All the Way

ALL THE WAY

ALL THE WAY

MY LIFE ON ICE

JORDIN TOOTOO

with Stephen Brunt

FOR JENNIFER

FOR MY PARENTS

FOR CORINNE

FOR TERENCE

INTRODUCTION

by Joseph Boyden

I
once had the chance to head far north to Rankin Inlet in Nunavut with an amazing group of people, including CBC radio icon Shelagh Rogers, Mike Stevens, one of the world's greatest harmonica players, and Jonathan Torrens, also known as J-Roc, from
Trailer Park Boys
. We were doing a community literacy event called the Peter Gzowski Invitational Golf Tournament. This was in March, 150 kilometres south of the Arctic Circle, so as you can imagine, the “golf” was actually played on a small iced-over lake, where at one point I used a frozen walrus penis for a putter.

One evening we were invited by the community to watch and participate in some traditional Inuit hand-drumming and throat singing, and it was on this night that I got to meet Jordin Tootoo's father, Barney. I remember asking to have my photo taken with Barney and he happily agreed. Clearly, he was used to the attention. After all, his NHL-playing son was the toast of
Nunavut, and much of Canada, for that matter. But what was also so clearly apparent was the deep pride and love this father had for his son. Barney's face glowed when I gushed about how Jordin was one of the league's scrappiest and most memorable players. I remember thinking to myself, “What a perfect story this is, a young indigenous kid growing up just outside the Arctic Circle, taught to play hockey by his adoring dad, and nurtured into the fit beast that he is by his equally adoring mother. Now this would make a great biography!”

It wasn't until recently, when I finished reading
All the Way
, that I realized the real power of Jordin's story. And how naive I was to ever conjure the word “idyllic.”

Jordin Tootoo does not pull punches. If you already know who he is, you might smile or, more probably, grimace at this particular cliché. If you don't know Jordin, you will soon learn the story of how this kid from a remote village beat the odds to become one of the toughest men in the NHL, a league with no shortage of the world's toughest men. But this book is far from just a story about the NHL, or even hockey, although that brilliantly Canadian sport is at the heart of it.

When I say Tootoo doesn't pull punches, of course, I mean this literally. Ask anyone in the NHL who has ever dropped gloves with him. But I also mean it in the more classic sense. Jordin is ready to share the story of his life so far. And what a story it is. Does he pull
any
punches?

Ask his parents, whom he loves dearly. Ask Stephen Brunt, who so concisely and objectively and in a pitch-perfect way helped Jordin to get the words down on the page. Ask his friends
or his wife or the many people he has come into contact with over his years of fame in a league where he epitomizes that rare combination of grace and brutality. Jordin's story is startling. It is at times a tough read. It can be beautiful. It is deeply tragic. It is triumphant. And not necessarily in that order. This book is a roller-coaster ride, the rise and fall and rise of a young man with all of the cards stacked against him, who manages to carve out a place for himself in one of the most vied-for and difficult professional sports positions in the world.

Let's talk for a moment about the odds he faced: the son of an Inuit father and white mother, Jordin Tootoo was raised in that isolated and largely Inuk community of Rankin Inlet in Nunavut. Most professional hockey players are groomed from the time that they first step on the ice as little children to play in highly organized and competitive leagues. There's no such thing as that in Rankin Inlet. Jordin didn't play true organized hockey until well into his teens, a fact that seems near impossible to coaches and scouts. Jordin learned his craft and his skills on that same small frozen lake where I batted around golf balls with a walrus phallus as well as on an indoor rink where his father played house league and coached Jordin and his older brother, Terence. In a league like the NHL, where size certainly does matter and players are typically well over six feet and tough guys are often much bigger than that, Jordin tops out at five foot ten. Imagine stepping onto the ice and going toe-to-toe with enforcers who tower above you and whose job is to knock your head off, and yours, theirs. But Jordin has certainly never backed down from a fight and most typically wins them. In short, Jordin breaks the
rules in terms of his physical stature, but his incredible speed and strength have more than made up for that.

The most daunting odds stacked against him, though, are that Jordin grew up in a home seized by the throes of alcohol addiction and the fear, anger, and violence that comes with that. His upbringing was far from ideal, to say the least. Simply to emerge from that home intact is a triumph, not to mention how Jordin has become a role model for youth facing the same odds.

But before he found sobriety, Jordin knew how to party. Yes, hockey players are famous for this, but Jordin took it to a whole new level. That he was able, for years, to drink to such excess on a regular basis that blackouts were a part of life and still get up and not just function but dominate on the rink might have been some of the biggest odds he managed to beat. In so many ways, Jordin Tootoo is a walking, talking, brawling, honest, open, and vulnerable contradiction, a man who by all accounts should never, on the surface, have made it out of Rankin Inlet.

Yet Jordin's is not a story of some kid's incredible luck of escaping a home and community wracked by deep trouble. Quite the opposite. He knows where he comes from and rather than having abandoned it, he embraces his world. Nunavut is home. Jordin is a product and a vital part of Rankin Inlet, and certainly of Nunavut, a world that indeed has its problems but also has a far more deep-rooted power. The Inuit are a people of the land. As much as Jordin's father faces off with his own demons in tow, Barney was and remains an incredibly skilled Inuk of the land, a place where he never drinks but instead teaches others the skills
not just to survive but also to flourish in the world's toughest physical climate and terrain.

Let me bring you back to that visit to Rankin I made a few years ago. When Barney found out I wanted to get out on the land, he arranged for a couple of his friends to take me by snowmobile to hunt ptarmigan. As we left town, we passed racks of pink Arctic char and seal meat, even a polar bear hide hanging to dry in the cold sun and wind. And it wasn't very far out that I realized how easy it would be to become lost in this white landscape, the only markers some stone rises and a couple of scattered inukshuks.

That afternoon I watched in awe as these new friends led me through a landscape in which I often became disoriented, and we were never, I'm sure, more than ten or twenty kilometres from town. In fact, at one point in the afternoon when I was feeling like I had a grip on things, I split off from the main party on my snowmobile, only to realize twenty minutes later that I had lost any of the other tracks and the rise I thought was my way back turned out not to be. All I could do was sit and wait for one of the Inuk hunters to follow my trail out and find me as I watched the wind blow snow across my trail and the sun sink ever faster to dusk. It was then I realized the harsh beauty of this place is matched only by the sheer brutal and crushing weight of the land's relentless neutrality when it comes to whether or not a puny human lives or dies on its back. And so we puny humans, if we hope to live in such a world, need to learn it from birth and never be so foolish as to make a major mistake. This is the world where Jordin's father excels, and this is the world where Jordin, too, feels most at home.

While reading his memoir, I came to understand something vital. Jordin inherently understands that the daunting man that he is both on and off the ice is directly attributed to his connection to the land. And so maybe it is no miracle at all that Jordin not just survives but flourishes on the ice of an arena because he learned to do the same on the frozen muskeg of home.

This autobiography is not a story that asks the reader to pity Jordin, and it is never a book that attempts to explain or make excuses for anything. I don't think I've ever before read such an honest, bare, and exposed account of a life. One doesn't expect someone in his position as a tough and brash tool of incitement on the ice to open up and be so vulnerable on the page. Perhaps this is what proves to me that Jordin Tootoo is the strongest person I've ever come across (with the possible exception of heavyweight boxing champ George Chuvalo, a man whose family I grew up with and who, in the depth of tragedy, has done much the same as Jordin in opening up to others and speaking out against the dangers of addiction). Jordin really is incredibly brave. In this book he truly bares himself, a trait not typical for most any man, especially one who has played in the world's toughest league for a decade.

Will this book cause some shock waves, not just within Jordin's family and community but also across our country? I believe it will. Part of healing is not just being able to admit to your own shortcomings but also to the shortcomings of those around you, in the hopes that this admission might help to point out a more healthy direction. I'm blown away by Jordin's matterof-fact approach to his difficult upbringing and how it directly
affected his own health and well-being as a young man. Jordin is a man who doesn't believe in wasting his words. Like his hockey, though, his words are fierce, they are carefully considered, and they will knock you on your ass with their sniper's ability to hit their mark. After all, Jordin is not just one of the league's great fighters. He also has one of the league's most powerful slapshots.

This cut-to-the-bone philosophical approach he takes to where he found himself then and where he finds himself now is deeply aboriginal. I made the startling realization after finishing his book that he is so much like the characters I explore in my fiction: tough men, world-weary and careful with their words, men who not only watch their surroundings closely but tap into them. But as soon as you scratch the surface, you find people straining for answers, straining for justice and understanding and for the truth just below. Jordin has done something my characters were never able to do, though: express himself so openly and with such a simple honesty that you can't turn your attention away.

I'll admit I became a bit obsessed with the man after reading his book. I didn't want the story to end. And so I did what any twenty-first-century person does to find out more: I googled him. There are plenty of YouTube videos that capture his epic speed and scoring ability and especially his punishing fighting skills. It becomes obvious pretty fast why he's one of the more contentious players in the NHL. But it was a video of him speaking with Michael Landsberg on TSN's
Off the Record
about fighting that made me realize the deep intelligence, the careful consideration, and the good politician's poise when faced with tough questions. Jordin freely admitted that he's a man of few
words, that he lets his actions on the ice speak for him. And yet he masterfully defended what he does and how he's perceived in some quarters while at the same time speaking with a glint in the eye and a sincerity that makes you want to like the guy. You can tell that below the calm exterior there's a depth of character earned from a lot of experience, a lot of pain and tragedy. And that kind of experience can destroy a person pretty quickly. He refuses to let it. He clearly fights as hard off the ice as he does on it to balance what his life so far has thrown at him, including the suicide of his older brother and best friend, Terence. Maybe that's what Jordin is fighting for. His brother's memory, his brother's shot at the big leagues scuttled by a bad decision one night when he thought he'd messed things up beyond repair. I won't speak for Jordin, though. He speaks for himself just fine in these pages, with a minimalist grace that begs us to read between the lines. He is nothing if not charismatic. And that charisma is born from the life he has led thus far, from the land, from his parents, from the memory of his brother that lives inside him.