At a town hall style event that was streamed live, Chicago Blackhawks owner and chairman Rocky Wirtz was asked what changes the team has made to protect players going forward.
This is a more than fair question, considering the overwhelming storyline for the Blackhawks this past year has been the 2010 sexual assault of player Kyle Beach by video coach Brad Aldrich.
Beach spoke publicly in 2021 about the assault and his experiences in the aftermath, when the Blackhawks made an organizational decision to wait to act on Beach’s accusation until after the playoffs in 2010. Then after winning the Stanley Cup, when Aldrich resigned in the face of the allegation, the team allowed him to participate in the championship celebration.
So, considering the town hall was ostensibly focused on the team’s vision moving forward, reporters Mark Lazerus (The Athletic) and Phil Thompson (Chicago Tribune) attempted to ask very reasonably what the organization had done to help ensure that kind of failure doesn’t happen again.
For lack of a better description, Wirtz completely lost it.
Here’s the full segment/video. Just ridiculous from Rocky Wirtz. pic.twitter.com/9k9QxKW0gI
— Wally Mazurek (@WallMaz35) February 3, 2022
That’s CEO (and Rocky’s son) Danny Wirtz attempting to defuse the situation and talk about what changes the team had made, only to be cut off by his father who declared the topic off-limits.
It even more absurd when Thompson attempted to follow up:
And now he goes after @_phil_thompson. Absolutely insane from Rocky Wirtz. Smh. pic.twitter.com/dMHYOHUbkQ
— Wally Mazurek (@WallMaz35) February 3, 2022
That’s absolutely wild behavior by a team owner/executive. Pivoting towards comparing the state of the Tribune sports page with his own team’s institutional failure to protect a player from sexual assault is unhinged. Not only was Wirtz completely out of line, choosing to clamp down so hard when asked what changes the team had made to protect players makes it very, very hard to believe that the Blackhawks have learned the right lessons here.
Perhaps that’s part of why they issued an apology so quickly:
Rocky Wirtz apologizes in a statement for having "crossed the line." pic.twitter.com/83ZdwOmcBj
— Mark Lazerus (@MarkLazerus) February 3, 2022
Thompson and Lazerus both shared that Wirtz had apologized privately as well:
For the record, he did the same with me. https://t.co/a1wLvdHwbU
— Mark Lazerus (@MarkLazerus) February 3, 2022
But at that point, it’s hard to look at a crafted statement of apology that promises the team has the right leaders in place when the chairman of the entire organization was so quick to melt down over simple and fairly-framed questions in a public town hall. Words shouted into a microphone tend to speak loudest.
