That could have been the point when I called it quits and said, Fuck it, I don’t want to play hockey anymore. It would have been an easy out: I don’t want to play hockey because I lost my brother. But I knew that Terence would have wanted me to keep going. He said so in the note he left for me. Every time I stepped onto the ice, I just felt the presence of my brother, his spirit.
FROM THE FIRST GAME of the season in Brandon, when the crowd gave me that great welcome, until the beginning of December, I was fucking on fire. I scored 5 points in my first game back, and in the first 35 games of the season I had 25 goals and 57 points. I was the leading goal scorer in the whole league. The WHL is a tough place, and there I was, a guy who was only supposed to be a fighter, ahead of everyone in points. I was playing unreal hockey, and that gave me a legitimate shot at playing for Team Canada in the World Junior Championship, which was being held in Halifax at the end of that year.
The season before, I’d been invited to the evaluation camp for the World Juniors but hadn’t made the team. This time it was a no-brainer. I was the best player in the league, playing on the first line for the Wheat Kings. I went to the World Juniors camp and played a few exhibition games, and I was crushing guys while staying out of the penalty box. I started out in the fourth or fifth line in the camp rotation, but as I started to light it up—and the fans loved it—I moved up the ladder. By the last couple of days of training camp, when they’d make the final cuts, I knew I had a pretty good chance of making the team.
My roommate at that camp was Derek Roy, who played junior hockey with the Kitchener Rangers and who had been drafted by the Buffalo Sabres. We both watched as players got cut and went home. Finally, it was the last day, when the final cuts would be made and the team would be named, and we were still there. They told us we’d get a phone call.
I’ll never forget that day. We woke up at six o’clock in the morning, because we knew that they always deliver the news, good or bad, really early. The phone in the hotel room rang at about 6:45. I look at Roysy and said, “Do you want to pick it up?”
He said, “No, you pick it up.”
That’s how nervous we were. So I picked up the phone and it was the coach, Marc Habscheid. “Is this Toots or Roysy?” he asked.
“It’s Toots,” I told him.
“Congratulations. You’ve made the team.”
I was all smiles. And then he asked to talk to Roysy. It was a little tense there for a second, until he found out that he’d made the team, too. We started fist-pumping at each other and hooting and hollering. What a great feeling.
That tournament changed everything for me. I played at a level I had never played at before, and the hockey world noticed. I think that without that tournament, people across Canada would never have gotten to know me the way they did. I was a great story—an Inuk kid from the Far North, playing for Canada—and it became national news. And, of course, for the territory of Nunavut it was a big fucking deal, having one of its own guys playing for Team Canada. As a tribute, I wrote the word “Nunavut” on the sticks I used in the tournament games. And I could feel Terence looking down at me the whole time. I remember thinking that he would have been there. He would have left his junior team to come and watch the games because that’s how proud he would have been of me.
Our team had a great lineup. Out of that whole group, I think there are only seven guys now who haven’t played in the NHL. Marc-André Fleury was the number-one goalie and he had a fantastic tournament. And then there were Joffrey Lupul, Kyle Wellwood, Carlo Colaiacovo, and a bunch of others. A lot of them were guys I had played against already—or would play against later in my career—and we still run into each other and share that bond. That’s one of the things that’s great about the hockey world. Those relationships last. You can be friends with a guy you played with in juniors and see him ten years later and you don’t miss a beat. It’s a pretty special feeling.
The other teams had some future stars, too—including a seventeen-year-old playing for Russia who no one had ever heard of before named Alexander Ovechkin.
But frick, we were just kids back then. The shit that we did. . . . We were horny young men. We were in Halifax and we had every goddamned girl hitting on us. What are you going to do? Let’s start slaying these broads. And it wasn’t just one-onone action. A few of the guys would get a couple of girls after practice and head into one of the rooms. Enough said.
At the beginning of the tournament I don’t think any of us really realized what was at stake, and how much pressure there was on us to win. I didn’t really understand that until after the gold-medal game. We went undefeated through the preliminary round and then beat the Americans 3–2 in the semifinals. The Russians were undefeated as well when we met them in the finals. Of course, Canada versus Russia has been the big hockey rivalry going all the way back to 1972. It felt like the whole country was watching us.
It was nuts in the arena. When we scored a goal, I thought my eardrums were going to explode. We were up 2–1 going into the third period. The boys were pretty relaxed. But then— boom, boom—the Russians scored two goals and it was all over. We lost 3–2.
I was on the ice for the last shift of the game. I’ll never forget looking over at my best friend, Scottie Upshall, right after the game ended. He was the captain of that team. He’d scored the second goal of the game. I’d known him since Spruce Grove, when we’d played on a select team together. We have been buddies ever since. The game was over, we’d lost, and Scottie was bawling his eyes out. Holy fuck. That’s when I realized that we’d let this game slip away in our home country. I had never seen Scottie like that, before or since. It’s heartbreaking, as a teenage kid, to let your country down. You’re playing in the biggest tournament of your life. All of that raw emotion from the fans is just pouring down on you and then that buzzer goes off and you realize that you’ve failed—not only failed your teammates, but failed your country.
Everyone remembers how the Russians celebrated—on our turf. I was standing on the ice, watching them, and then looking at the other guys on our team. No one had to say it. We were thinking, Fuck these guys. Let’s fucking beat them up right now. I know that was my instinct. Look at this fucking donkey riding his stick down the ice. Fuck him. But I had to keep it together because if I did something stupid, that would be it for me ever representing Canada again.
If that had happened in a normal junior game, that guy riding his stick would have wound up in the hospital.
My popularity blew up after that tournament. I only scored one goal and one assist, but all the reporters said that I was the fans’ favourite Canadian player because of the style of hockey I played, because I would hit anything that moved. Things just skyrocketed from there and carried over into the rest of the season with the Wheat Kings. Suddenly my name was all over the place. I was crushing guys left and right, playing good old Canadian hockey, and the people in the arena and watching on television loved it. It felt like it happened overnight. The nation of Canada took me under its wing and I rode that wave for the whole two weeks of the tournament. Everywhere I went, people were praising me. I said, “Okay, relax, I’m just a regular guy like anyone else.”
That was by far the highlight of my career thus far: being part of Team Canada and that whole experience. No one can ever take that away from me. I can tell my kids one day that I represented this great country. We didn’t win the gold medal but that didn’t change the way people felt about me. That tournament really put my name on the map, and Tootoo became a household name in a lot of places.
WHEN I RETURNED to Brandon after the tournament, it felt like everything had changed. In every arena I played in after the World Juniors, every barn in The Dub, people were applauding me, even when I was on the visiting team. Fans would stand around waiting for me after games. Oh my God, it was unbelievable. I was getting gifts from other teams, congratulating me, when the Wheat Kings would go to their rink to play them. It was amazing.
But the
best reaction came from other First Nations people. I remember going to play in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, and three-quarters of their fans were Aboriginal people from the reserves around there. They gave me a gift from the reserve; it was one of their traditional blankets with some special designs on it, plus some sweetgrass. When I scored a goal the place erupted, even though I was playing for the Wheat Kings. After the game there were so many fans waiting around our bus that we needed extra security. I was fucking loving it.
I’m very thankful to have a following like that among Aboriginal people. I can’t really express those feelings in words. The way I like to say thank-you to them is to actually visit them and make time to sign autographs until the last person has got his autograph or picture. I don’t want people to be shy to come up to me. This profession doesn’t last forever and those kinds of things don’t last forever. I want to enjoy it while it’s happening and thank the Aboriginal people for letting me be a role model to them. Little do they know that they’re what inspires me. I want to be a better professional for them, both on and off the ice.
I’m an Inuk, but I identify strongly with all First Nations people. I think there are a lot of similarities among us, no matter what part of the country we come from. We are very loyal to our traditions, our culture, and our people. We’re small town–oriented individuals who have a simple life and enjoy it, rather than having all of these materialistic things. We draw a lot from our roots. When I go to these Aboriginal communities and reserves, those are the similarities I see to the place where I grew up.
I’m not really a political person but I do believe that First Nations people run as one, and we just want to be treated equally. It doesn’t matter what colour skin you have or where you come from. We’re all human beings and we want to be treated the way everyone should be treated—and that’s fairly and equally, and not being judged.
IT WASN’T JUST the hockey fans in Canada who noticed me during the World Juniors tournament. I also grabbed the attention of David Poile, the general manager in Nashville, and the Predators coaching staff. They already liked me enough to have drafted me and they had liked what they saw of me in training camp. But I think that when they saw me in the tournament, it gave them an entirely different sense of my potential, of what kind of player I could be in the NHL. I won’t say it was a no-brainer for the Preds to give me every opportunity to make the team the following year just because of that tournament, but they definitely saw something there and that carried over to camp the next fall.
I finished the season in Brandon with 74 points in 51 games—tied for the team lead even though I missed a bunch of time because of the World Juniors. I also had 216 penalty minutes, which was a lot, but there were guys in the league with way more than that. I was learning to control when I fought and when I didn’t fight, to make better decisions, which made me a more valuable player. If you look at my statistics, I was a plus-13 that year. That tells you how much I was contributing.
I was a leader on that team. I’m not the most vocal guy, but I try to lead by example. Being a leader means that, when times are tough, your teammates need to be able to lean on you and be open to talking about issues. This applies not just in the hockey world but away from hockey as well. Not every player has the balls to go up to the coach and talk about certain situations. That’s what your leaders are for. I admit I wasn’t the greatest at the vocal part. Other guys like Ryan Craig and Brett Thurston played that role. But my teammates always knew where to find me when we were on the ice and things got tough.
We won our division, but were beaten by Red Deer in the third round of the playoffs. Those were great teams in Brandon, but it always seemed like we couldn’t get past Red Deer. We were up 3–1 in that series. That’s when I broke my first rib—right underneath my collarbone. It was just a freak accident. In game five I kind of swiped at a guy behind our net and it just popped. After the game, we were jumping on the bus to head back to Red Deer and I was in fricking pain. I could barely breathe. But I ended up fighting through it and playing through it. I wasn’t 100 percent but I didn’t want to let my teammates down, so I didn’t say anything about it to anyone. It was a battle. But that’s what makes the playoffs fun. I went to the doctors after the series and they said, “Gee, you were pretty lucky. If that bone had actually cracked, it probably would have cut one of your main arteries and you would have been done in two minutes—and you wouldn’t even have known what hit you.” It was a surreal moment, hearing that. Thank God that didn’t happen.
I may be the first Inuk to make it to the NHL, but my people have been making a living on the ice for a long time. Above is my father beside a muskox he brought down. Below is my first regular-season fight in the NHL, against Mike Danton. Life on the ice can be dangerous and you have to respect that. But you never show fear.
My family has always meant the world to me. The people around you are the people who shape who you are. Above are my parents at their wedding. To the right are the three of us kids in the kitchen in Rankin. That’s Terence on the left and Corrine on the right. I’m the little guy in the middle. And below, that’s the three of us, all grown up, at Corrine’s wedding.
You don’t get anywhere in life without dreaming. Here I am (above) as a little kid just thrilled to be playing minor hockey on indoor ice. Below, I’m standing on the blue line in Halifax as part of Team Canada. To be identified as a guy who can help the best players in the country win gold is an unbelievable honour.
I think about my big brother every day. Growing up, he always had my back. I cherished my time playing junior hockey with him as well. Even though we were far from home, we were together almost around the clock. We always had the same dream, and that is something I still think about.
You know you have a problem when what you’re doing off the ice affects your job. I took things to extremes in the bars in Nashville, and while I could still mix it up when the puck dropped, I knew I was not the hockey player I could have been back then.
When my contract was up in Nashville, I felt it was time to leave. But I always remained grateful to the Predators, both for drafting me and supporting me during a dark time. Below is coach Barry Trotz with my parents. For whatever reason, I never felt like a close-knit part of the team in Detroit. It can be tough to play an emotional game like hockey at its highest level when the bonds aren’t as close.
I have been through some tough times, but I never lose sight of how lucky I am. I have some great friends and family. That’s me with my old teammate Scottie Upshall, back when we were teammates in Nashville (above) and with Brian McGrattan at my wedding (right). Most important, I was lucky enough to get married in the summer of 2014. That’s me with Jennifer on our wedding day, with my mother and father.
Life as a pro hockey player isn’t all glamour, but it does mean eating at fancy restaurants and flying on chartered jets. None of that ever distracted me from what is important in life. For me, that means the land and the people who matter to you—and the two go together. That’s me and my father fishing on the ice (above). And below, that’s me and Terence. I miss him every day.
NINE
The Nashville Predators came into existence in 1998, part of the National Hockey League’s expansion into nontraditional markets that began way back in 1967 but really gained momentum after Wayne Gretzky’s trade from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings in 1988. In no way was Nashville hockey country. Culturally, the city is known the world over as the capital of country music and the home of the Grand Ole Opry. As well, in the state of Tennessee, football is the sport of choice, especially the college game. Most of the fans who came out to see the Predators had never played hockey and didn’t understand its finer points or its history. But they liked the speed, they liked the action, and they especially liked the rough stuff. It was a very different place than Rankin Inlet, or Brandon, but in many ways, for Jordin, Nashville was the perfect fit, both as a player and as a person.
I went to the Predators’ s
ummer prospects camp in July 2003, after my fourth season with the Wheat Kings. It’s a chance for the young players to get in some extra work and get comfortable before the main training camp begins in September. You can continue playing junior hockey as an overage twenty-year-old, but I was done with it. At that point, I didn’t really know whether I had a shot to make the NHL or whether I would wind up playing for the Predators’ farm team in the American Hockey League, the Milwaukee Admirals.
Not long after I left Nashville at the end of prospects camp, I got a call from David Poile asking me if I would be interested in coming back down three weeks before the regular training camp began to train with their conditioning people. Of course, I said yes. I moved down on August 10 and went right into working out and pounding the weights like I never had before. By the time training camp came around, I had probably put on ten pounds of muscle.
In camp, David Poile told me just to play my game. He said, “We brought you in because of the element you bring,” and I knew what that meant. So I lit ’er up, I had a couple of fights, and obviously I made an impression. Everything just kind of fell into place for me. They had a player named Scott Walker who was at the end of his career and who played the same style as I did, and he didn’t really want to be that guy anymore—the energy guy, the fighter. He was done with it. And that role fit me like a glove.
I thought for sure I would have to fight Scott Walker in camp to prove a point and try to take that job for myself. Mentally, I was draining myself thinking about it. But one of the veteran players, Jim McKenzie, told me to take it easy in camp. “Don’t fight your own guys in camp to make a point. You do that during exhibition games when we’re playing someone else. You’re not going to prove anything here by taking on veteran guys who have been around for a while.” That lifted some weight off my shoulders. I didn’t want to get off to a bad start with these guys by running around and being an idiot. It was nice to hear it straight up.
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