Daniel Carcillo has been talking about hockey’s dark side for a long time. Are people finally ready to listen?

It’s Carcillo’s past that makes him such an unlikely but important voice as hockey deals with its dark underbelly.

Daniel Carcillo was an agent of chaos on the ice, playing with such reckless physicality that it earned him the nickname ‘Car Bomb.’ The former winger, who spent the majority of his career with the Phoenix Coyotes, Philadelphia Flyers and Chicago Blackhawks before retiring in 2015, delivered massive hits, threw fists, agitated opponents and was suspended or fined 12 times by the league.

“I was a legit psycho on the ice,” Carcillio told For The Win via phone from his home in Chicago. “I’ve never not owned up to it. I was a homophobic, racist bully.”

For most of his career he was the embodiment of hockey’s culture of toxic masculinity. He was a brutish, punishing player on the ice, and not much better off of it, he says now.

“I was a bad person and a bad teammate,” Carcillo admits. “But I also know I wasn’t born that way. I take ownership of my actions but the league wanted a certain kind of player. They wanted me to play a certain kind of way, so that’s what I turned myself into, for the sport.”

Carcillo will the be first to tell you he deserved his reputation as a volatile, unpredictable presence.That only makes the current path he’s on, as a mental health and player advocate, all the more unlikely — and all the more important. He spent a lifetime inside hockey’s insular culture but also knows there’s a way out. He’s managed to find it, and now wants to help other players.

“What I’m doing now is so much more important than anything I’ve done in hockey because I’ve been where those guys are now,” he says. “I had no idea that you don’t actually have to feel like [expletive] all the time.”

Philadelphia Flyers left wing Daniel Carcillo (13) during the first period of Game 2 of a second-round NHL hockey playoff series in Boston on Monday, May 3, 2010. (AP Photo/Elise Amendola)

Over the past several weeks, the toxic culture surrounding hockey has faced a kind of reckoning as stalwarts of the sport and its traditional, stifling culture have fallen. First came the firing of Hockey Night in Canada fixture Don Cherry after a racist, anti-immigrant rant. Unrelated to that, the Toronto Maple Leafs fired head coach Mike Babcock for poor performance, prompting the revelation of how poorly he’d treated players like Mitch Marner and Johan Franzen. His firing also led to damning allegations of racism and physical abuse by one of his proteges, Bill Peters, who has since been fired by the Calgary Flames.

“I use this comparison all the time, but it’s like the Catholic Church,” Carcillo said. “Those three people that took the fall, that went down publicly, it gives the victims the power back. It shifts the power back to them. Those big three going down, is like finally a sign that maybe people will be held accountable for what they’ve been doing all these years.”

What started with allegations against Babcock and Peters has slowly started to snowball into a larger unearthing of hockey’s dark underbelly as more and more ex-players come forward with allegations of hazing, racism, and physical and sexual abuse. It was Carcillo that players took these stories to.

“I probably had 125 message or more in the first few days after Peters,” Carcillo said.

Already an active presence on Twitter with a history of candidly discussing the head trauma and abuse he suffered as in hockey, Carcillo has turned into someone that players don’t hesitate to put their trust in.

As the messages began to pour in, a few names started to come out, including that of minor league coach from a prominent hockey family, Brent Sutter (a former NHL coach who now coaches junior hockey in Canada).

“Several young men from the Alberta area have reached out about a Sutter brother. They wish to remain anonymous for fear of retribution from the hockey community & the old cowboy mentality that they are fighting against,” he tweeted along with a screen shot of a direct message from a former player who wished to stay anonymous.

There were other names too, like current Chicago Blackhawks coach Marc Crawford, who has been placed on leave while the team looks into allegations of abuse.

As to why he thinks players trust him to do the right thing with their stories, Carcillo has a simple answer.

“It’s because I don’t work for the NHL,” he said. “And I never plan on working for them. You have to understand, the league and those people, they hate me. But players, they don’t.”

They trust him, he said, because they see the work he’s already done, and his willingness to say what others would rather go unsaid. Over a year ago, Carcillo went public with the abuse he suffered in the OHL, which lead to a wider investigation of the league.

Philadelphia Flyers right wing Pierre-Edouard Bellemare (78) fights with Chicago Blackhawks left wing Daniel Carcillo (13) Eric Hartline-USA TODAY Sports ORG

Like the players who have reached out to him now, Carcillo also grew up inside the closed, tight-knight culture of the sport and internalized the rhetoric he was taught. Players had to be tough, they had to be physical, and they had to respect authority.

“No one ever uses ‘I.’ It’s always ‘we,” Carcillo said. “You see other guys going around, enduring that abuse, and then it’s, ‘Who am I to say, I don’t agree with that?’ It’s always for the good of the team. Always. And the last thing you want to be is a personality or a distraction because you will be blackballed. You’re done.”

It’s his unique perspective, as a guy who’s been able to come out on the other side, that has made him such a key voice as hockey culture deals with issues it has largely ignored for decades.

“I was like a lot of these guys,” Carcillo said. “I know that mentality, and how hard it is to fight against that. I’m just waking guys up. That’s not part of becoming a good hockey player. Getting hit or spit on or pissed on, that’s not what makes a good person. And anyone who does that to you does not care about you.”

Making that resonate with players is Carcillo’s next challenge, and it won’t be easy. Hockey’s culture is decades old, and made to withstand outside influence. He’s an unlikely and largely unsupported crusader.

In the days since these accusations have started to gain more traction, coaches have come forward to defend their leadership styles and players who shared stories of hazing and what would amount to physical abuse have tried to downplay what happened to them. Carcillo is fighting against a culture that perpetuated physical and emotional abuse by closing ranks; that culture is closing ranks.

Brent Sutter, for one, released a statement pointing to the “vast majority” of players on his teams having a good experience.

Former NHL player Brent Sopel also walked back a widely heard story about Crawford kicking and choking him, saying he relayed it on a podcast last year as a way to entertain listeners.

Sean Avery also downplayed abuse from Crawford — saying he “deserved it,” — and Predators coach Peter Laviolette addressed an incident where it looked like he was punching a player in the head, that has been widely shared as a GIF.

Carcillo and a few other players have tried to speak out about the dangers of normalizing the kind of physical abuse they’re alleging — everything from being hit, spit and urinated on to worse — but there’s still a large, widespread sentiment in the hockey establishment that sees some of this behavior as the price of winning.

The question of how to enact broad change weighs heavily on Carcillo. He’s heard hundreds of stories but isn’t sure where to turn next. He’s considered a class-action lawsuit against the CHL, the governing body for Canadian junior hockey, and is also exploring the idea of helping those players — who are paid — unionize to fight for more rights.

Such sweeping efforts, he knows, will be tough to sell to teenagers dreaming of making the NHL. Carcillo’s own awakening did not come until he was 25-years-old, when he entered rehab to deal with alcohol and substance abuse issues and the resulting therapy helped him see more clearly.

“It was the first time in my life that I realized that maybe the way I was being treated and being talked to, and had been talked to my entire hockey career, might not be OK,” he says.

Carcillo is careful to protect the players who have confided in him. Flyers center Nolan Patrick — the No. 2 overall pick in the 2017 draft who has not played this year due to a migraine disorder — revealed recently that he had gone to Carcillo for advice. But Carcillo, who has used plant-based medicine including CBD to help with his own issues, prefers not to speak publicly about such relationships for fear of blowback.

“I have a great relationship with younger players but I also don’t want to out players that I have talked to, because I know how the league is and they’ll hold that against them,” he says. “That’s why I shut up. My motto, is help somebody without getting found out.”

And that is what Carcillo, the guy who used to be called Car Bomb, is all about these days.

“I am a sexual-, verbal-, physical-abuse survivor and I know I can empower people to tell their story and hold people accountable and initiate healing for themselves,” he says. “That’s all I’m trying to do now, is help people.”

The last 7 months of his life, he said, have been the best 7 months of his life. And that’s including the period where he won two Stanley Cups. Buoyed by the turns his own life has taken, Carcillo wants to see change happen throughout hockey, but that doesn’t mean burning it down totally.

“That’s the biggest misconception probably,” Carcillo said. “It’s not about burning people at the stake. I just want accountability. Extreme accountability.”

As the beneficiary of multiple second chances during his career, Carcillo believes that people can change and grow but only after they’ve been held accountable.

“The end goal here with coaches? You gotta give them a second chance. The whole thing with people hating cancel culture — I think cancel culture is necessary because it holds people accountable,” he says. “It’s not about exiling people, it’s just about acknowledging they’ve done something wrong, getting them to acknowledge they’ve done something wrong, getting them the help they need and then you can come back.”

Carcillo has a platform and is eager to push his cause forward, but knows he is still a work in progress. He has spent four years in therapy, focusing on rehabilitating his brain and addressing his mood disorders while working on his impulse control. The journey for him started at 25, almost a decade ago, and he is still, every day, doing the work to undo the damage of his past self. The work he says, goes towards making him a better husband and a father for his three kids (a son, 5, and two daughters, 2 and 14 months.)

That change didn’t happen overnight, and it didn’t happen with a few weeks of league mandated sensitivity training. Carcillo had to be honest with himself, and confront the ugliness inside before he could get better. It’s the same thing, he said, that game of hockey — and those who control it — must do now.

“Everybody deserves a second chance,” he says. “Everybody. But this is a lifetime of learned behavior to undo. So it’s going to take time. It’s going to take real time.”