Authors: Jordin Tootoo
At least we always had hockey as an escape. After school, guys would pick up their sticks when word got around town that there was a street hockey gameâguys like Pujjuut Kusugak and Warren Kusugak, who were Terence's best friends. Then after dinner we would go to the arena and hang out. There would be men's hockey or midget or bantam. We were kind of rink rats.
My dad would play at 8:30 or 9:00 at night with the
old-timers. I would go to the rink with him and watch how they laced up their skates or taped their shin pads so I could copy it. When I go home now and I'm in the dressing room in Rankin Inlet, the kids are all watching me in the same wayâ
see how he puts this on this way, or tapes his stick that way?
I chuckle watching them, because once upon a time that was me.
The truth is, in hockey terms and maybe in all terms, I'm a fucking long shot. I'm from Nunavut. We don't have hockey leagues. We don't have scouts coming up here. It was like a crazy fantasy that anyone from here would ever play in the NHL. When we were playing street hockey with all of our buddies or playing on the lake, we said the same things that other Canadian kids say: “I'm going to be Wayne Gretzky. I'm going to be Doug Gilmour.” Because we watched
Hockey Night in Canada
and we knew all of the players. But the chance of that actually happening was almost zero.
In Nunavut, your goal is to survive one day at a time. It's a harsh environment. Your living conditions are not the greatest and you have to be fucking tough to live in the Arctic. I mean, we were playing hockey in forty below or fifty below like it was nothing. That's what we were used to. You don't see kids down south even going to school when it's forty below. Up north, the only time you don't go to school is if it's a blizzard out and you can't see ten feet in front of you.
You could see that mentality in the way we played hockey. Usually, guys who dominate in kids' hockey are bigger than the others. But the way we grow up in the north, I believe that, genetically, we're mentally tougher and physically stronger
because of our living conditions. From the time I was thirteen, I would wake up at six o'clock in the morning to shovel snow at all the government buildings. Shovelling snow and working outside doing whatever: it's physically demanding. I became so much stronger, naturally stronger. I didn't realize that I was doing weights by shovelling snow. My upper body and my legs got bigger; I had all the physical strength I needed. It was natural for me. It was just how we lived.
Thank God I had an older brother, because that's who pushed me. Being three years younger than Terence and all of his buddies, I wanted to be like them and play like them. They were always hard on me. They said, “If you want to play with us you've got to do it this way.” I was kind of like the guinea pig in the dressing room. They used to make me run into the boards at 100 miles an hour and then fucking laughed at meâ like, “You stupid idiot, get back up and just battle through it.” But I didn't mind that at all because I looked up to my brother and his buddies. I think that was the turning point in terms of becoming mentally strong and having the will to battle.
Terence would always tell me that if I wanted to play with the older guys, he would back me upâbut he wasn't going to baby me. I had to fight for my ground. It started when I was this little guyâsix, seven, eight years old. Even then, I had to be fricking tough. If you knocked me down, I got up. I had to get back up because I wanted to be with them, to be with these older guys that I idolized. If that hadn't happened, I wouldn't be the player I am today or the person I am today. I became fearless. When I went down south, I was always tougher and meaner
than the other kids. I was a fucking maniac. That's why today I'll fucking take on a guy who's six foot six. It's mind over matter. That's all because of how I grew up.
My dad had a hockey background, so he kind of coached me and my brother and all of our friends. Dad played senior hockey in Manitoba and he was a stud. I remember watching him play in rec hockey tournaments in Rankin Inlet when we were growing up. Everyone would say, “Watch out for Barney Tootoo.” I was at the rink all the time and I enjoyed watching him play. He was the best player there.
As a coach, Dad was a bit of a hard-ass. In his mind, if you want to fucking play, you've gotta fucking battle. You would get shit on, even at a young age, for doing something stupid. I probably wouldn't be a good coach because I have some of the same mentality, thinking that you've got to fight through adversity because that's what I went through. Kids nowadays, they're just pussies. Their coach tells them off or whatever and they just bow their heads and just fucking crumble.
My dad mostly coached my brother and his buddies. He couldn't coach two teams at once, so I was coached by someone else unless I was playing with the older guys. As a hockey parent, he was never the father sitting in the stands yellingâand I wasn't a player who looked at my dad in the stands and got orders from him. It always happened after the game. He'd come up to me and say, “Why did you do this? What's wrong with you? You know better.” After every game, you knew that if you'd fucked up a few times, you were going to hear about it. That was actually a great way to parent a hockey kid. Dad wasn't overprotective.
His approach was more that you had to do your own thing and figure it out.
On the other hand, my mom was a yeller. Everyone knew when Rose Tootoo was in the arena because she was always screaming and yelling. If anyone touched me, she would fricking flip out.
We practised on Mondays and Thursdays and scrimmaged against each other on Saturdays. There were fifteen kids, so we just split the group in half. There weren't enough players for real teams. In peewee, there wasn't supposed to be any hitting, but my dad allowed it when he was coaching: “Boys, if you want to fuck around, battle it out.” Some of the parents would say, “Geez, what are you doing, Barney?” And my dad would say, “I'm coaching them. I'm teaching them to play hockey.” Because that's what hockey was to him.
Kudos to my dad for allowing us to play the game whenever he was available, but the truth is it was kind of on his own timetable, when he wasn't grabbing a drink. He'd say stuff like, “I'm only gonna drink on Tuesday this week, so on Wednesday I'll be good to go with the boys.”
In the 1980s, Dad managed the local rink, so he was around all the time. We knew he was going to be there after school, so we could go to the rink any time we wanted and slap on our skates. And then after we left home, he stopped coaching. I don't know when everything fell apart between Rankin Inlet minor hockey and my dad. He just kind of disappeared from hockey after we left home. He did his duties managing at the rink, but then I guess he didn't want to have to deal with kids anymore,
so he kind of drifted away. Kids are always asking him to coach them, but he won't do it now.
When you're young, you should enjoy hockey, you should have fun, and that's what we did. Our parents didn't put us on a specific regimen. We wouldn't shoot pucks all day to be the next Wayne Gretzky. Nowadays, kids are training twelve months a year and by the time they're teenagers they're fucking done with hockey because their parents pushed them through all of this shit for twelve months a year and didn't give them a break. We played on natural ice, from the middle of November until May, when the snow came down from the arena roof. Once the ice had melted, we played baseball or soccer. To this day, in the off-season I put my gear away for a month and don't even look at it, because you want to miss the game a little bit. Growing up, that's how we did it. In the summer, we were out fishing and hunting and playing other sports. When I go home now, I tell the kids that as much as we love the game, you need time away from it.
There are a lot of great hockey players in the north. You see all of these young, talented kids and they're unreal until their teenaged years, and that's when women and booze come into the picture and it changes their whole outlook. There's your love and passion for the game, but then you have to deal with a whole new element and, for a lot of them, hockey takes second place.
For me, I knew hockey was always going to be my life. My goal was to play in the NHL, even though that was a crazy idea for a kid from Rankin Inlet. A big part of that goal was sticking with it, even when it would have been easier to stay home and
be a local superstar. A lot of kids who leave the north to go play Triple A hockey end up going home for these stupid tournaments and never leaving, all because for one weekend they were the stars of the show. Growing up, they were always the best player and then down south they realize that they're just an average kid. That's how it was for me, but I always had my dad saying, “No, you've got to stay down there and just work through it.”
Between the ages of seven and twelve we played hockey only with our friends, and then at peewee and bantam ages, we moved into organized hockey. Terence and I were the ones who stood out. We would go to tournaments in other communities and we were always the talk of the town. We were always kind of counted on to be the difference-makers. To me, it just kind of came naturally. I was a good skater. I wasn't the biggest guy out there, but mentally I knew how to battle through. The truth is, I was skating around other kids, but I didn't feel like that because my peers didn't praise me as being better than them. We were all the same and treated the same. I don't know how to explain it. But down south, if a kid's skating around everyone, everyone starts talking about him. Up there, they knew I was good but there weren't any scouts watching us and it was no big deal.
When I was peewee age, I played with both the peewees and the bantams, but when I got a little older I just played with my brother and the other bantams. I wouldn't say I dominated at that level, but I definitely stood out. Every time we had a tournament, they'd say, “You've got to watch out for Tootoo.” I just thought, being with my buddies, that we were all the same, and my buddies treated me like I was just the same. We all
thought we were great players. For me, it wasn't like,
I'm the best player here so you've got to treat me differently.
It wasn't like that.
A few times each winter, we raised enough money to fly to other communities in the Keewatin region of Nunavut and we lit it up. Usually we won these tournaments. Rankin Inlet was the team to beat. But our community was a lot bigger than these other communities, so we also had a lot more kids.
THREE
P
laying hockey in Rankin Inlet meant playing against the same kids Jordin had grown up with and then occasionally travelling to a neighbouring Inuit community such as Baker Lake or Chesterfield Inlet for a game. Rankin Inlet was a big city compared to those places, and their hockey teams didn't offer much of a challenge. But once a year, the Rankin Inlet players would head for more distant horizons. For Jordin, who knew that he was a very good player by local standards, it was a rare chance to experience a different part of the north and to put his skills to the test against kids who had enjoyed the benefit of playing in organized leagues.
In Rankin Inlet, we didn't have a hockey league. We just played with each other and we were always so rough and tough; our attitude was
anything goes
. Then, in March, we'd raise some money and the atoms and the peewees would go down to Yellowknife for a Native hockey tournament and just slaughter
the other teams. They would be so scared of us. You could almost see them thinking,
Oh fuck, Rankin's coming and those guys are crazy.
I remember that first time, jumping on a 737 and all of us, twelve- and thirteen-year-old kids, were thinking,
Holy shit, we're going to a huge city.
Yellowknife is like fucking Toronto or Vancouver to small-town kids. We'd never seen high-rises, so it was a big thing for us. And then we just dominated the tournament. We knew each other inside and out because we'd played together every day. Even nowadays, when guys from Rankin get together and play, they know where the other guys are going to be on the ice. You're playing with the same guys you grew up with, that you played with your whole life, right from when we were tykes. So you know everyone's moves.
In one of the games in Yellowknife, we were playing a team from Fort Providence, which is an Aboriginal community in the Northwest Territories about two hundred kilometres from Yellowknife. We were in peewees then, and I was just crushing guys. Guys were leaving the ice on stretchers. Everyone was raving about this fucking Tootoo kid, but they didn't believe I was only thirteen years old. There was a big scandal, and I had to prove my age.
But that's where I was spotted by the coach of the Fort Providence team, and it was the first time that anyone outside of Rankin Inlet had really noticed me as a hockey player. That summer, he called me at home and invited me to play for his team in the Alberta Native Provincial Hockey Championships in Edmonton.
I was ready to go and my parents gave their permission, but it was a little complicated. You had to be living in that community in order to play. So in January, when I was thirteen years old, I left for Fort Providence and moved in with a family just so I could play in this one tournament in June or July. It was a First Nations community but not Inuit. I didn't know a fucking soul. And life was different. They had trees in Fort Providence.
I was in grade eight then. For the rest of the school year I lived with the family there and went to class. Coming from a disrupted household already, I thought this was the greatest thing, because I wouldn't have to watch my parents party anymore. What a great opportunity this was to get out of my house and the fucking mess that it was behind closed doors. It was a big relief.
I KNOW I'VE TALKED about it already, but you really need to understand what my life was like at home then, what alcohol did to me and to my family.