For Theo Fleury, there's life in a country song

To Theo Fleury, the ongoing unravelling of Johnny Manziel’s NFL career is more than just a story he’s following.

“I’ve been there,” says Fleury. “I’ve done it. I’ve seen it.

“It was the same with Tiger Woods a while back, with a little different circumstances. It was painful to watch. I was watching my own movie.”

At a decade on since the effective end of his pro hockey career and the beginning of his sobriety, you could say Fleury at 48 years old has changed the reel on his own particular film. For a guy who says “I got everything from hockey,” he has moved off into new directions as a writer, an advocate and public speaker for mental health and healing, and now via a country music project that is growing louder. On the back of his release last fall of debut LP "I Am Who I Am," Fleury and his Death Valley Rebels bandmates are readying for a busier season including a six-night Western Canada tour in early March, with more dates later in the year.

“Let’s see how these first few months go, see how people dig it,” he told Yahoo Canada Sports in Toronto. “But the music is more in line with the message for me. If I played in front of 10 people I’d be happy, cause I know that seven of them have experienced trauma. If I can reach out to one soul and give them hope and inspiration to change their lives, that’s what it’s all about.”

The band plays a rather no-nonsense country, the sort of thing Fleury grew up listening to on the Prairies, but it’s his straightforward delivery and the lacerating honesty of the storytelling that gives it lift. “I have all the answers / It’s the questions I can’t see,” he croaks in the title track – “that’s what makes it believable for me,” he says. “It wasn’t written by five guys in a room. It comes from me.”

It took Fleury a while to get there, including dealing with depression after the end of his hockey playing days. The epiphany came in two stages around his 2009 autobiography with writer Kirstie McLellan Day, who pulled out of him pretty much every sad detail – not just a sports story, but one that chronicled in detail his struggles with substance addictions, sexual abuse, thoughts of suicide.

“I didn’t think I’d reveal as much as I did … I didn’t really have any expectations, other than I just wanted to put all this stuff on paper, take one last look at it and put it in the past.”

Instead, he was booked to a nationwide promotional tour – “four days before, I was shitting my pants; 'what the hell did I just do?'" – starting with a bookstore filled with 400 on the first night in Toronto.

“Out of the corner of my eye I spot this guy, he’s got my book clutched against his chest and his face is buried in the floor and he’s walking pretty slow. I followed him. He gets to the front of the line, puts his book on the table, looks me in the eye and says, ‘Me too.’ And that’s sort of when I knew what the rest of my life was going to look like. I’ve had over 500, a thousand people since that first ‘me too’ say ‘me too’ as well.”

As a survivor, a chronicler and something of a counsellor now, with a second book out and speaking engagements that include the conference that brought him to Toronto, Fleury’s come through territory few athletes negotiate. It makes him uniquely qualified to relate to the the sort of hellish lows that Manziel is going through, and how anyone could begin to climb out from such a spot.

“It’s about getting to the core of it, peeling all the layers of the onion off. Why am I doing this? Why am I hurting people? Why am I disappointing people? But unfortunately the last person that can see their lives going down the drain is themselves.

“Trauma has to go somewhere in your body, it stores itself there. That’s sort of what’s happened to him (Manziel). He’s tried to be so strong on the outside – I like to call it the lipstick. When you hold that stuff in for a long time you get sick. I got sick. I have Crohn’s from holding in all that stuff for so long.”

Of course he has a song for it: “Sick As Your Secrets,” it's called. For Fleury, it's not just art imitating life – it is his life.