All the Way (17 page)

I knew in the back of my mind that this broad must be fucking hot so, of course, during the game I had to fight. I had to show her that this is what it was all about. I got into a scrap and I was kind of marked up after the game. After I got dressed, I went down to the family room, which is where the players meet their guests. I had no idea who this girl was or what she looked like, other than that she was a blonde and beautiful. I walked into the family room and all of the players' families were sitting around, and I didn't see anyone who matched that description. Then I looked toward a couch in the back of the room and I saw this stunning fucking blonde. That had to be her. She was the only one there.

“Is your name Kellie?”

“Yeah.”

“I'm Jordin.”

It went on from there. It was a Saturday night and we had Sunday off. Kellie was underage; I think she was nineteen or twenty years old then. And she wasn't really well known around town yet. So I took her to Tin Roof, a bar where all the players used to go. Of course, one thing led to another. We were getting all pissed up. The night ended. We both lived at The Enclave condominiums, so we took a cab home together. Nothing happened that night. I gave her a call the next day. We started
hanging out. I showed her around town. I knew where the hot spots were. Three weeks went by and we decided we would start seeing each other. She basically moved into my place. We started having fun, and the rest is just details.

I even took her up to Rankin Inlet one summer, but it didn't go very well. People thought I was king shit, dating a famous country singer. But she wasn't welcomed very well by my family and friends, and I have to admit that I didn't make it easy for her. She was up there for four or five days and I partied hard for three of them and kind of left her alone with my folks. It wasn't good. She didn't eat. Not just our Inuit food—she didn't eat anything. I didn't know that, because I was fucking gooned for most of the time she was there. So when she got on the plane to fly south to Winnipeg, her blood sugar level was way out of whack. She ended up collapsing on the plane. I got a call from the Winnipeg police saying that they had Kellie, that they'd had to take her off the plane on a stretcher and put her in an ambulance. She almost died. She ended up in the hospital for two days and had to cancel some of her shows.

As the significant other, of course I should have been on the next plane to her. But, instead, I called my buddy Mike Young, who was in Winnipeg then, and asked him to babysit Kellie in the hospital so I could stay in Rankin Inlet and keep partying. Needless to say, when I returned to Nashville and saw her again, things started going downhill fast. It's probably the only time I'll ever be in
People
magazine. They did a story about us dating. And then they did another one about us breaking up—though they didn't get the real story, which for me was probably a good
thing. Here's what happened: I got a new cellphone, and when I took off for practice one morning I left my old phone on the coffee table in my condo. You probably can guess where this is going.

After practice, I turned on my phone and there were, like, ten text messages. “Get your ass home we need to talk.” “Where are you?” All that plus a whole bunch of missed calls.

I called Kellie right away and said, “What are you doing? You know I was in practice.”

All she said was: “You need to get your ass home right now.” I could tell from the tone of her voice that it wasn't good, but I wasn't sure what I'd done wrong. I got home, opened the front door, and looked down the hallway toward the living room. On the coffee table, I could see a case of Bud Light—and as I got closer I could see that there were four beers missing. I asked Kellie what she was doing, drinking at 12:30 in the afternoon, but she wasn't interested in that conversation.

“You fucking sit right down here,” she said. Then she pulled my old cellphone out of her pocket. “You have anything to say?”

“No,” I said, “but it looks like I'm going to be here for a while, so I might as well crack a beer with you.”

I knew what was coming. We went through that case of beer while I sat there and got an earful for a good two or three hours. She read out text message after text message.

“So, here's one from Wednesday, January 23, 12:05 am— that's the night the bus picked me up at midnight to go out on tour. . . . ‘Hey, sexy. She's gone. The front door is open.'”

It was bad. Time for another beer.

We tried to work things out for a few months after that, but needless to say it didn't happen. I couldn't handle it anymore— or maybe she couldn't handle it. And then, later, she wrote a song about me. An angry song. It's called “Best Days of Your Life.” There's a video that goes with it, where she's singing with Taylor Swift, and there's a guy in it who's supposed to look like me. At the end of the video, he gets hit by a bus.

Once he was established and had become comfortable as an NHL player in Nashville, Jordin's life off the ice began to look not much different from the life he'd lived in Brandon as a junior hockey star. There was always a place to go, always a party, always someone to buy him a drink and pat him on the back. But, now, there was another element to Jordin's drinking and carousing: the need to dull the painful memories of Terence's suicide, to avoid being alone with all of the unanswered questions about why it had happened and whether there was something he could have done to prevent it.

I had a group of drinking buddies on the Predators: Scottie Upshall, Chris Mason, David Legwand, Adam Hall, and Scott Hartnell. We were all the younger guys on the team and most of us were western Canadian boys. I can tell you, it was a good time—too good of a time.

Uppie is my boy. I met him way back at a tournament in Edmonton when we were thirteen or fourteen years old. We hit it off right away. He's a gem, I'll tell you. A real beauty. His family is originally from Newfoundland, but he grew up in Fort McMurray, Alberta, before it got so big and crazy. He's still got a
little bit of a Newfoundland accent. As kids, we played together on a couple of Alberta Selects teams, and once went down and played in a tournament in Minnesota. What I remember most about it is that the only time I ever saw Uppie was at the rink. The rest of the time he was out golfing. I'm sure that when his hockey career is done he's going to be a pro golfer. He's got great skills.

Then we played against each other in junior—me in Brandon and him in Kamloops. Uppie was a great junior player. All I'll say about it is that he knew who ran his show; I fucking ran his show. He knew not to fuck around with me. And then Uppie got picked in the first round of the draft by Nashville. It's funny how everything worked out: I got drafted by the Predators, and then he got drafted by the Predators. I thought,
Shit, we just can't leave each other alone.

We joke around a lot. I call him Scottie Too Hottie, the Devil Boy, which ought to give you a clue as to what he's like. The guy thinks he's the fucking hottest guy walking around. He's a good-looking guy and he carries himself in a certain way. He's someone who can talk to anybody at any time. He's a lot of fun—but I don't think a lot of other people have had as many good times with him as I have. He's also a guy who is there to listen and understand. He's a team guy first. I could see that right from the day we first met. He's a leader. He's a guy who wants to be counted on to make a difference and take that pressure on.

The best thing that happened in his career was probably when Uppie was traded from Nashville to Philadelphia in 2007. We were running pretty hard together and it was starting to show.
Word had started getting out. When he was traded, everyone came up to me and said, “Your buddy is gone; now what are you going to do?” I figured out what to do. (Now Uppie's an alternate captain with the Florida Panthers and enjoying life. I'm proud of where he's at.)

I was living on my own, with no curfew. My routine was that on the night before a game, I'd kill a couple of bottles of wine, feel good. I'd wake up the next day, do the morning skate, sleep all afternoon, play six shifts a game, get into a fight—it was easy, at least at first. And then as I became more established and more successful and the coaches started to rely on me more, I started playing more minutes. But my life away from the rink hadn't changed and it was killing me. I was playing ten or more minutes per game and by the ninth or tenth or eleventh minute I was thinking,
Holy fuck, I'm dead.
I couldn't perform to the best of my ability, and so I had to start taking advantage of my role as the enforcer. If I had been partying and I was dead on the ice and I knew I didn't have the legs, I'd get into a fight as fast as I could, just to get the five minutes off in the penalty box. I knew that if I scrapped a couple of times, the team would be happy and the fans would be happy and I wouldn't have to work as hard that night.

But I still partied. A Saturday night game, a day off on Sunday—
let's get after it, boys
. I was a weekend binge drinker. It wasn't like I'd wake up in the morning and need a drink. It's just that when I drank, I'd fucking drink like I was from the Far North—you know, that's in my blood. I could drink for two days straight, no problem. So I partied hard. All booze. I
was never was into drugs or anything; booze was my drug. I'd fucking get after it on Saturday nights, all night, and just be a maniac. I wasn't a guy who was violent or anything, because I'd seen enough of that growing up. For me, drinking was entertainment. I was a happy drunk. But I would force people to drink with me, just like my dad does. If you're going to be around me, you're going to drink with me all fucking night. And I was happy to buy every round.

I was a very well-known guy in Nashville, and any time we went out and had a night off it was, like, fucking Jordin Tootoo and his buddies are here and the party's on. No one knew my teammates, and I always used that as an excuse when I was called into the coach's or general manager's office after a bender and they weren't. The team would get a call from someone saying, “Tootoo was in the bar all day Sunday drinking and watching football. Doesn't he work?” I wasn't going to throw my teammates under the bus; instead, I would take the heat and come out of the office believing that everything would be good—I'd fucking play great the next game and they'd forget all about it. That went on for a couple of years, and just about every weekend David Poile would get a call—and then Barry Trotz would call me into his office and ask me what the fuck was going on. But why was it always me?

It got to the point where Poile called me in and told me I needed to figure things out or else he'd put my name in headlines across North America, because the team would cut me or release me. I didn't believe him. I figured I was their fucking go-to guy and there was no way they'd do that. I had the same mentality as
Theo Fleury; I thought I was unstoppable.
You're going to cut me or trade me? Go ahead and try it and see what the fans say.

Eventually, my teammates stopped hanging out with me as much, because they knew I would be going hard, every time out, and they didn't want to do that anymore. But I didn't see that. I just wondered why none of the boys wanted to go out with me, and then I found friends outside of hockey who were willing to go out any time I wanted, for as long as I wanted, and had nothing to lose.

After a game, the bars in Nashville would be ready for me. They'd figure,
The Predators won tonight, so Toots will be here around midnight. Let's get his corner ready.
In the early days I went to the popular places. But toward the end of my drinking days, I hung out in fucking dark places, little holes in the wall where I wouldn't be seen—or at least where I thought I wouldn't be seen. The truth is that a lot of people still knew I was going out, but in my mind I was out of sight in these little fucking holes in the wall.

On the ice, I was a scary guy in those days. I'm sure that the players on other teams hated me—and probably they still do— but now they at least understand that I'm a more controlled freak than I was then. Before, during practice, even my teammates didn't know what the fuck I was going to do. They'd be thinking,
Don't piss off Toots. He's not all that great today. He might go off.
I didn't see that part of myself and I let so many guys down. What a fucking shitty teammate I was.

Guys on my team would ask me, “You okay, Toots? Is everything okay at home?” All they had to do was look at me to
know what kind of shape I was in. But I didn't think there was a problem. It was no big deal … whatever. But that's not what I saw in their eyes.

In those days, I got into a lot of fights just because I wanted to pound the piss out of somebody—out of anybody. There was a lot of shit going through my mind that came out in those fights. It's supposed to be a controlled anger when you fight, but when I was partying, there was no control. I was fucking all-in. All of the anger I had outside of the rink was coming out on the ice. I didn't care if there was a skill guy or a fighter standing in front of me. Fuck him. I just kept wrapping myself around booze and then went to the rink and let it all out. When you're using substances, they trick your mind. Something little may happen and, frick, you snap.

A bunch of times, I made pacts with my teammates. I stood up in private meetings with them and promised that I wasn't going to drink that month, or that I was going to quit drinking cold turkey. I'd tell them I was sorry that I had let them down, that I was going to change, that I wanted to quit drinking for them. They'd just sit there and listen and, you know, I'd feel good after telling them I'd quit. But I could see in their eyes that they were thinking,
Aw, fuck, Toots, here we go again. You're just bullshitting us again. You're going to fall off the wagon in a couple of weeks anyway, so let's not get our hopes up too high.