they allegedly coerced her to drop the complaint and colluded to make sure their stories lined up. Hockey Canada kept the details of the case out of the spotlight and came to a confidential financial settlement with the plaintiff, paid out of a secret slush fund worth millions of dollars that the organization kept on hand to settle such complaints quietly. On May 26, 2022, TSN investigative reporter Rick Westhead broke the story surrounding the Team Canada junior players and Hockey Canada's handling of the case, immediately sending shock waves throughout all levels of the hockey world. Charges of sexual assault were made against the players; all of whom entered pleas of not guilty. Once the story went live on the TSN website, Westhead's inbox on X filled with messages from people who wanted to share their personal stories on how they had been impacted by hockey's toxic culture. For over three years the story ignited an enormous amount of debate and discussion across the country. Even after the players were acquitted of all charges in July, 2025, the conversation about how broken the national game had become only intensified. In We Breed Lions, award-winning journalist and bestselling author Rick Westhead does a deep-dive into the state of hockey in Canada today. He gives voice to those who have been sexually assaulted by hockey players, revealing the struggles they've had with local police officials in their efforts to seek justice. He also goes inside the dressing room to find out how attitudes of misogyny and homophobia continue to flourish, and speaks to former players who were forced to perform degrading acts of initiation in order to “be one of the guys.” Looming large in Westhead's extraordinary reporting are the gatekeepers of the game—league officials, team owners and members of the sport's governing bodies—who are reluctant to impose change from the outside and willing to sacrifice the well-being of their players and the community for profit. Westhead offers hope for hockey's future, profiling those individuals and organizations who are committed to educating players around issues of consent, putting an end to hazing and redefining what it means to be a man on and off the ice. Featuring a Foreword by bestselling author Stephen Brunt, We Breed Lions is must-reading for parents, players and all of those who love the game of hockey and want to see it get to a better place.

Rick Westhead

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