All the Way (10 page)

They divided the players into two teams, one of which was coached by Don Cherry, and the other coached by Bobby Orr. There were some great guys in the game that year—Jason Spezza, Jason Pominville, Colby Armstrong, Cory Stillman, Lukas Krajicek—all of the best draft-eligible players in Canadian junior hockey. They had a skills competition the night before the game, and I won for the hardest shot; I think my best shot was 96.1 miles per hour.

Bobby Orr was my coach. Imagine that. The greatest hockey player in the world is coaching you. He's a legend. As a small-town boy growing up watching hockey, I only knew the big names: Mario Lemieux, Wayne Gretzky, Bobby Orr. To have Orr coach me was awesome. He knew my style. I remember him
telling me, “Hey, kid, play the game hard and let's get Cherry all fired up, because you're the type of player that can rattle him.” I was all for that. I only knew one style of play and that was rock 'em, sock 'em hockey. Other people told me I ought to tone it down a little bit and play less physical hockey with all of the scouts around. I thought,
Fuck that—I want to rattle Grapes's team a bit. Give him a taste of his own medicine. If he likes rock 'em, sock 'em, I'll give him rock 'em, sock 'em.

I don't know if I ever did rattle Cherry, but we beat his team 5–3 and I did get to talk to him. Hockey has taken me to a lot of places I never expected to go and let me meet people I'll never forget.

I didn't really think too much about the significance of the game. I just went out and played. I didn't hear anything about how I was ranked afterwards, which was fine. To me, less is more. But I guess I did make a bit of an impression by playing the way I play. The media asked Bobby Orr about me after the game. He said, “Is he a hard rock, or what? He's a tough kid. Everyone's always talking about size in our game, and here's one player that's not real tall, but he's just as strong as a horse. He's looked at as small because he's not 6'4". But he's one that could play in the National Hockey League. He's got a heart as big as this rink, and he plays very, very well. I was really impressed with Jordin.”

Don Cherry talked about me, too. I guess it shouldn't really be a surprise that I was his kind of hockey player. “Tootoo, I wish I'd have had him in the Boston Bruins,” he said. “He looks
like he should have played for the old Bruins. I just think he's great, and I don't know if a lot of people know of Stan Jonathan, but he reminds me of Stan Jonathan. He's a great hockey player, and he will be in the National Hockey League, there's no doubt in my mind.”

That was good to hear.

I ALREADY HAD an agent by then: Don Meehan at Newport Sports Management, who was probably the most powerful agent in the sport. Kelly McCrimmon introduced me to Don when I was fifteen, and I was with him until the summer of 2010. At the time, I didn't really understand how that part of the hockey business worked—or even who Don Meehan was. He was put in front of me and Kelly said, “This is a guy who could help you in your career.”
Frick, why not? Where do I sign?
Obviously, Meehan thought I had NHL potential way back then. As for me, I knew I was a good enough player to get drafted but, other than that, I wasn't a guy who really followed that part of the game. I let my play determine my outcome and that's what happened. Scouts had come to watch me play in Brandon, but most of the communication with them was through Kelly. He'd tell me the nights when they were in the stands and even though I might have been slightly hung over, I blocked that out and turned it up a notch, knowing I was being watched.

It wasn't until a couple of weeks before the draft that I knew where I was ranked. Most of the experts were saying that I'd be
picked in the third or fourth round. I didn't really care where I was picked or which team picked me. The important part for me was just having that chance.

The draft happens in June, at the end of the NHL season. That year they held it in Sunrise, Florida, where the Panthers play. Ilya Kovalchuk was the first overall pick, followed by Jason Spezza. I had stayed in Brandon after the Wheat Kings' season finished. On draft day, my parents flew down from Rankin Inlet, and Terence was there. The whole family got together at a hotel in Brandon. We had a little gathering in the lounge and then sat there for what seemed like hours, waiting for the phone to ring. After the first couple of rounds they stop showing the draft on television, so we had no idea what was going on.

Finally, my cellphone rang. It was David Poile, general manager of the Nashville Predators, telling me that they had taken me with the first pick in the fourth round, ninety-eighth overall. They actually had traded up to take me in that spot. It was only then that it hit me:
Fuck, this is really happening. I've been drafted. I'm going to play in the NHL.
My brother was there. My whole family was there. It was a special moment.

When we got back to Rankin Inlet, it was one big, big party. The first Inuk player to ever get drafted by the NHL … that's a pretty good excuse to light 'er up.

THAT SUMMER, I went down to Nashville for a rookie camp. I had been in the States a few times on road trips, since
there are some American teams in the WHL. But it was my first experience being in the real South. When I got there, the temperature was about 90 degrees and the humidity was unbearable, at least for a northern guy like me. I'd thought the weather was going to be like it is in Winnipeg. At first I just stayed in my hotel with the AC blasting. The only time I left was for the one-minute walk to the rink.

The idea was to introduce the drafted players to the coaches, the team, and the city. That's when I first met Barry Trotz, who was the head coach of the Predators. He was a Manitoba boy, from Dauphin, who knew Kelly McCrimmon, and he welcomed me with open arms. But we actually spent most of our time with guys from their minor league system, including Claude Noël, who went on to coach the Winnipeg Jets.

Despite the heat, Nashville made an immediate impression on me. A lot of people talked about how great it was to live there and how friendly the people were. But the team was still new, and hockey wasn't all that big there. We were able to see some sights during that week. The city started growing on me right then and there. I thought about coming back and living there and experiencing the country music scene and all of that stuff.

On the hockey side, the trip was a real eye-opener. Three days before the trip, I was all pissed up, still partying after the draft. I hadn't set foot in the gym. I'd thought it was going to be fucking easy. Instead, it was a whole other level of being in shape. At that age, when you're done with hockey at the end of the season, you don't think about being in the gym. And then there was the mental part of the game. When you're playing
with junior kids, the game is a lot slower. I didn't quite understand all of the systems they were talking about in Nashville. They were giving us all these booklets on things like faceoff plays.
Holy shit.
We didn't really have those in Brandon. It was more like: this is how we're going to forecheck, and this is how we're going to break out, and other than that just go out and play hockey. Rookie camp was more like going to school again for me. But I embraced the experience of being around NHL guys—guys who had been around in the league. Some of them were working out at that camp because they had kids in school in Nashville. Brent Gilchrist was there, Cliff Ronning, Tom Fitzgerald. It was pretty intimidating at first, but when you're in that environment for long enough it just becomes normal. And it was a pretty neat experience for a kid, and the first Inuk— going all the way down south and seeing the life of a pro hockey player for the first time. What I saw there told me that it was time to start changing my focus, because there was work to be done to make it to the next level.

In September, I returned to Nashville for the Predators' rookie camp. I got to play in an exhibition game, and stuck around camp longer than any of the players drafted higher than me. So I started thinking,
Fuck, I'm the man around here.
It wasn't really a surprise when they sent me back to junior. But the experience of being in an NHL camp and hanging in there for that long gave me a real boost of confidence. It set me up for a great year in Brandon.

MEANWHILE, Terence had finished up his final season with OCN and was looking for a way to continue in hockey. He had been the captain there for three years, and I think that's what really kept him in The Pas. He had an opportunity to play in The Dub but he knew that the money wasn't as good. He was good enough to play major junior, but in the back of his mind he was thinking,
I've got to get paid.
That was his mindset all through junior hockey. At the end of the day, he was playing to support our family, sending money home to shut them up.

I don't know if it was because he left home at an older age or because he didn't get the practice needed, but for whatever reason he was a step behind me in hockey, and he knew that. He told me, “You're a better player than I am. I've got to find a way to stick it out. You're younger, you know the systems and stuff, and how it works. For me, it took a little longer but I'm going to make it work.”

Terence's coaches had a contact at the Roanoke Express, a team in the East Coast Hockey League that played out of Roanoke, Virginia. The ECHL is a second-tier minor league one level below the American Hockey League, so two levels below the NHL. The teams all play in the States, and most of them are affiliated with NHL teams.

The guys in Roanoke got a call about Terence and looked at his stats and decided to offer him a tryout. Terence went down there and he made the team. It's funny: just recently, I ran into a guy named Mark Bernard. He's a scout now, but in those days he was the general manager in Roanoke, the guy who gave Terence a chance there. He told me how much they loved him, how the
fans there embraced his style of play. Mark told me that when he sees me play now, it's just like watching Terence. That kind of tickled me.

Terence definitely enjoyed his time in Roanoke. He wanted to be a pro and he was going to do whatever it took to move up to the next level—the American Hockey League—and then after that, who knows. Maybe a shot at the NHL. He always told me, “You may have gotten a little bit better than me, so I'm going to have to work my way up and catch you.”

I don't think Terence was ever jealous of the success I enjoyed. He always encouraged me. He'd say, “I'm proud of you, keep going. You do your thing. For me, it might take a little extra time, but I'm ready for that challenge.” I never saw jealousy in his eyes and he never asked why everything was happening for me and not for him.

When he got to Roanoke, he became the city's favourite hockey player right off the bat. And he enjoyed living down there. He talked about it all the time. “I'm kind of on my own here. Nothing to worry about. I'm far enough away from everyone.” For him, it wasn't tough at all being away. He was doing what he loved and he was three thousand miles away from the shit at home whereas, when he was in The Pas, he was still close enough to have to deal with it.

The only problem with the ECHL was that Terence had to take a big pay cut. With OCN, Terence was making good money under the table, but in Roanoke he was making fucking peanuts. Still, he always found a way to send money home. As soon as I signed my first contract with Nashville and got my
bonus money, I got a call from him. “Now it's your turn to look after the family. I'm fucking struggling here. You make sure you look after Mom and Dad.”

I tried sending money to Terence, but he wouldn't take it. I told him that he had looked after me and it was time for me to pay him back, but he wouldn't accept it. He said, “I don't want any of your money.” The only help he would accept was for sticks and gear. Beyond that, he didn't want to deal with money anymore. He just wanted to enjoy his life.

I HAD A GREAT SEASON in 2001–2002. By the end of the year, it was pretty obvious that I was more than just a tough guy. I finished as the Wheat Kings' leading scorer, with 32 goals and 39 assists. We finished first in our division and then beat Saskatoon and Swift Current in the playoffs before losing a tough seven-game series to Red Deer in the semifinals. Not that my game had completely changed. I had 272 penalty minutes that year, also tops on the team, and fought sixteen times. In every one of those sixteen fights, the guy I had faced was taller than me, heavier than me, or both. And that's not just my memory. There are statistics. There are actually people who keep track of stuff like that.

My confidence was pretty high. I knew that I couldn't be satisfied with just being a junior player and I had to start learning how to be a pro. I was setting goals, reaching them, and then setting new goals. It was tough for me, because I was now looked at as the go-to guy on the team. But it wasn't my
teammates or coaches putting pressure on me. It was more me putting pressure on myself, and trying to prove to others that I could be a pro hockey player.

That summer, I was looking forward to going to the Predators' training camp again. I knew that it would be tough to crack an NHL roster as a nineteen-year-old, and that I'd probably return to Brandon for my final year of junior. But coming off a season like that one, I thought I had an outside chance to stick around.

And Terence was coming off a great season, too. They loved him in Roanoke, loved the way he played, and they wanted him back. But he also had an offer to try out with the Norfolk Admirals in the American Hockey League. If he made it, that would mean better money, and it would be one step closer to the NHL.

Terence was all jacked up about that. Things were really going well.

SEVEN

I
n the summer of 2002, Terence arrived in Brandon following his first season with the Roanoke Express. On the ice, it couldn't have been a more successful debut. He had made history, becoming the first Inuk to play professional hockey, and while the first two lines of his rookie statistical record—9 goals and 16 assists—didn't suggest much, the third one did—218 penalty minutes. Though undersized, Terence was fearless, tormenting the opposition, getting under their skin, and scrapping when necessary; in other words, he played hockey the Tootoo way. In a nontraditional southern U.S. hockey market, he immediately became a fan favourite, and almost from the start number 22 Tootoo jerseys started popping up in the crowd. Though some had picked Roanoke to win a championship that season, the Express were knocked out in the first round of the ECHL playoffs. Before leaving for home, Terence ordered his sticks for the 2002–2003 season, but he was hoping to take another step forward and make the jump to the Norfolk Admirals of the American Hockey League, then the number-one farm team of the Chicago Blackhawks. Terence had understood from the start that it would be a difficult road from hockey's low minors to the National Hockey League. But if long odds fazed the Tootoo brothers, they never would have left Rankin Inlet. And the truth was, they were closer to their dream of suiting up together in the NHL than they had ever been. Upon arriving in Brandon, Terence moved in with Jordin, sharing a basement bedroom in the home of his billets, Neil and Janene, on the outskirts of town. It was a great summer. Jordin was a junior hockey celebrity—a star in a one-sport, one-team town—the Tootoo brothers were together once again, and though the family burdens remained, they seemed far, far away. During the day, Jordin and Terence trained hard for the upcoming season and, at night, they tore up the town. On August 27, with summer quickly drawing to a close, Jordin, his girlfriend Meghan, and Terence went out to sample the Brandon nightlife as they had so many times before.