Akim indicated not, but “guys have jokingly … and that’s the way I took it … ‘the eight-ball.’”Īliu also held back from the media the fact that Windsor police asked his parents if they wanted to press charges against Downie - because Aliu was 16 at the time, it was his parents’ call, but he told them he didn’t want this to go to court and they acquiesced. Another: Steve Riolo asked about any racial slurs. Akim said it was not Steve D but another veteran he would name names as he did not want a player sitting in the stands. One note read: Mantha asked if Steve Downie spat on the floor and asked to clean it up. Notes taken by the Windsor front office during its internal investigation at the time indicate that he declined to name some of his teammates involved in hazing. He aired out the whole hazing incident - or at least most of it, anyway. With the video everywhere, Aliu spoke his piece with the media. What the video didn’t capture was an incident earlier in practice, when Downie skated up to Aliu and cross-checked the rookie in the face, bloodying him and knocking out seven teeth. In the clip, Aliu swings wildly Downie pulls Aliu’s sweater off and connects with a bunch of right hands. A cameraman for a local television station grabbing some footage at Spitfires practice happened to catch a wild fight between Aliu and a veteran, Steve Downie, a first-round pick of the Philadelphia Flyers. Three weeks after the hazing on the bus, a video showed up on the news, first in Windsor, then nationally, and soon thereafter on YouTube. The arena became his safe place and comfort zone. When he started playing minor hockey, his parents bought him a pair of second-hand skates and a hockey bag of well-used equipment for $50 and teams found ways to wave fees and carpool him to games. Aliu didn’t speak English at first, which made him the target of bullying, even though he soon grew a head taller than kids in his class. Born in Lagos, he’d spent years of his youth in Kiev before moving to Toronto, where he grew up in hard-scrabble circumstances, his family living on welfare for a time. He was the son of a Nigerian father and a Russian mother. People who knew Aliu before he arrived in Windsor knew he was a kid who always stuck up for himself. He also wasn’t going to suffer that treatment in silence. Aliu didn’t like it one bit and refused to play along. In 2005, Akim Aliu was a sixth-overall pick in the OHL draft beginning his first year with the Windsor Spitfires, when a bunch of older players forced four rookies to strip and locked them all in the cramped bathroom at the back of the team bus on the drive back from a pre-season road trip.
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