[greekbeast]

November 16, 2009

In Fleury’s Memoir, Rangers Years Are a ‘Nightmare’

By JEFF Z. KLEIN

When Theo Fleury was a Ranger, he said, he would stay out all night drinking, doing cocaine, going “below the streets of New York City” to “party with freaks, transvestites, strippers” or to “hang out with homeless guys around a burn barrel” on the West Side piers.

He substituted Gatorade or his baby boy’s urine for his own in drug tests until, finally, he had to take a break from hockey to enter a substance-abuse program. Much of his time as a Ranger, from 1999 to 2002, he remembers as a “nightmare.”

On Tuesday, Fleury will appear at a Manhattan bookstore in support of his memoir, “Playing With Fire,” which was published last month and is the No. 1 nonfiction book in Canada.

The book, which rocked the hockey world as surely as Andre Agassi’s recent memoir rocked tennis, is best known as the place where Fleury finally disclosed that as a 14-year-old player in Western Canada, he was sexually abused by Graham James, a once-respected junior league coach. James was sentenced to three and a half years in prison in 1997 for sexually abusing players.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/sp...r=1&ref=sports