You could fit eight or nine hundred people in our home arena. I can just imagine teams crossing the bridge from The Pas to the reserve and seeing the arena there. They must have been shaking in their boots. It must have been a bad feeling knowing that they were going to get the shit kicked out of them in front of that hostile crowd.
We were living the life. I was one of the few guys still in school, so I’d go in the morning for two or three hours. Practice was at 12:30. We were done at 2:30. We’d show up for practice on snowmobiles and then everyone would go fishing after we were done—jump on the quads and go up the river to our ice shacks and just fish all afternoon. And we were getting paid to do it! That was probably the most fun I ever had as a hockey player. What more could a fifteen-year-old ask for? And I wasn’t even supposed to be there. It just kind of happened.
Terence and I moved in together with a couple, Rosie and Ed, who were our billet family. Rosie was a schoolteacher and Ed worked at the pulp mill. As a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old kid, moving in with a billet family is one of the most intimidating things you can do. You grew up living with mom and dad all your life, and now you have to go and live with a family that has a different structure and different rules. Every billet family is different. Some of them are warm and loving, and some of them are just in it for the money they get from the team to house and feed you. As a player, you want to try to fit in and make sure you get off on the right foot. If things don’t go well with a billet, that can be a determining factor in whether a kid wants to quit hockey or stick with it. Ideally, you want to make sure you have an environment where the family can cater to your needs and welcome you with open arms.
That’s the way it was with Rosie and Ed. They were in their late fifties, early sixties, and they had grown-up kids who had moved out of the house. We were just something to keep them busy, and they liked having us around. It was a very healthy family, and they really looked out for me and my brother.
And OCN is also where I really started pumping the booze. Every weekend was a gong show for us. I was hanging out with older guys, and when you’re part of the team, you’re part of the team—it doesn’t matter how old you are. I was in grade ten, but I was out in the bars with all of the boys. And the women. . . . We were fucking stud muffins, juggling different broads and telling stories and whatnot.
On those nights out, Terence looked after me. We liked to drink together, but I had to go to school in the morning. Some nights I would say, “Fuck it, let’s get another case and keep going.” And he’d be like a parent, and say, “Get to bed, you have to be ready for school tomorrow.” I always knew I was in good hands.
We won a championship that season, and I was named OCN’s scholastic player of the year. The truth is, because almost our whole team was nineteen or twenty years old, there were only two or three guys who were even in school. But I owe a lot to our billet Rosie, who took my education seriously because she was a teacher. I’d never really had someone hounding me to make sure I got my work done, on my ass every day, waking me up every morning, telling me it was time to go to school. And I’ll tell you this: I had no fricking interest in going to school every day. I’d much rather have been living the life like all of the other nineteen-year-olds on my team. So kudos to Rosie. As much as I hated it then, it all worked out in the end.
But the best part of that year was being away from Rankin Inlet and being with Terence. Whatever was going on back home, we would back each other up. Every conversation we had with our parents, we made sure we’d find a way to let them know that everything was good at our end. No one had to tell us that things weren’t so good at home. Terence would send a lot of his hockey money to our parents, just to please everyone and shut them up and keep them out of our hair. During his last two seasons there, after I left, he even took a side job at an auto body shop owned by the family he billeted with—Murray and Karen Haukass and their three boys, Brett, Luc, and Ty. Terence had always loved cars and he earned a little extra cash that way.
My brother’s treat for me was that, after every practice, we would go through the Tim Hortons drive-through and he would buy me a French vanilla cappuccino and a doughnut. Always the same thing, and he always paid for it. It’s one of those little things I miss. When I go to Tim Hortons now, I always have the same thing. There are times when I’m sitting in my car waiting for the order and I’m about to say something to Terence—but there’s no one sitting next to me.
Through all those years, I thought that maybe we would wind up on the same team again somewhere down the road, maybe even in the NHL. But that was the last time we ever played together.
FOUR
The Western Hockey League—known in hockey circles as “The Dub”—is the youngest of Canada’s three major junior hockey leagues, and once upon a time it was considered a poor prairie cousin of the established loops in Ontario and Quebec. But for decades now, the WHL has more than held its own, growing to include teams in the northwestern United States and becoming arguably the primary breeding ground for National Hockey League talent, especially the kind of big, bruising players who dominate the modern game. Growing up in Rankin Inlet, Jordin didn’t have any direct exposure to The Dub until he was eleven years old, when family circumstances provided an unexpected look into his future.
In 1993, my dad went to school in Medicine Hat, Alberta, to get his plumber’s trade certificate. We lived in a motel there for six months. It was just me and my mom and my dad. I did school work by correspondence and we all lived in a room the size of a living room. All I knew about the town was our motel, the street out front, and the rink where my dad played pick-up hockey with a couple of his buddies from plumbing school.
It turned out that was the same rink where the Medicine Hat Tigers played. One of his buddies saw me there with him and asked my dad if I played hockey, and he told him I did. Then, three months into our stay, a house league team asked me to come out. I was like, Fuck, yeah! I played a couple of games and I just lit it up. I wheeled around everyone and they were all saying, “Who is this kid?”
I remember going to watch the Tigers and thinking, Holy fuck, it would be awesome to play in a rink like this. It was the closest thing I had ever seen to the NHL.
One of the first things I did when I got the call from Kelly McCrimmon, telling me that I’d been drafted by the Brandon Wheat Kings, was to look up the team and see if they played in the same league as Medicine Hat. I remember thinking that I could be playing in that same league I saw as a kid if things worked out.
Kelly was the general manager and part-owner of the Wheat Kings. That’s the way it works sometimes in junior hockey. He played junior hockey and college hockey, but he never played pro. His brother, though, was Brad McCrimmon, who played in the NHL and who was coaching in the Kontinental Hockey League in Russia when he was killed in that terrible plane crash in 2011.
When I was playing for OCN in that first season after I was drafted by the Wheat Kings and then cut in training camp, Kelly would come out to watch me whenever we came south to play games in Dauphin. The next year, I knew I had a good chance to make the Wheat Kings, which I did.
It was supposed to be a big step up from the Manitoba junior league to the WHL. I’ll never forget the day I got my first paycheque. Remember, in The Pas I was making five hundred dollars a week, in cash. I figured that the WHL is a way bigger league, so you must get paid more. So when I signed my contract, I was gung-ho. Then payday came. I got a cheque for $72—and that was for two weeks. I called Terence and told him I was coming back to OCN. It was brutal. But then Kelly had me call my agent and he convinced me to stay in Brandon.
During that first season in Brandon, one of my best memories is of when I played my first game in Medicine Hat. I was skating around the rink before the game and just thinking, Fuck, I’m back here. I can’t believe this. I remember the seats were like Smarties: all different colours. This is where I had been when I was a kid.
When I was leaving after the game, I s
aw a bunch of kids standing off to the side—fifteen or sixteen years old, so the same age as I was then. A girl came up to me and said, “Jordin, do you remember me?” I didn’t know who she was. “I’m Kristen,” she said. “I played hockey with you here in Medicine Hat and these are all the other guys you played with.” Then I remembered— we had one girl on that house league team. And now here they all were. They remembered me. I thought that was pretty cool.
OFF THE ICE, my first two years in Brandon were really tough, in part because of the people I lived with. I was assigned to a billet family, which is the way it works in junior hockey. They are paid by the team to provide room and board. They had two kids who were younger than me, so their focus was on their kids and billeting me was just another income for them. At dinner or lunch, there was only enough food for them. And there was never any extra food around the house. I ended up going to my teammates’ places to hang out because at least I knew there was food there.
So, I was miserable. Everything about the situation was killing me inside. Terence was still playing with OCN in The Pas, and when he’d come down to play in Dauphin, I’d just fuck off and go watch him because I wanted to be out of that house.
In August, after my second season in Brandon, Terence came down to visit me at the house. Everyone in the family was out. There was this other billet family I knew about—the couple’s names were Neil and Jeanine. They were great people. Neil owned a golf course and a printing company, so they weren’t housing players for the money. Neil was a real hoot to be around, the life of the party. He was a family guy who enjoyed life. And Jeanine was a passionate mother who always made sure there was food on the table. Her own boys came first, but she treated her billet players like they were part of the family. They’d had a twenty-year-old player living with them the season before, so he was going to be gone because he was overage. I knew that when the new season began, the Wheat Kings would send them another player.
So I grabbed six garbage bags and I said to Terence, “Help me pack up, I’m out of here.” He said, “What are you doing?” I told him I was bringing my stuff to Neil and Jeanine’s. We were going home to Rankin Inlet for a couple of weeks, and I figured I would just leave my stuff with them and stake my claim. So we packed up everything and I called Neil and Jeanine and asked them if I could store my stuff there until I got back. They said, “Okay, but aren’t you living at Nigel and Kim’s house?” I told them I wasn’t happy there and that I was going to tell Kelly when I got back. Of course, Kelly caught wind of it before that and said, “No way you’re going to move where you want to go.”
By this time I was a star with the team, and I wasn’t afraid of using my status to my advantage. So when I returned to Brandon I didn’t even call my old billets. I had no contact with them. I was done. Instead, I walked into Neil and Jeanine’s house and they said, “You need to call Kelly right now.” I got on the phone with him and he blasted me: “Who the fuck do you think you are?” I told him that I didn’t like it over there. I told him: “This is where I want to live; I’m going to live here. End of story.” I know now how immature and selfish that was, but I didn’t care about anyone else. I was telling the general manager what I was doing—as a kid—and who does that?
But in the end I got my way and ended up staying with Neil and Jeanine, and life was great. I ended up there for the last two years of junior. Their place was out in the country a little bit and they had two boys who were a little younger than me, and everything just clicked perfectly. I was a lot happier, and they were a stable family. Slowly I started opening up to them. They had a better understanding of me and the shit I’d been through. It was like a weight lifted off my shoulders. They actually cared about me. I realized they would go to war for me. I felt loved. I felt part of a family again. I have to thank them for giving me the opportunity to open up and be myself.
THERE WAS ANOTHER THING I liked about my new billets: they loved having parties. Sometimes we’d have team parties at their place, so I figured it would be the perfect spot for me, because by then partying had become a big part of my life.
I was fourteen when I first tried alcohol. It was just us kids drinking out behind a building in Rankin Inlet. I’d be watching my parents drink: it’s a Friday night, Dad’s getting off work, and it’s building up. So I’d steal a couple of shots just to warm up the blood a bit. Then in The Pas, when I was playing for OCN, I hung out with Terence and the older guys and could do pretty much whatever I wanted, which included a lot of drinking.
When I got to Brandon, for the first two years I was still in high school, so I was a bit controlled and life at a billet home is structured. But even then, every once in a while I would get fucking blasted. At the beginning I was really shy, except when we had team parties. Then I would light ’er up and stories would start getting out. But all of those stories would go away after I scored a hat trick.
Then during the last two years of junior, because I was out of school, an older guy, and a top player, I figured I could get away with a lot. Which I did.
The way people drink back home influenced my drinking when I went down south. It was always drink until you’re drunk, drink your sorrows away so you don’t fucking have any pain and you don’t remember anything and you just forget about everything. Up in Rankin, you drink until the last drop’s gone, and then you find someone else with booze. You figure out the consequences later. That’s the way I was.
Not that anyone in Brandon would have understood that. They thought I was the life of the party. I was on top of the world. I was playing junior hockey in a place where it was the biggest game in town, I was the best player on my team, the leading scorer, and drinking was already second nature to me. I figured that no one was ever going to give me shit about what I did off the ice, and if they did I’d fucking prove them wrong. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life.
In Brandon I could always find friends to party with, and I always thought I could handle my booze. I was a guy who drank a lot, but I wasn’t a guy who would start fighting when I drank. I was a happy drunk. I had seen all the negativity and anger in my family when they started drinking, and I didn’t fucking want to be like that.
I felt invincible; I was scoring goals and leading my team and the fans loved me. The fans didn’t know anything about my other life; they didn’t know that I partied hard. Only my teammates and friends knew. My parents didn’t know—if they had, they’d have fricking killed me. They would have told me that I was disgracing our family name and shit like that.
I knew that when push came to shove, hockey made up for anything I did in my personal life. I was fucking dominant on the ice. If I stayed dominant, the people running the team didn’t care about anything else, because ultimately you’re there for hockey. So I was living two lives. And as for my billets, it was like this: I’d bring a case of beer home and they’d say, “What are you doing?”
I’d tell them that I was going to sit in the basement and have a few beers.
“No, you’re not.”
“Fuck you, I’m not. I am. Fucking don’t tell me what to do.”
And that was that.
My standard routine was to pick up a twelve-pack and get half cut. If we had team parties it was like, “Toots is just going to get ripped tonight. Fucking A.” And in the off-season, when my brother was around with our buddies, it was four- or five-day benders. Party all night, sleep all day, regroup, do it again, send home a couple grand to shut my parents up for the week, then back at it again. Life was good.
As a hockey player, I could get away with it. I knew I was good and that compensated for whatever else I did. If I went out partying and missed curfew—fuck it, I’m going to score two goals and three assists tonight, so that will block everything out. And that’s exactly what happened. In juniors I would party hard and be fucking hung over, but I just battled through it during games because, growing up, I was mentally tough. I battled through a lot of shit because that was in my blood. Even when I
turned pro, it was the same thing: play five or seven minutes in a game, get in a couple of fights, and it’s all good.
I got called into the office by Kelly McCrimmon countless times. I had countless battles with him. It got to the point where it became one long fuck-you match. I remember one time specifically the Tragically Hip was in town to play on a Saturday night. Kelly scheduled a practice for eleven o’clock on Sunday morning because he didn’t want the guys who were going to the concert to stay out all night. Of course, I went to the concert and ended up meeting a broad and didn’t even go home. I slept through practice. Well, fuck, I woke up in this broad’s house and it was 12:30. There were a bunch of missed calls on my phone from Kelly, and the assistant coach, and my agent. I went home to my billets and they were worried sick. They told me I needed to go see Kelly right away. I called my agent first and gave him the lowdown. And then I called Kelly and he lashed out at me, said I’d better get my ass down to the rink right away. So, of course, I was in panic mode—and not for the first time. I was shitting my pants. But when I got there, I sure didn’t act that way.
Kelly pulled me into his office and started yelling: “What the fuck are you doing? We’re going to send you home! This is not right! We’re taking the A (for alternate captain) off of you! You’re not a good leader!” He told me he was suspending me for a week for partying and missing practice. I said, right to his face, “You’re sending me home? Then trade me right fucking now. I’m out of here; I’m done. You’re not going to tell me what to do. I’m the man here. I’m the fucking leading scorer, and I’ve got a beautiful girl by my side.” I was so pissed off I was going to fight three guys that night—fight, do my shit, get half cut, and it’s all good. That was my attitude. And, of course, there was no way they were going to trade me. They needed me.
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