All the Way by Jordin Tootoo

practice and it was straight to the machine, hoping that Terence had sent me a fax. I’d fax him to say, “I fucking hate it here. This sucks.” And he’d say, “Jordin, just stick it out. This is going to be okay.” He was always encouraging me to stay strong.
    I wish I would have saved some of those faxes.
    DURING THE YEAR that Terence was playing in The Pas and I was playing in Spruce Grove, his coaches started asking him about me. They caught wind that I was playing Triple A, and then they heard that I was taken by the Brandon Wheat Kings of the Western Hockey League in the bantam draft. Looking back, that was a big step for me—being drafted by a team in one of the best junior leagues in the world, where all kinds of NHL players had started their careers. As a fifteen-year-old, I was invited to the Wheat Kings’ rookie camp, but there wasn’t much chance I’d stick with the team that year. Instead, my plan was to go to Thompson, Manitoba, and play Midget AAA there. Thompson was only a two-hour drive from The Pasand a lot closer to home, so I’d have an easier time keeping in touch with Terence there.
    The day after I got cut by the Wheat Kings, my dad and my brother drove down from The Pas to Brandon to pick me up and take me to Thompson. They came by at five o’clock in the morning and we started out on the first leg of the trip, the six-hour drive to The Pas. Instead of going straight on from there, we ended up staying overnight and checking out the beginning of OCN’s training camp the next day. Terence was going to be in camp for a couple of days before I had to report to Thompson. The OCN coach, Gardiner MacDougall, asked Terence if I’d like to take a shot at making the team, and he told them I’d love to. So I suited up for a couple of exhibition games. Lit it up. Got in a few tilts. The next thing you know, the coaches were saying, “We want to keep you here.” It happened so fast. Before I knew it, I was enrolled in the local high school and playing for OCN.
    In hockey terms, it was a big jump. If I had gone to Thompson to play Midget, I would have been playing against fifteen- and sixteen-year olds. The OCN team played in a league that was just one level below major junior. The players there were all older: nineteen, twenty, and twenty-one. It was a really tight group. They were brought in from Ontario and Saskatchewan, as well as being from Manitoba. Only five or six of us were Aboriginal. These were guys who weren’t going to play in the Canadian Hockey League, but they could come up to The Pas and play for good money, better money than they would make in major junior. I was fifteen years old and making five hundred bucks a week, with all of my living expenses covered.Terence was making around $1200 a week because he was one of the top guys. And as a bonus, we could buy stuff on the reserve, like gas, tax-free.
    As a hockey team, we were stacked. I think we lost only seven or eight games out of sixty-two that whole year. Gardiner MacDougall gave me an unbelievable opportunity to grow as a young player. At fifteen years old, I was playing with what were men to me and holding my own. That whole season, we were on fire. Our team was unbelievable. Visiting teams hated coming there because they knew they would get their asses kicked.
    You could fit eight or nine hundred people in our home arena. I can just imagine teams crossing the bridge from The Pas to the reserve and seeing the arena there. They must have been shaking in their boots. It must have been a bad feeling knowing that they were going to get the shit kicked out of them in front of that hostile crowd.
    We were living the life. I was one of the few guys still in school, so I’d go in the morning for two or three hours. Practice was at 12:30. We were done at 2:30. We’d show up for practice on snowmobiles and then everyone would go fishing after we were done—jump on the