All the Way (8 page)

I was making only a couple hundred bucks a week playing junior. Terence was making more than that in The Pas. But with both of us, half of that had to go home—and, fuck, we knew what it was being spent on. Mom would call and say, “We can't make our payments.”

“You need fuel? You need food? What's the grocery store's number? I'll call the gas station and open a tab for you.”

“No, just send us some money.”

I knew what they were really trying to get at. They wanted to order booze.

Usually it wasn't my dad who asked for the money; it was Mom: “I got no money. Dad doesn't know how to pay bills. I got to pay everything.” Well, meanwhile, my mom's playing bingo three times a week, plus buying booze. She always had an excuse, but in the end she was just using us. She used her kids to pay for her fucking addictions.

My parents still think I'm the Jordin who will just give, give, give, give, give, and nothing's ever good enough for them. You know, I called home and told them I bought a new truck, and their reaction was, “Why would you buy a sixty-thousand-dollar car when you could have spent that money elsewhere?” In their minds they're thinking,
There's sixty thousand gone and no money for us.
It's never: “Oh, I'm proud of you” or “Congratulations!” There's never any encouragement or anything. When I told them I bought my place in Kelowna, my mom gave me the old “Well, fuck, that's not very smart of you to spend two million dollars on a house and fucking waste all your money on that.”
Like, what's wrong with you? Mom, I fucking worked hard all my life for this. Why can't you just say congratulations and leave it at that?

BACK THEN, coming home in the summer meant that I was partying right alongside my parents and everyone else. That's actually when I drank the most. It was my time off. People in the community would be amazed, seeing me and Terence drunk so often. They'd be thinking,
Holy shit, do they live like that all the time? When do they ever play hockey?
But no one complained— especially my parents—because we supplied the booze. They sure weren't going to tell their kids not to drink and at the same time drink the booze we were providing.

In Rankin Inlet, alcohol is supposed to be controlled, and you're supposed to need a permit to bring booze in. Not when I came home. It was a big piss-up. I'd bring up cases and cases of beer—coolers full of beer—plus the hard stuff, all brought home on the plane. Our bedroom was like a liquor store and, for our parents, it was like,
Fuck, yeah, this is fucking great.
They'd place an order before we came home—we need ten cases of this and five bottles of that—and we would deliver it. I would come home with ten checked bags with bottles clinking inside them and no one fucking questioned me.

Then it would be one long fucking shindig until we left again. The whole town would be fucking hammered thanks to us. The word would get out that Jordin and Terence were home
and partying somewhere, so have at 'er. All our buddies and relatives would show up, and we'd all party together.

The whole time I was home it'd just be one drama after another—my buddies feuding with their girlfriends, and husbands fighting with wives, and older guys partying and getting thrown in the drunk tank—but I didn't fucking care. It was a circus, but I didn't care because we were having fun. A lot of my friends and people in the community don't drink that often, but when they do it's mayhem. Like I said, you turned into a fricking devil. Back then, I never understood why my buddies' girlfriends would get pissed off at them for partying with me. Well, now I know that when they'd go home and they were pissed drunk, it was a different story—and I didn't have to deal with it.

You don't see that when you're living in that cloud. But now, when I come home, I think,
What the fuck was I doing?
Being selfish, and doing it all for the wrong reasons. To us, bringing the booze home was a way to have fun and shut up our parents, but it caused so much shit for so many other people.

Jordin's first season with the Brandon Wheat Kings was 1999–2000. Playing as a sixteen-year-old, he scored only 6 goals in 45 games, but made a statement with his 217 penalty minutes. Though he was young, and far from the biggest guy on his team, he made it clear that he wouldn't back down from anyone. He was already on the radar of Hockey Canada, dating back to his minor hockey days in Alberta. The organization invited him to participate in a program designed to take the best young hockey players in Canada and groom them to compete for the country internationally, with the big prize being a spot on the World Junior Championship team. Thanks to blanket television coverage on TSN over the Christmas season, when fans were at home with few other sports viewing options, and thanks especially to regular Canadian victories, the World Juniors had become one of the most watched sporting events on the calendar. Canadians fell in love with international hockey while watching the legendary Summit Series in 1972, and each subsequent tournament was framed as a battle for the national birthright. The World Juniors fed on those emotions, each year delivering a new crop of fresh-faced heroes, wearing the maple leaf and battling against whichever country emerged as the great rival—the Russians, the Americans, the Swedes, or the Finns. Some of the players involved would go on to become stars in the National Hockey League, while for others the World Juniors would mark the peak of their celebrity, and sometimes the peak of their hockey careers.

Playing junior hockey in Brandon wasn't a big leap from OCN, because I had already spent a year playing against guys who were junior age. The only real difference was the travel—the long road trips in The Dub. We didn't have those in The Pas.

In my first year of junior, I got to play on two teams that were part of Hockey Canada's Program of Excellence, which identifies the best players in the country and prepares them for the World Juniors. First, I was part of Team West, which represented Manitoba and Saskatchewan in the World Under-17 Hockey Challenge, played in Timmins, Ontario. There were four other
Canadian teams representing different regions, plus teams from Germany, the Czech Republic, Russia, the United States, and Finland. That year, the Russians won the tournament.

Then, in the summer between my first and second years in Brandon, I was picked to play on the National Men's Under-18 Team in what was then called the Four Nations Tournament in Kežmarok, Slovakia. (It's now called the Ivan Hlinka Memorial Tournament.) The other three countries involved were Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and the United States. That was the first time I'd been outside North America and the first time I'd spent seven or eight hours flying anywhere. So, it was a whole new experience for me. As I remember, the food and the hotel were a little greasy, but I'd been in worse places and eaten worse things out on the land, so it wasn't that big of a deal for me.

There were some great players on that team: Derek Roy, Scottie Upshall, Stephen Weiss. A bunch of guys who went on to play in the NHL. With those kinds of tournaments, you have to come together pretty damn quickly and bond as a team. It helps if you can have fun and enjoy it. That was a great group of young guys. I remember before every game, after our warm-up stretches, we'd form a circle and everyone would take turns doing a little dance in the middle. I was a pretty shy guy. But when you're in that environment and everyone enjoys it, even if you're not a dancer you come up with something and everybody starts cheering.

Right before the tournament began, I was named captain, which was a huge honour, especially when you look at who was on that team. We ran the table, beating the Americans 3–1 in the
final game to win the championship. That was pretty amazing: seeing the flag raised and hearing “O Canada.”

When you put on that maple leaf and represent your country—fuck, you're on top of the world! You're sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old and playing for Canada. What could be better than that? At that age you don't really feel how much pressure there is on you to win the gold medal. You just enjoy it. You just go out and play the game. After those two tournaments, I knew I had a chance to play on the World Juniors team. That would be a whole other level.

WHEN I FIRST MOVED to Brandon, and moved out of the billet house I'd shared with Terence in The Pas, Mike Young moved in with him and lived with the Haukass family. Mike ended up becoming one of my best friends. He has been through thick and thin with me. He probably got to know Terence as well as anyone. He looked up to Terence and wound up living with him for two years. To this day, Mike and I reminisce about all of the good times we had with him. When we go out fishing or hunting or just do random things together, Terence's name always comes up. I really appreciate having a best friend who knows what kind of a guy my brother was and who can relate to my experiences with him.

Mike comes from Gillam, Manitoba, way up in the northern part of the province. I think it really worked out well for him, moving in with my brother, because they were both from small towns, both from pretty isolated communities. Having a support
system with one other person who could relate to where they'd come from worked out for both of them. Terence kind of took Mike under his wing in The Pas. Terence was one of the veteran guys at OCN and Mike is the same age as me—so, three years younger than Terence was.

Mike played for a couple of years in The Pas with Terence and then came to Brandon to try out with the Wheat Kings. He made the team and hung on for a few months, so we ended up playing together for a little while. After that, he went on to play pro in the Central Hockey League in the States, and now he lives in Dallas and runs the elite youth program for the Dallas Stars. He's gone into the coaching side of hockey, and good for him. There aren't a lot of guys who move south from Canada and stay down there.

I have to tell you a story about our time together in Brandon. One night, I was invited to a hot-tub party that was being thrown by a bunch of my girlfriends. I was a veteran on the team at that point and Mike was a rookie, so I had to egg him on a bit to get him to come out with me. He was worried, because we were supposed to have a ten o'clock curfew that night. We had a game in Saskatoon, which is a six-hour bus ride from Brandon, the next night and the bus was leaving at six o'clock the next morning. But I guess the combination of me encouraging him and the thought of those girls in the hot tub persuaded him that it was a good idea.

We grabbed a case of beer and headed over to the party around 8:30. The minute we got there, we jumped into the hot tub with a bunch of ladies, and that was good—me and Mike
and five or six girls. Forty minutes went by and our case of beer was gone.
Well, why don't we wind 'er up and grab another case?
So we went out and grabbed another case of beer, and by that time it was right around ten o'clock—right around our curfew—but we didn't care. So, that second case of beer fricking got us drunk.
Well, boys, let's grab another case of beer.
So, by then we were a few cases deep and three sheets to the wind and the next thing we knew it was one o'clock in the morning. The bus was leaving at six o'clock. So, what the hell were we going to do? Thank God I had an extra suit in the back of my car from a previous road trip; we always had to wear a suit and tie when we went on a road trip.

I ended up crashing at Mike's billet house with him. I remember, just before passing out, that Mike said, “Toots, whatever you do, make sure you set two alarms on your phone. I'm setting my house alarm and my phone to make sure we wake up on time.”
Yeah, yeah, no worries, no worries.

Lo and behold, we slept through our alarms and it was 6:15 when we woke up. You can imagine our panic. We were still half-drunk and losing it, scrambling around and gathering our shit together, trying to get out the door. We showed up at the rink around 6:30 and the bus was waiting outside with everybody already on it. I stormed into the arena to pack up my gear and I remember that our trainer grabbed me and said, “Toots, don't worry, we packed your bag already. Get the hell on the bus.” So, I cruised onto the bus trying to look like everything was fine, with my scarf wrapped around my face because I knew that I definitely reeked of booze. I went right to the back of the
bus and took my usual position for long road trips: crashing out on the floor. I looked up and saw Mike moseying his way onto the bus. Of course, because he was a rookie, he had to sit right up front where the coaches sat. He was covering his face as best he could. Once we got moving, I fell asleep pretty fast, but I remember one of my teammates waking me up and saying, “Holy shit, Toots, you smell like a brewery.” After that, I passed out and went into a deep, deep sleep.

Around Regina, which is about four hours outside Brandon, the bus got stuck in the snow. Everyone had to get off, but I was so out of it that the guys figured they might as well just let me sleep there. I didn't even know it had happened until we got to Saskatoon and they told me about it. That was right near the end of Mike's stint in the WHL. He was a bubble guy and we had a couple of young prospects who the team decided to go with instead of him. He ended up going back to OCN and playing out the rest of his junior career there.

Oh yeah, and when we played the Blades in Saskatoon that night, I scored 2 goals, got a couple of assists, and was named the first star of the game.

FIVE

A
t the end of the 2000–2001 season, just before heading overseas for the tournament in Slovakia, Jordin returned home to Rankin Inlet to visit his family. It was becoming more and more obvious that someday he might have a chance to do what no Inuk had done before: play in the National Hockey League. Being a junior hockey star was one thing, but making it to the NHL, to the big time, would open the door to an entirely different level of fame … and wealth. But when Jordin arrived home for his annual summer return to the north, knowing that his own life was about to change dramatically, he realized immediately what would always stay the same. In the claustrophobic confines of the Tootoo home, the cycle of drinking, abuse, and occasional violence continued as it had for most of his life. Jordin's father, Barney, was still two different people: the person he was when he was sober, and especially when he was out on the land, and the person he was when he was drinking. Everyone in the family lived in fear of the next binge. From an early age, Jordin's and Terence's role had been to try to manage their parents, to defuse the anger, to pick up the pieces, all while pretending to the outside world that everything was fine in the Tootoo home. They learned to lie, to cover up, and to survive. That was the way it had been since they were children, walking the streets to find Barney and get him home safely after one of his benders, when they were trying to protect their sister, Corinne, when they were breaking up fights between their parents or following their mother when she fled town temporarily to get away from their father. Even though they had grown into young men, their roles hadn't really evolved. And then one day came a breaking point, when the balance of power shifted forever. Barney was drunk again. Jordin knew that script by heart. He knew how it had always ended. But this time, it would be different.