All the Way (5 page)

For my parents, drinking starts out as a social thing, but then that social thing turns into fricking abuse and then into violence and that's when it takes control over them. They drink only to get fucking wasted.

Growing up, that was just normal for me. It's hard to get alcohol in Rankin and it's expensive. A lot of families are living paycheque to paycheque because of that; they set aside half of their paycheques to pay for their orders of booze.

There was booze in our house all the time. When I was ten, eleven, twelve years old, I'd open the cabinet under the sink and there'd be four or five bottles in there.
Fuck, I wonder what that tastes like.
But we kids were too scared to touch it because we knew if we did and got caught, we'd get the belt.

When my parents started drinking, Terence and I would take off. We always wanted to be outside then, away from the house, away from all of the bullshit. We'd be on our bikes riding to the Point, doing kid stuff, throwing rocks around, but it was always in our minds:
Fuck, if we do this, we're gonna get in shit
. If we got soakers in our boots, we'd stay away from home for as long as we could to try and dry up. We were two peas in a pod. We almost never left each other's side. And when we did, we'd ride around town looking for each other.

We had a lot of fun, and we were always finding different things to do. But we were always careful to never go over the edge, because if we did we would get the belt or the fucking wooden spoon when we got home. It's a small town. If Jordin and Terence Tootoo were breaking windows, our parents would find out. So we would watch our buddies do it, but we wouldn't do it—although even if we were around it, we'd be getting the boots from our parents.

We would come home and Mom would yell at us, or we'd get a fucking beating for some odd, stupid reason, or we'd be sent out to pick up Dad on the Ski-Doo when he was all pissed up and it was minus forty degrees. And we'd still have school the next day.

The truth is, my older sister, Corinne, was the one who put
up with the worst of the bullshit, the verbal and physical abuse at home, because she was the oldest and because she didn't have the chance to leave and play hockey the way Terence and I did. Drinking and abuse is a cycle for a lot of people in the north, and it's hard to break. If I didn't have hockey, I'd probably be a mechanic now, working for the town, living one day at a time, paycheque to paycheque. I'd probably have a bunch of kids running around. Leaving to go to Alberta for that tournament was huge for me.

When I do visits to other Inuit communities now, I talk about the importance of our culture and our traditions; you have to keep those strong. It all starts with the way our people carry themselves when they're out on the land. Nothing else matters other than living in the moment. You can't think beyond survival. You have one plan and that's to make sure you bring food back for your family. For a lot of our elders who grew up on the land, can you imagine how draining it must have been to go out into this wilderness where there are thousands and thousands of miles of open land and you need to find food? How are you going to do that? Where do you go? Our people have to be mentally tough.

When I visit the elders in our communities, they don't ask me about my hockey career. They ask how I am doing inside. It's not like they're proud of me because I'm an NHL star. That's when I know I am around our people—good people. Our elders know what it takes to survive. There are days when I want to throw in the towel and call it quits, but then I think of them and about what our people had to do back in the day just to stay
alive. I'm an Inuk deep inside and I've got to make sure that I carry on those traditions.

The other thing I talk about is education. The dropout rate in the north is phenomenal. The teenagers are thinking,
Why do I need to go to school, because I'm never going anywhere anyway.
In a lot of the isolated communities I also try to get the kids to experience southern life, because it opens up more doors for them. But they're scared to leave. They all know about life in the south because of television, but they're scared of being put in a situation outside of their comfort zone and not knowing what to do when times get tough. They know what to do up here, but down there it's like a different language and, in a lot of ways, a different planet. That's why they stay. And then they get trapped.

SO I GOT AWAY from Rankin Inlet, got away from my folks, got away from all of the drinking and all of the bullshit. I moved in with my billet family in Fort Providence.

I walked into this new place and it was fine and dandy for the first week, fine for the second week, and then … well, frick, if I thought I was getting away from booze by moving south, I had another thing coming. It was awful, but it was all normal for me. I never complained about it because I still thought life in Fort Providence was better than it would have been at home. You learn to kind of hold everything in, and so I did that and just battled through it. At least I didn't have to worry about the belt or the wooden spoon like I would at home. So, no, I wasn't homesick.

They had three kids, including one the same age as me, and he was like a brother. Fuck, it wasn't healthy living, but to this day I still talk to those people. I guess I promised them that if I ever made it to the NHL, I was going to fly them down south so they could watch me play. They remind me of that when they come down to see me play in Edmonton or Calgary. I guess I never got around to it.

Outside of my billet house, I put my head down and just went about my business. But I was the new kid in school, and I ended up fighting kids all the time because I was picked on. I wasn't one of them. They tried to bully me. Well, I didn't take any shit from anyone. If you pissed me off, I'd beat the shit out of you. A month in, they knew better than to fuck with Jordin Tootoo.

It was a very hostile environment. But that's what I was used to, so it wasn't like I was shocked. There were a lot of drugs and alcohol. I tried marijuana there for the first time—it was a regular thing for a lot of these young kids because their parents did it all the time. But it just didn't do anything for me. Booze: that was my drug. First time I had it, I thought it was the greatest. I didn't care about weed. I never did hard drugs, cocaine or acid or whatever. It just never crossed my mind, because booze was always on my mind. I just thought it was natural because my parents did it and, well, fuck, if they did it, why couldn't I do it, too?

I played in the tournament in Edmonton and I ended up steamrolling a lot of the younger Aboriginal kids. I think that's when my name really started to get out there. They were saying,
“Who is this Tootoo kid? We've never seen anything like this before.” I was just happy being away from home and having the opportunity to play in a big tournament.

Afterwards, a Triple A bantam coach pulled me aside and invited me to come to camp in Spruce Grove, which isn't far from Edmonton, and try out for his team. He sent the paperwork through to the coach in Fort Providence and I asked my parents about it. They said it was fine.

So that fall, at the beginning of grade nine, I moved to Spruce Grove, Alberta. My billets were another Aboriginal family—actually, there was another Aboriginal kid who had played in the tournament in Edmonton and then had moved to Spruce Grove to play for the same team. He lived with his single mother—just the two of them—and I moved in with them. It was a great situation. The mom was everything a kid coming down from the north could have asked for. She understood my whole background and situation. And it was a sober house. She didn't drink at all. That was all new to me—a good kind of new. Honestly, without her, I wouldn't be where I am today; I would have given everything up and said the hell with this. My other teammates' parents also welcomed me to their homes. Seeing how happy these families were … it was something I had never experienced before. It was awesome.

But the rest of my life in Spruce Grove wasn't so easy.

Needless to say, I made the team. Then, on my second shift in my first game of organized regular-season hockey, off the draw, a guy fucking slashed me. I thought,
Fuck you, white boy, don't fuck with me
, and I dropped my gloves. I ended up fighting
a couple of guys, and all of the parents got wound up. After the game, I got a call telling me I was suspended for five games. I thought,
What the fuck is this? You guys want to play hockey? This isn't hockey.
Back home, if someone pissed you off, you just beat him up and then went back out and played. That's how I thought it was supposed to work, not with all of these fucking rules and systems and shit like that. In Rankin, it was just a free-for-all.

I served my time and word got around that Jordin Tootoo was fucking crazy. It was just my instincts. That's how I grew up. I was never the biggest guy out there, but I didn't take shit from anyone.

In school in Spruce Grove, there were only a handful of Aboriginal kids from the reserves around town, and a few East Indians, but of course I was the only Inuk. The white kids there thought they knew what the Native lifestyle was: fucking drunks and idiots and whatever. Obviously, I was put into that category right off the bat. I felt a bond with the Native kids. We're kind of the same people. We're cousins, even though we have different traditions and different beliefs. But I don't remember being particularly close to any of them at school.

What I do remember is the racism. A lot of racism. I wasn't used to that. I hadn't had a lot of experience with it. Growing up in our community, it always felt like everybody was equal. And when we'd go to tournaments in the surrounding communities, of course it was never an issue. The first time I really knew that racism even existed was when I was chosen to play for a Native all-star team at a tournament in Saskatoon when I was
thirteen years old. The other teams got upset with us because we were playing the game the way we played it back home. We were rough and tough. We had come down south and it turned out that the rules were a lot different there. We were bulldozing everyone and they didn't like it—the players, the coaches, even the parents in the stands. On the ice, the kids started saying some pretty nasty stuff to us. You wonder how they came up with it. How did the adults teach these kids that it was okay to degrade someone of a different race? I can't recall many of the specific slurs now, but I remember being more surprised than hurt. A kid would yell something like, “Hey, Eskimo, go back and live in your igloo where you belong!” I remember thinking,
What's wrong with an igloo? What's wrong with being Inuit?
I just didn't get it.

But as I experienced more of those kinds of incidents over the years, I started to understand that I wasn't in Rankin anymore, where everyone knew everyone and everyone accepted everyone. I started to understand why a lot of people who left there came home soon after. I still hear stuff sometimes during a game. There was an incident during my rookie year in the NHL that got a bit of press. I got into a scrum with Tyler Wright in Columbus and he told the media afterwards that I bit his finger. Then he added, “Well, I guess that's what Eskimos do—they eat raw meat, don't they?” That was a racial slur.

I didn't hear about what Wright had said until it was in the papers and somebody contacted me to ask me what I thought. I told them that I didn't give a fuck what he'd said. I wasn't afraid of Wright, so I knew that one way or another he was
going to get it. He was the type of player who was a chirper but who never really backed up his words. The next time we played Columbus, I knew something was going to happen—and he knew it, too. I already had the edge on him mentally. When he was getting ready in the dressing room that night, I know he was thinking,
Fuck, I've got to watch my back because Toots is going to do something stupid.
He was right. The game was in Nashville, and the whole crowd knew that something was going to happen. I went after Wright the minute we were both on the ice, and got three or four punches in. Then he turtled, as he usually did. It wasn't like any of his teammates were there to back him up. You're a man of your own words. If you say something, you'd better be there yourself to back it up.

That was the end of it. He never came around me again. He never said anything to me again. That was the end of that whole feud. And that's how a problem like that should be settled. In today's game, you've got all of these young punks roaming around the ice, saying shit and talking trash. As my father always says, “Talk is cheap, but money buys whisky.” If you've got something to say, be a man. This doesn't apply just to hockey. In today's society, you see a lot of young kids being spoon-fed and having everything handed to them. When times are tough or they're faced with hardship, they'll just crumble.

OF COURSE, in Spruce Grove I was also the new kid on the block, this new hockey stud, which didn't help. I was built pretty much like I am now, maybe a little bit smaller.
Obviously, everyone's cliquey in high school. I had to really figure out who my friends were. And it turned out the only friends I had were my teammates. In class I would always hope that one of my teammates was there so I'd have someone to talk to. I wasn't the guy who would approach people or try to push myself to be cool like everyone else. I would always wait for them to welcome me in, and that would never happen. Except that some of the girls really liked me. They were saying, “Who is this cute little Jordin kid?” They were all over me. Of course, the guys said, “Fuck this guy. Who does he think he is, trying to take our girls away from us?” I remember getting into fights, standing up for myself.

The skater kids and the other cliques had their own little groups. I was an easy guy to pick on. I remember that guys would try to get into my locker, to burn my books and stuff. That happened. At first, I just took all of the heat. But then I stopped taking any more shit. I started calling guys out, guys who were trying to bully me. It got to the point where I lost it a couple of times. I remember walking home from school one day and hearing somebody behind me shouting, “Hey, fuck you!” I turned around and there were three kids walking up to me. I dropped my bag, started swinging for the fences, and beat the shit out of all three of them. I think, after that, no one really fucked with me. The message got out that it wasn't a good idea to fuck around with Tootoo. Don't even look at him, because he'll fucking kill you.