The Nashville Predators came into existence in 1998, part of the National Hockey League’s expansion into nontraditional markets that began way back in 1967 but really gained momentum after Wayne Gretzky’s trade from the Edmonton Oilers to the Los Angeles Kings in 1988. In no way was Nashville hockey country. Culturally, the city is known the world over as the capital of country music and the home of the Grand Ole Opry. As well, in the state of Tennessee, football is the sport of choice, especially the college game. Most of the fans who came out to see the Predators had never played hockey and didn’t understand its finer points or its history. But they liked the speed, they liked the action, and they especially liked the rough stuff. It was a very different place than Rankin Inlet, or Brandon, but in many ways, for Jordin, Nashville was the perfect fit, both as a player and as a person.
I went to the Predators’ summer prospects camp in July 2003, after my fourth season with the Wheat Kings. It’s a chance for the young players to get in some extra work and get comfortable before the main training camp begins in September. You can continue playing junior hockey as an overage twenty-year-old, but I was done with it. At that point, I didn’t really know whether I had a shot to make the NHL or whether I would wind up playing for the Predators’ farm team in the American Hockey League, the Milwaukee Admirals.
Not long after I left Nashville at the end of prospects camp, I got a call from David Poile asking me if I would be interested in coming back down three weeks before the regular training camp began to train with their conditioning people. Of course, I said yes. I moved down on August 10 and went right into working out and pounding the weights like I never had before. By the time training camp came around, I had probably put on ten pounds of muscle.
In camp, David Poile told me just to play my game. He said, “We brought you in because of the element you bring,” and I knew what that meant. So I lit ’er up, I had a couple of fights, and obviously I made an impression. Everything just kind of fell into place for me. They had a player named Scott Walker who was at the end of his career and who played the same style as I did, and he didn’t really want to be that guy anymore—the energy guy, the fighter. He was done with it. And that role fit me like a glove.
I thought for sure I would have to fight Scott Walker in camp to prove a point and try to take that job for myself. Mentally, I was draining myself thinking about it. But one of the veteran players, Jim McKenzie, told me to take it easy in camp. “Don’t fight your own guys in camp to make a point. You do that during exhibition games when we’re playing someone else. You’re not going to prove anything here by taking on veteran guys who have been around for a while.” That lifted some weight off my shoulders. I didn’t want to get off to a bad start with these guys by running around and being an idiot. It was nice to hear it straight up.
Jim was really important to me that year. I was a kid that came from nowhere and he was a small-town boy from Gull Lake, Saskatchewan, so we had that in common. But he had been around forever. Before he got to Nashville, he had played for eight other NHL teams—Hartford, Dallas, Pittsburgh, Winnipeg, Phoenix, Anaheim, Washington, and New Jersey— going all the way back to 1990 and he’d won a Stanley Cup the year before with the New Jersey Devils. That year in Nashville turned out to be his last season. He had been a brawler back in the day, as you can see from his numbers; in junior, he had 100 points total—and 1739 penalty minutes.
When I first moved to Nashville, Jim took me under his wing. We played a similar role, except that he was a true heavyweight and I was a smaller guy, new to the league, and didn’t know a whole lot about playing in the NHL. He really mentored me and groomed me in terms of how to be a good professional, an everyday player. He taught me that even though there are days when you’re not feeling too well and you don’t want to be in the gym, you have to do that extra work because that’s what helps you overcome obstacles and become a champion.
I told Jim a lot about my life away from hockey. He was one of the people who really cared about me. His family was great to me, too; they had me over for dinner all the time. Jim became my roommate on the road, and I’ll never forget my first trip to New York City. We went out to grab dinner and a coffee, and somehow we got separated in the crowds on the street. I was people-watching, soaking it all in, and I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention. Suddenly, I looked up and he wasn’t there. Then I saw him off in the distance, obviously looking around for me and seeming distressed. When I caught up with him, I could tell he was relieved. “You scared the living daylights out of me,” he said. “This is your first time here and I didn’t want you to go missing. I was looking everywhere for my little Mohican.” I’ll never forget that that’s what he called me: “my little Mohican.”
Jim and I had the same mentality. Just because we were making all of this money and playing in the NHL, we didn’t take it for granted. Even when you don’t feel like it, when the fans are all over you, you have to embrace the opportunity. To this day, I will stay and sign autographs until the last person is happy rather than flipping the fans off the way some guys do. Jim taught me to stay until the end. Because it’s not going to last forever.
On the ice, Jim taught me how to use my style and to play smart. He’d say, “On this shift, dump it in and chase it around. Let’s stir it up.” When he was on the ice with me, I had someone to look after me if one of our opponent’s big guys came after me. He was right there. We went out and caused chaos. The guys on the bench loved it. We wouldn’t take any penalties, and we were back in the game.
I learned an important lesson from veteran players like Jim. You need to be an impact player every night. But that isn’t the same as needing to fight every night. The job was to go out there, cause havoc, and draw penalties. In the NHL, that became the most important part of my game.
I’m not a talker on the ice. I don’t make guys mad by chirping at them. I do it physically. I give them a little jab, a tap on the back of the legs. When they are skating off the bench, I give them an extra nudge. The little fucking shit that drives them crazy. Just chipping away at them. Then instead of saying something, I just smile in silence. That drives them even more crazy.
I know what’s going on. I have a game plan in my head. You play within the coach’s system, but you have your own game plan, and you add to it piece by piece. I want that guy to go nuts, retaliate, and wind up in the penalty box, giving us a power play.
Some games, do I want to do that shit? Fuck, no. Let me play. But if that’s what’s going to keep me around, that’s what I’ve got to do. I would take a run at somebody, wait until he knocked me down in retaliation, and then blow up to make sure the referee saw it. It doesn’t make me the most popular player in the league—probably pretty close to the opposite—but it works.
I GUESS I DID enough things right during that Predators’ camp, because near the end David Poile called me into his office and said, “Congratulations. You made the roster.”
I had been confident. I didn’t think they could send me down the way I’d played. But still, that’s the kind of news you’ve got to hear twice before it sinks in. What? Really? I made it? I’m in the NHL?
Holy fuck.
BARRY TROTZ, who moved to the Capitals in 2014 and had been the longest-serving coach with one team in the NHL, really understood me from day one. We had a strong personal connection because his father was an alcoholic and he saw signs of alcoholism in my family and knew what I was dealing with. We had a lot of conversations about our families. When things started getting pretty dark with me, I was in his office quite a bit. He would tell me, “You’ve got to figure this out. I’ve seen this in my own family.” He really cared about me. And maybe at that age, I didn’t fully understand what he was trying to do. I was more likely to be thinking, Fuck, why is he hounding me all the time? I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do on the ice. Why is he on me? It never occurred to me then that he was trying to help me, that he cared about my health and was worried about what I was doing away from rink.
The truth is, he had a lot to worry about. After all of those years spent living with billet families in junior hockey, when I still found ways to do pretty much whatever I wanted to do, here I was living on my own in a condo, with no curfews, no restrictions, and a lot money in my pocket. I remember when my first NHL paycheque came in and it was like, Holy fuck—I think it was for $26,000. I took a picture of it and sent it to a few of my buddies. All of the years of getting paid shit money just disappeared.
The first game of the season was scheduled for October 9 against the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim (now the Anaheim Ducks). A whole crowd came down from Rankin Inlet. All of my immediate family made the trip, my sister Corinne and her husband, all of my relatives and friends that I grew up with. Even the premier of Nunavut came to the game. They had a couple of buses full of people who made the drive all the way down from Manitoba. That’s not a short trip. By the time the game started, they had filled pretty much a whole section in the Nashville arena.
It was an intense week or so. The night before the game, I went out for dinner with my immediate family. My dad said, “You’ve been doing this all of your life. I just want you to go out there and don’t think about trying to impress your family and your friends. Just go out there and do your job and have fun, make sure that you look after yourself.” During the morning skate on the day of the first game, I was jumpy. The time came for my pre-game nap and I couldn’t fucking sleep. This was the cream of the crop, the best league in the world. And there I was, twenty years old and getting my shot.
I got a lot of media coverage that year; really, I was the talk of the whole training camp. The press in Nashville loved my story, so by the time we got to the first game the Predators fans knew all about me, about Terence, and about where I came from. The crowd was ready for me. I jumped over the boards for my first shift and the whole arena gave me a standing ovation. It was a pretty cool moment: the first Inuk player in an NHL game— way down in the U.S. South, no less—and they were standing and cheering for me. The place kind of erupted, and it kept erupting for me as the years went on.
I was nervous. I stepped out for my first shift of the game and immediately missed a glorious chance right in the slot. The fucking puck came right to me and then it caught a rut in the ice just as I was teeing it up and bounced over my stick. I actually didn’t get my first goal until about a quarter of the way through the season, at a game in Atlanta. I remember it was a one-timer, and at first I didn’t even know that I’d scored the goal. I took a shot from the top of the circle and there were a bunch of guys in front of the net but somehow it went in. All of the guys were saying, “It’s Tootoo’s goal, we didn’t touch it.” They really wanted me to get that first one.
Those first few weeks in the league were amazing. But there were also times when it was pretty rough. I remember going to St. Louis for the first time. The Blues were our big rivals then, and they had Mike Danton on their roster. You probably know his story: he went to jail for trying to have his agent, David Frost, murdered, though there was a whole lot more to it than that. But at that time, he was known mostly as a fighter, kind of a crazy fighter. And I knew that going into the game. Because I was the new fighter on the Predators, I was going to be expected to take him on. For fighters, thinking about what’s coming eats away at your state of mind—knowing that you’re going to have to go to war, that you have to accept the challenge. That’s the difference between someone a team can count on and someone they can’t: being willing. As a rookie, I was trying to win the trust of my teammates. I wanted them to know I would go to war with this guy for them any day of the week. I wanted to prove myself. But I was also only twenty years old, fighting men.
I remember skating out for warm-ups that night and seeing Danton, just seeing the look in his eyes—the look that said, I don’t give a shit what happens to me; you’re not going to beat me up. I trusted my own strength but there we were looking over at each other and he had a glare in his eyes that said, I’m going to fucking kill you. Holy shit, that kind of intimidated me—this guy with his history and he has nothing to lose. I was nervous as hell. But that fear factor is part of what motivates me. Knowing that this was it, this was my time. I thrive in those moments. That’s when you have to believe in yourself. Any time you have any doubt in your mind, you’re screwed.
The warm-up seemed to take forever, and then there was the anthem. Those seconds seemed like hours. Let’s fucking get this over with. Finally, they dropped the puck and we dropped our gloves, right off the faceoff. I fought Danton a couple of times that night, and held my ground. After that, I could feel the respect I had gained from my teammates, and from the other fighters around the league. I had showed them I wasn’t afraid of anybody.
OF COURSE, I FOUGHT during that first season in Nashville, during every season before, and during every season since. Fighting was always part of my game, and it’s one of the skills that got me to the NHL. The truth is, I’ve been fighting all of my life, one way or another. In hockey, I started fighting way back—when I was twelve or thirteen years old. Even playing street hockey, there was the odd time it boiled over. That’s just how it was when I was growing up.
I know my role and it is being energetic and changing the pace of the game and dropping the gloves when that makes sense. With my style of play, I know fights are bound to happen. Someone is going to get pissed at me. If you lay a guy out, your instincts are to drop the gloves. I did that for the first seven years of my NHL career. I went out looking for it.
Nowadays, it’s a little different. I pick my spots. I fight on my terms. I fight when my team needs it. I’m not going to fight on anybody else’s terms. If a fight arises, it arises. I don’t go looking for fights. But then, sometimes, something goes down and it becomes your job to fight. You get a tap on the shoulder from the coach and you know what you’re supposed to do. I think now I have a better understanding of when it’s time to change the momentum in the game with a fight. It’s about communicating with the guys on your team. Sometimes the guys need a lift, and you get out there and create it. You don’t have to say to the other guy, “Do you want to go?” As a fighter, you just see it in his eyes. If I go on the ice and I see that we’re down by two goals and the other team has put one of their tough guys out there and I’ve been put out there, I know what’s supposed to happen. And the other guy knows why I’m going out. There are other times when it’s more spontaneous. But you’ve always got to be ready as a fighter. Things can turn on a dime pretty damn quickly.
I think most fighters don’t love doing their job, but ultimately if that’s what’s going to keep them in the league, that’s what they’re going to do. There are a lot of guys in the NHL or in juniors who are willing combatants only because that’s what they’re told to do. Do they like doing it? Probably not, but whatever is going to take them to the next level, they’re going to do it. But for me, because of the way I grew up and the things I had to fight for, I don’t mind doing it at all, even though I know there are other elements to my game. If we play a team and they’ve got four or five guys who are willing combatants, then Yeah, fuck, let’s go. There aren’t a lot of teams that have players like me. I live and die for my teammates. They’re my brothers. They’re the reason why I’m there every day, ready to go to war and do battle. I want to be that person. Being able to change the momentum of the game or lift the guys up with a fight is rewarding. I get satisfaction from that.
I understand that you put your life at risk when you fight, but for me there’s no fear. Once you start experiencing fear, that’s when you know you’re starting to go downhill. Every game I go into, I’m confident. Confidence is everything. It’s unbelievable what the mind can do for you. If you start second-guessing yourself before you go into a fight, you’re fucked right then and there. I’ve had a lot of guys, junior hockey guys, come through training camp and say, “Hey, you’re not the biggest guy. Have you got any tips for me? I’m kind of a fighter. What have you got?” Guys ask who taught me how to fight: “In the off-season, what did you do … train like a boxer?” Fuck, no. I’m not that kind of fighter. I’m a hockey player. If I was a fighter, I’d fucking train for MMA or boxing. Fortunately, the way I grew up is what’s carried me through my whole hockey career. I had to learn how to stick up for myself when I was fricking seven years old, so why wouldn’t I do it now?
It’s just like throwing a switch for me. Early in my career, I only knew how to throw rights. Today, I can throw with both hands. That was part of the process of learning how to fight. Now I’ll go toe to toe with anyone. Obviously, with heavyweights it’s a different story. I may take a beating and, when that happens, you mentally lose confidence. For a minute, I think, Fuck, do I really want to keep doing this? But my confidence always comes back.
Some guys in the dressing room are like, “Geez, how do you keep doing it?” I don’t really know. I’m not a great teacher, but I give them one piece of advice: you have to go in believing you can win. Don’t ever second-guess yourself. The other guy will know it; you’ll know it. A lot of guys I fight, when I ask them to go and they’re just like, “Aw, fuck …,” and then they hesitate. I know right then I’ve got them. That’s the biggest part of the game for fighters now: understanding your mental preparation.
What does it feel like to be in a hockey fight? You find out you have muscles you never knew you had before. And you’re so in the zone. It’s just me and the other guy. You know it’s going to happen. You can see it in the guy’s eyes. Fuck, he wants to go. You know you’ve got him beat mentally and that’s half the battle. You know that just by looking in his eyes. But you still have to stay composed, because you’re not going to win every fight. Some guy will catch you with a lucky shot, and that’s part of the game, too. It’s all about will, about fighting for dear life.
Everything else that’s going on in the rink is blacked out during a fight. I have one goal at that moment, and that’s to fricking pound the piss out of this meathead because either he asked me to go or he did something to my teammates. And when you’re in that state of mind where you want to kill—there’s an edge there and if you go over it, that’s when you’ll get hurt. There’s a fine line between being in control and being out of control. So, as much as you want to pound the piss out of this guy, there’s a lot of shit going through your mind. If you go over that fine line, that’s when you get knocked out or you fucking blow your knee out. So, it has to be a controlled anger. And after the fight, it’s all over. There’s no retribution. But if need be, I’m willing to go again. If it happens, it happens.
The best part about being a fighter is the support you get in the dressing room. When the guys actually appreciate what you’re doing for the team, it’s more enjoyable. When you don’t get that feedback, don’t get that love from the boys, I think that’s when you start losing interest. You’ll come into the dressing room at the end of a period after you’ve had a fight and you can’t even talk you’re so exhausted—you’re huffing and puffing. The guys will come up to you and just tap you with their sticks. They don’t have to say anything. You know that’s a sign of appreciation, their way of saying, We know what it’s like. Of course, the fans love the fights. They love that part of the game, and it’s great to give them what they want and hear the cheers. But for me, the most important part is what you feel in the dressing room. You have that euphoric feeling of being wanted. You feel that you’re loved and appreciated for all of the shit you’ve gone through and put yourself through for the team. I did that for six years in Nashville, and that’s what kept me there. If I hadn’t done it, the fans wouldn’t have loved me and maybe the coaches wouldn’t have thought, This is why we’re keeping him here.
The game evolves every year and things change. You’ve got to be able to skate and play and do all that other stuff as well. Over the last couple of years, I’ve gained more clarity about why fighting is part of the game and why I’m called upon to do it, rather than simply fighting in anger or to please the crowd because that’s what they want to see.
When I was still partying a lot, there was no controlled anger for me. I was fucking all-in because of all the anger I had away from the rink. That was all coming out when I fought. I didn’t care if the guy standing in front of me was a skill guy or a fighter. If I was fighting a skill guy, fuck him. That was his problem. Luckily, I didn’t hurt myself too badly—knock on wood— before I straightened out my life and got sober.
I know the stories of guys like Derek Boogaard and Rick Rypien—fighters who had all kinds of problems that eventually cost them their lives. But I’m happy. My life is in control. If I was still partying, I’d be a miserable man. But it wouldn’t be because of fighting.