All the Way (6 page)

But still I kept hearing that so-called gangs from other schools were out to get me. Even when I walked down to the gas
station, I was always looking over my shoulder. I thought that one of these gang kids was going to come after me.

I admit that I had a short fuse. With all of that anger inside me, I had no remorse when it came to hurting someone. And so I became the bully. I used that to my advantage, being the man in junior high. No one fucked around with me. When I left home, I assumed that if anyone pissed you off, that's what you did. Drop 'em. I was fighting in school. I got sent to the principal's office every now and then. And then I'd put the blame on the other person because, in my mind, I was just sticking up for myself.

It wasn't until midway through the school year that people started respecting me, because they knew what I could do on the ice. And I started arm wrestling these fucking tough guys in junior high, and I started killing them. Word started getting around. That's when I started gaining respect.

While I was in Spruce Grove, my only communication with Terence was through a fax machine. He was living in The Pas, playing for the OCN Blizzard (OCN stands for Opaskwayak Cree Nation). The band owns the team, which plays in the Manitoba Junior Hockey League, the level just below major junior. The OCN team started in 1996, and Terence started with them in 1997 and played for four seasons. The last three seasons, they won the league title, and the last two seasons, he was the team captain and the leading scorer.

A reporter from Toronto did a story on the Blizzard during Terence's last season there. He interviewed Terence about how hockey could be his ticket out of Rankin Inlet: “I have
no respect for those kids who just give up,” Terence said. “I see those guys when I go home for the summer and they're doing nothing. If you give up, you'll be a nobody.” That was Terence.

Long-distance calls were expensive and the family I was living with in Spruce Grove couldn't afford it. So we communicated by writing pages and pages of faxes to each other, every day. We were constantly going to Staples to get more paper. Every day, I came home from school or from practice and it was straight to the machine, hoping that Terence had sent me a fax. I'd fax him to say, “I fucking hate it here. This sucks.” And he'd say, “Jordin, just stick it out. This is going to be okay.” He was always encouraging me to stay strong.

I wish I would have saved some of those faxes.

DURING THE YEAR that Terence was playing in The Pas and I was playing in Spruce Grove, his coaches started asking him about me. They caught wind that I was playing Triple A, and then they heard that I was taken by the Brandon Wheat Kings of the Western Hockey League in the bantam draft. Looking back, that was a big step for me—being drafted by a team in one of the best junior leagues in the world, where all kinds of NHL players had started their careers. As a fifteen-year-old, I was invited to the Wheat Kings' rookie camp, but there wasn't much chance I'd stick with the team that year. Instead, my plan was to go to Thompson, Manitoba, and play Midget AAA there. Thompson was only a two-hour drive from The Pas
and a lot closer to home, so I'd have an easier time keeping in touch with Terence there.

The day after I got cut by the Wheat Kings, my dad and my brother drove down from The Pas to Brandon to pick me up and take me to Thompson. They came by at five o'clock in the morning and we started out on the first leg of the trip, the six-hour drive to The Pas. Instead of going straight on from there, we ended up staying overnight and checking out the beginning of OCN's training camp the next day. Terence was going to be in camp for a couple of days before I had to report to Thompson. The OCN coach, Gardiner MacDougall, asked Terence if I'd like to take a shot at making the team, and he told them I'd love to. So I suited up for a couple of exhibition games. Lit it up. Got in a few tilts. The next thing you know, the coaches were saying, “We want to keep you here.” It happened so fast. Before I knew it, I was enrolled in the local high school and playing for OCN.

In hockey terms, it was a big jump. If I had gone to Thompson to play Midget, I would have been playing against fifteen- and sixteen-year olds. The OCN team played in a league that was just one level below major junior. The players there were all older: nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one. It was a really tight group. They were brought in from Ontario and Saskatchewan, as well as being from Manitoba. Only five or six of us were Aboriginal. These were guys who weren't going to play in the Canadian Hockey League, but they could come up to The Pas and play for good money, better money than they would make in major junior. I was fifteen years old and making five hundred bucks a week, with all of my living expenses covered.
Terence was making around $1200 a week because he was one of the top guys. And as a bonus, we could buy stuff on the reserve, like gas, tax-free.

As a hockey team, we were stacked. I think we lost only seven or eight games out of sixty-two that whole year. Gardiner MacDougall gave me an unbelievable opportunity to grow as a young player. At fifteen years old, I was playing with what were men to me and holding my own. That whole season, we were on fire. Our team was unbelievable. Visiting teams hated coming there because they knew they would get their asses kicked.

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

T
he 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 saw 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.