Free All the Way by Jordin Tootoo Page B

to have fun and shut up our parents, but it caused so much shit for so many other people.
    Jordin’s first season with the Brandon Wheat Kings was 1999–2000. Playing as a sixteen-year-old, he scored only 6 goals in 45 games, but made a statement with his 217 penalty minutes. Though he was young, and far from the biggest guy on his team, he made it clear that he wouldn’t back down from anyone. He was already on the radar of Hockey Canada, dating back to his minor hockey days in Alberta. The organization invited him to participate in a program designed to take the best young hockey players in Canada and groom them to compete for the country internationally, with the big prize being a spot on the World Junior Championship team. Thanks to blanket television coverage on TSN over the Christmas season, when fans were at home with few other sports viewing options, and thanks especially to regular Canadian victories, the World Juniors had become one of the most watched sporting events on the calendar. Canadians fell in love with international hockey while watching the legendary Summit Series in 1972, and each subsequent tournament was framed as a battle for the national birthright. The World Juniors fed on those emotions, each year delivering a new crop of fresh-faced heroes, wearing the maple leaf and battling against whichever country emerged as the great rival—the Russians, the Americans, the Swedes, or the Finns. Some of the players involved would go on to become stars in the National Hockey League, while for others the World Juniors would mark the peak of their celebrity, and sometimes the peak of their hockey careers.
    Playing junior hockey in Brandon wasn’t a big leap from OCN, because I had already spent a year playing against guys who were junior age. The only real difference was the travel—the long road trips in The Dub. We didn’t have those in The Pas.
    In my first year of junior, I got to play on two teams that were part of Hockey Canada’s Program of Excellence, which identifies the best players in the country and prepares them for the World Juniors. First, I was part of Team West, which represented Manitoba and Saskatchewan in the World Under-17 Hockey Challenge, played in Timmins, Ontario. There were four otherCanadian teams representing different regions, plus teams from Germany, the Czech Republic, Russia, the United States, and Finland. That year, the Russians won the tournament.
    Then, in the summer between my first and second years in Brandon, I was picked to play on the National Men’s Under-18 Team in what was then called the Four Nations Tournament in Kežmarok, Slovakia. (It’s now called the Ivan Hlinka Memorial Tournament.) The other three countries involved were Slovakia, the Czech Republic, and the United States. That was the first time I’d been outside North America and the first time I’d spent seven or eight hours flying anywhere. So, it was a whole new experience for me. As I remember, the food and the hotel were a little greasy, but I’d been in worse places and eaten worse things out on the land, so it wasn’t that big of a deal for me.
    There were some great players on that team: Derek Roy, Scottie Upshall, Stephen Weiss. A bunch of guys who went on to play in the NHL. With those kinds of tournaments, you have to come together pretty damn quickly and bond as a team. It helps if you can have fun and enjoy it. That was a great group of young guys. I remember before every game, after our warm-up stretches, we’d form a circle and everyone would take turns doing a little dance in the middle. I was a pretty shy guy. But when you’re in that environment and everyone enjoys it, even if you’re not a dancer you come up with something and everybody starts cheering.
    Right before the tournament began, I was named captain, which was a huge honour, especially when you look at who was on that team. We ran the table, beating the Americans