All the Way by Jordin Tootoo Page B

thing, and he always paid for it. It’s one of those little things I miss. When I go to Tim Hortons now, I always have the same thing. There are times when I’m sitting in my car waiting for the order and I’m about to say something to Terence—but there’s no one sitting next to me.
    Through all those years, I thought that maybe we would wind up on the same team again somewhere down the road, maybe even in the NHL. But that was the last time we ever played together.

FOUR
    T he Western Hockey League—known in hockey circles as “The Dub”—is the youngest of Canada’s three major junior hockey leagues, and once upon a time it was considered a poor prairie cousin of the established loops in Ontario and Quebec. But for decades now, the WHL has more than held its own, growing to include teams in the northwestern United States and becoming arguably the primary breeding ground for National Hockey League talent, especially the kind of big, bruising players who dominate the modern game. Growing up in Rankin Inlet, Jordin didn’t have any direct exposure to The Dub until he was eleven years old, when family circumstances provided an unexpected look into his future.
    In 1993, my dad went to school in Medicine Hat, Alberta, to get his plumber’s trade certificate. We lived in a motel there for six months. It was just me and my mom and my dad. I did school work by correspondence and we all lived in a room the size of aliving room. All I knew about the town was our motel, the street out front, and the rink where my dad played pick-up hockey with a couple of his buddies from plumbing school.
    It turned out that was the same rink where the Medicine Hat Tigers played. One of his buddies saw me there with him and asked my dad if I played hockey, and he told him I did. Then, three months into our stay, a house league team asked me to come out. I was like, Fuck, yeah! I played a couple of games and I just lit it up. I wheeled around everyone and they were all saying, “Who is this kid?”
    I remember going to watch the Tigers and thinking, Holy fuck, it would be awesome to play in a rink like this. It was the closest thing I had ever seen to the NHL.
    One of the first things I did when I got the call from Kelly McCrimmon, telling me that I’d been drafted by the Brandon Wheat Kings, was to look up the team and see if they played in the same league as Medicine Hat. I remember thinking that I could be playing in that same league I saw as a kid if things worked out.
    Kelly was the general manager and part-owner of the Wheat Kings. That’s the way it works sometimes in junior hockey. He played junior hockey and college hockey, but he never played pro. His brother, though, was Brad McCrimmon, who played in the NHL and who was coaching in the Kontinental Hockey League in Russia when he was killed in that terrible plane crash in 2011.
    When I was playing for OCN in that first season after I was drafted by the Wheat Kings and then cut in training camp, Kellywould come out to watch me whenever we came south to play games in Dauphin. The next year, I knew I had a good chance to make the Wheat Kings, which I did.
    It was supposed to be a big step up from the Manitoba junior league to the WHL. I’ll never forget the day I got my first paycheque. Remember, in The Pas I was making five hundred dollars a week, in cash. I figured that the WHL is a way bigger league, so you must get paid more. So when I signed my contract, I was gung-ho. Then payday came. I got a cheque for $72—and that was for two weeks. I called Terence and told him I was coming back to OCN. It was brutal. But then Kelly had me call my agent and he convinced me to stay in Brandon.
    During that first season in Brandon, one of my best memories is of when I played my first game in Medicine Hat. I was skating around the rink before the game and just thinking, Fuck, I’m back here. I can’t believe this. I remember