All the Way (15 page)

Life as a pro hockey player isn't all glamour, but it does mean eating at fancy restaurants and flying on chartered jets. None of that ever distracted me from what is important in life. For me, that means the land and the people who matter to you—and the two go together. That's me and my father fishing on the ice (above). And below, that's me and Terence. I miss him every day.

NINE

T
he Nashville Predators came into existence in 1998, part of the National Hockey League's expansion into nontraditional markets that began way back in 1967 but really gained momentum after Wayne Gretzky's trade from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings in 1988. In no way was Nashville hockey country. Culturally, the city is known the world over as the capital of country music and the home of the Grand Ole Opry. As well, in the state of Tennessee, football is the sport of choice, especially the college game. Most of the fans who came out to see the Predators had never played hockey and didn't understand its finer points or its history. But they liked the speed, they liked the action, and they especially liked the rough stuff. It was a very different place than Rankin Inlet, or Brandon, but in many ways, for Jordin, Nashville was the perfect fit, both as a player and as a person.

I went to the Predators' summer prospects camp in July 2003, after my fourth season with the Wheat Kings. It's a chance for the young players to get in some extra work and get comfortable before the main training camp begins in September. You can continue playing junior hockey as an overage twenty-year-old, but I was done with it. At that point, I didn't really know whether I had a shot to make the NHL or whether I would wind up playing for the Predators' farm team in the American Hockey League, the Milwaukee Admirals.

Not long after I left Nashville at the end of prospects camp, I got a call from David Poile asking me if I would be interested in coming back down three weeks before the regular training camp began to train with their conditioning people. Of course, I said yes. I moved down on August 10 and went right into working out and pounding the weights like I never had before. By the time training camp came around, I had probably put on ten pounds of muscle.

In camp, David Poile told me just to play my game. He said, “We brought you in because of the element you bring,” and I knew what that meant. So I lit 'er up, I had a couple of fights, and obviously I made an impression. Everything just kind of fell into place for me. They had a player named Scott Walker who was at the end of his career and who played the same style as I did, and he didn't really want to be that guy anymore—the energy guy, the fighter. He was done with it. And that role fit me like a glove.

I thought for sure I would have to fight Scott Walker in camp to prove a point and try to take that job for myself. Mentally, I was
draining myself thinking about it. But one of the veteran players, Jim McKenzie, told me to take it easy in camp. “Don't fight your own guys in camp to make a point. You do that during exhibition games when we're playing someone else. You're not going to prove anything here by taking on veteran guys who have been around for a while.” That lifted some weight off my shoulders. I didn't want to get off to a bad start with these guys by running around and being an idiot. It was nice to hear it straight up.

Jim was really important to me that year. I was a kid that came from nowhere and he was a small-town boy from Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, so we had that in common. But he had been around forever. Before he got to Nashville, he had played for eight other NHL teams—Hartford, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Winnipeg, Phoenix, Anaheim, Washington, and New Jersey— going all the way back to 1990 and he'd won a Stanley Cup the year before with the New Jersey Devils. That year in Nashville turned out to be his last season. He had been a brawler back in the day, as you can see from his numbers; in junior, he had 100 points total—and 1739 penalty minutes.

When I first moved to Nashville, Jim took me under his wing. We played a similar role, except that he was a true heavyweight and I was a smaller guy, new to the league, and didn't know a whole lot about playing in the NHL. He really mentored me and groomed me in terms of how to be a good professional, an everyday player. He taught me that even though there are days when you're not feeling too well and you don't want to be in the gym, you have to do that extra work because that's what helps you overcome obstacles and become a champion.

I told Jim a lot about my life away from hockey. He was one of the people who really cared about me. His family was great to me, too; they had me over for dinner all the time. Jim became my roommate on the road, and I'll never forget my first trip to New York City. We went out to grab dinner and a coffee, and somehow we got separated in the crowds on the street. I was people-watching, soaking it all in, and I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention. Suddenly, I looked up and he wasn't there. Then I saw him off in the distance, obviously looking around for me and seeming distressed. When I caught up with him, I could tell he was relieved. “You scared the living daylights out of me,” he said. “This is your first time here and I didn't want you to go missing. I was looking everywhere for my little Mohican.” I'll never forget that that's what he called me: “my little Mohican.”

Jim and I had the same mentality. Just because we were making all of this money and playing in the NHL, we didn't take it for granted. Even when you don't feel like it, when the fans are all over you, you have to embrace the opportunity. To this day, I will stay and sign autographs until the last person is happy rather than flipping the fans off the way some guys do. Jim taught me to stay until the end. Because it's not going to last forever.

On the ice, Jim taught me how to use my style and to play smart. He'd say, “On this shift, dump it in and chase it around. Let's stir it up.” When he was on the ice with me, I had someone to look after me if one of our opponent's big guys came after me. He was right there. We went out and caused chaos. The guys on the bench loved it. We wouldn't take any penalties, and we were back in the game.

I learned an important lesson from veteran players like Jim. You need to be an impact player every night. But that isn't the same as needing to fight every night. The job was to go out there, cause havoc, and draw penalties. In the NHL, that became the most important part of my game.

I'm not a talker on the ice. I don't make guys mad by chirping at them. I do it physically. I give them a little jab, a tap on the back of the legs. When they are skating off the bench, I give them an extra nudge. The little fucking shit that drives them crazy. Just chipping away at them. Then instead of saying something, I just smile in silence. That drives them even more crazy.

I know what's going on. I have a game plan in my head. You play within the coach's system, but you have your own game plan, and you add to it piece by piece. I want that guy to go nuts, retaliate, and wind up in the penalty box, giving us a power play.

Some games, do I want to do that shit? Fuck, no. Let me play. But if that's what's going to keep me around, that's what I've got to do. I would take a run at somebody, wait until he knocked me down in retaliation, and then blow up to make sure the referee saw it. It doesn't make me the most popular player in the league—probably pretty close to the opposite—but it works.

I GUESS I DID enough things right during that Predators' camp, because near the end David Poile called me into his office and said, “Congratulations. You made the roster.”

I had been confident. I didn't think they could send me down the way I'd played. But still, that's the kind of news you've
got to hear twice before it sinks in.
What? Really? I made it? I'm in the NHL?

Holy fuck.

BARRY TROTZ, who moved to the Capitals in 2014 and had been the longest-serving coach with one team in the NHL, really understood me from day one. We had a strong personal connection because his father was an alcoholic and he saw signs of alcoholism in my family and knew what I was dealing with. We had a lot of conversations about our families. When things started getting pretty dark with me, I was in his office quite a bit. He would tell me, “You've got to figure this out. I've seen this in my own family.” He really cared about me. And maybe at that age, I didn't fully understand what he was trying to do. I was more likely to be thinking,
Fuck, why is he hounding me all the time? I'm doing everything I'm supposed to do on the ice. Why is he on me?
It never occurred to me then that he was trying to help me, that he cared about my health and was worried about what I was doing away from rink.

The truth is, he had a lot to worry about. After all of those years spent living with billet families in junior hockey, when I still found ways to do pretty much whatever I wanted to do, here I was living on my own in a condo, with no curfews, no restrictions, and a lot money in my pocket. I remember when my first NHL paycheque came in and it was like,
Holy fuck
—I think it was for $26,000. I took a picture of it and sent it to a
few of my buddies. All of the years of getting paid shit money just disappeared.

The first game of the season was scheduled for October 9 against the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim (now the Anaheim Ducks). A whole crowd came down from Rankin Inlet. All of my immediate family made the trip, my sister Corinne and her husband, all of my relatives and friends that I grew up with. Even the premier of Nunavut came to the game. They had a couple of buses full of people who made the drive all the way down from Manitoba. That's not a short trip. By the time the game started, they had filled pretty much a whole section in the Nashville arena.

It was an intense week or so. The night before the game, I went out for dinner with my immediate family. My dad said, “You've been doing this all of your life. I just want you to go out there and don't think about trying to impress your family and your friends. Just go out there and do your job and have fun, make sure that you look after yourself.” During the morning skate on the day of the first game, I was jumpy. The time came for my pre-game nap and I couldn't fucking sleep. This was the cream of the crop, the best league in the world. And there I was, twenty years old and getting my shot.

I got a lot of media coverage that year; really, I was the talk of the whole training camp. The press in Nashville loved my story, so by the time we got to the first game the Predators fans knew all about me, about Terence, and about where I came from. The crowd was ready for me. I jumped over the boards for my first
shift and the whole arena gave me a standing ovation. It was a pretty cool moment: the first Inuk player in an NHL game— way down in the U.S. South, no less—and they were standing and cheering for me. The place kind of erupted, and it kept erupting for me as the years went on.

I was nervous. I stepped out for my first shift of the game and immediately missed a glorious chance right in the slot. The fucking puck came right to me and then it caught a rut in the ice just as I was teeing it up and bounced over my stick. I actually didn't get my first goal until about a quarter of the way through the season, at a game in Atlanta. I remember it was a one-timer, and at first I didn't even know that I'd scored the goal. I took a shot from the top of the circle and there were a bunch of guys in front of the net but somehow it went in. All of the guys were saying, “It's Tootoo's goal, we didn't touch it.” They really wanted me to get that first one.

Those first few weeks in the league were amazing. But there were also times when it was pretty rough. I remember going to St. Louis for the first time. The Blues were our big rivals then, and they had Mike Danton on their roster. You probably know his story: he went to jail for trying to have his agent, David Frost, murdered, though there was a whole lot more to it than that. But at that time, he was known mostly as a fighter, kind of a crazy fighter. And I knew that going into the game. Because I was the new fighter on the Predators, I was going to be expected to take him on. For fighters, thinking about what's coming eats away at your state of mind—knowing that you're going to have to go to war, that you have to accept the challenge. That's the
difference between someone a team can count on and someone they can't: being willing. As a rookie, I was trying to win the trust of my teammates. I wanted them to know I would go to war with this guy for them any day of the week. I wanted to prove myself. But I was also only twenty years old, fighting men.

I remember skating out for warm-ups that night and seeing Danton, just seeing the look in his eyes—the look that said,
I don't give a shit what happens to me; you're not going to beat me up.
I trusted my own strength but there we were looking over at each other and he had a glare in his eyes that said,
I'm going to fucking kill you.
Holy shit, that kind of intimidated me—this guy with his history and he has nothing to lose. I was nervous as hell. But that fear factor is part of what motivates me. Knowing that this was it, this was my time. I thrive in those moments. That's when you have to believe in yourself. Any time you have any doubt in your mind, you're screwed.

The warm-up seemed to take forever, and then there was the anthem. Those seconds seemed like hours.
Let's fucking get this over with.
Finally, they dropped the puck and we dropped our gloves, right off the faceoff. I fought Danton a couple of times that night, and held my ground. After that, I could feel the respect I had gained from my teammates, and from the other fighters around the league. I had showed them I wasn't afraid of anybody.

OF COURSE, I FOUGHT during that first season in Nashville, during every season before, and during every season
since. Fighting was always part of my game, and it's one of the skills that got me to the NHL. The truth is, I've been fighting all of my life, one way or another. In hockey, I started fighting way back—when I was twelve or thirteen years old. Even playing street hockey, there was the odd time it boiled over. That's just how it was when I was growing up.