‘I inherited the rumour’: How a false NHL affair story rewrote one woman’s life

It’s been more than 30 years since the Vancouver Canucks lost Game 7 of the 1994 Stanley Cup Final by a single goal. For many fans, that near-miss was bittersweet proof the team was on the cusp of greatness.

But when the Canucks came back the next year and stumbled, and a popular defenceman was abruptly traded away, the disappointment demanded an explanation. And that’s when a rumour began.

A story took hold among fans that Canucks defenceman, Jeff Brown, had an affair with the wife of goalie Kirk McLean — wrecking team chemistry and setting the franchise adrift. 

The rumour wasn’t true. But Jane Macdougall, a former broadcaster and current regular contributor to The Globe and Mail, says she’s been dealing with the fallout of the rumour for three decades.

Though she wasn’t even married to McLean at the time the story was said to have taken place, she quickly became the rumour’s most visible and enduring scapegoat.

“In some people’s estimation I wasn’t just a homewrecker,” she told CBC Radio’s Storylines in 2024. “I was a franchise wrecker.”

The gossip followed her from social events to school yards, warped perceptions of her character, and outlasted every effort to debunk it. 

But since retelling the story on Storylines, she says something has shifted. Some people — including those who had once passed along the rumour themselves — reached out to apologize.

The 1994 heartbreak

It all began with a heartbreak. On June 14, 1994, the Canucks made it to Game 7 of the Stanley Cup Final against the New York Rangers. The Canucks lost by a single goal. But as the team returned to Vancouver, the sentiment was clear: next year, they’d win it all.

That didn’t happen. In 1995, the team floundered. Chemistry vanished. Star players seemed off. And then, in the middle of the season, Brown was suddenly traded away.

“When fans don’t understand what’s happening, they need to find an explanation,” said Macdougall.

That explanation took the form of a rumour: that Brown had slept with McLean’s first wife, Lesley Shaddock — causing a rift in the team and ultimately resulting in Brown’s trade. It’s unclear where the rumour began, but by 1996 it had spread by word of mouth, then onto hockey message boards, chat rooms, and eventually to Reddit.

Shaddock, who now lives in Ontario, said the rumour had no basis in fact. She remembers hearing about the rumour from McLean himself, after they had separated.

“I actually laughed the first time I heard it,” Shaddock said. “It was just so silly.”

Macdougall says she didn’t know McLean during the Canucks’ ’94 playoff run. They started dating a few years after he and Shaddock divorced, married in 1998, then divorced some years later. 

The rumour had been circulating for a few years already, but Macdougall believes that once she married McLean the story simply “attached itself” to her.

“I had inherited the rumour,” she said. “The rumour is like a demon — it just needs a host.”

Before long, the rumour began surfacing in Macdougall’s everyday life. She pegs the frequency of someone asking her outright or making a reference about it at around once a month.

Colleagues made comments. A contractor doing work for Macdougall overheard his construction crews discussing it. Macdougall’s children, she says, were bullied over it in elementary school.

“My son would get into fights on the playground,” she said. “And the things they were saying were just things they were parroting that their parents had said.”

A theory that won’t go away

Macdougall, Shaddock, McLean and Brown have all said the rumour is entirely false. Brown told Storylines he had “barely met” either of McLean’s former wives.

“It’s just still out there and it’s just so stupid,” he said. 

Brown believes the 1995 trade was simply the result of a personality clash with then-head coach Rick Ley. CBC reporting at the time corroborated the ongoing tension between the two. 

But even then, the rumour has endured.

McLean himself — now an ambassador for the Canucks — said that while the team’s stumble in 1995 felt inexplicable to fans after their near-win in 1994, it made perfect sense to the players themselves.

“I don’t think people realize what it takes out of you to get that far,” McLean said. “You’re heartbroken. And you try to regroup, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to get to the finals again.”

A familiar tale

As hockey fans know, the Canucks aren’t the only team whose fans have built elaborate lore around dramatic betrayals.

Online sports forums reveal similar stories of star players traded after supposed affairs, and the resulting rifts caused by locker-room drama.

One of the most infamous involved NBA superstar LeBron James, with unfounded rumours that first surfaced in 2010 speculating he had an affair with his former Cleveland Cavaliers teammate Delonte West’s mother Gloria James. 

More recently, social media in early 2024 lit up with unverified claims that the NHL’s Chicago Blackhawks terminated forward Corey Perry’s contract after he had an inappropriate relationship with the mother of star rookie Connor Bedard. Perry described the rumours as “a bunch of B.S. on the internet.”

In both cases, the players and team management publicly shut down the stories. 

But why do they stick? Mark Lewis, a Vancouver lawyer and lifelong Canucks fan, says stories like this can be emotionally convenient for fans.

“Maybe it’s easier to believe that something pulls your favourite team apart than that the players just aren’t as good as you thought,” he said.

For Macdougall, the hardest part was the way people clung to parts of the rumour, even when faced with the facts.

“There was just tons of remarks,” she said. “My favourite being, ‘Well, I happen to know for a fact she’s lying.’ I thought, wow. For a fact?”

‘I’m not a victim’

After sharing the story last year on Storylines, Macdougall says many people either wrote or spoke to her, saying they had known about the rumour, in some cases for many years.

She said the acknowledgements generally fell into two categories: “Those who were giving me a pass, and those who claimed they never believed it.”

“Giving me a pass” meant that they believed the rumour, but chose not to hold it against her. “They decided it was something from my ‘errant youth,’ and chose to overlook it,” she said.

But for Macdougall, that quiet tolerance was its own form of judgment. The rumour had shaped how people saw her, even if they didn’t say it out loud.

While she says going public hasn’t “made a wholesale change in the weather,” it did bring relief.

“There’s a wonderful feeling for going on the record and dispelling what was designed to be harmful,” she said.

Macdougall has spent years reflecting on what fuels this kind of gossip. 

“I’m not a victim. I’m someone who’s had a front row seat at some of the core dynamics of humanity,” she said. 

“We judge women very harshly.”