When Jordin was released from The Canyon, he immediately flew back to Nashville to join the Predators. On January 31, he participated in his first practice and spoke to the media for the first time since leaving for rehab. “The support I’ve gotten from my teammates, my family, the fans of Nashville, it has been unbelievable,” he said. “Without their support, I probably couldn’t have done it. I think the bottom line is that it’s something I needed to do and, at the same time, I’m just happy to be back and thankful. . . . I’m just going to take it one day at a time. Right now, I’m just living in the moment and enjoying every bit of it. I can’t tell you how far down I went. I’m just going to live in the moment right now.”
The Predators’ general manager and coach spoke as well. “Nobody’s perfect,” David Poile said. “We all have different issues in our life. I think that it just reached a situation where he was becoming more difficult and obviously a distraction to others in our organization. The point is, and this is the most important point, Jordin got it and Jordin did it and he knows he’s better off for it today.”
“He is dealing with it the right way and he’s manning up and that’s what you’re proud of,” Barry Trotz said. “He’s manning up and taking responsibility and that’s the first step for success. . . . As soon as the doctors give us the word, he’ll be ready to go. His first focus is on getting order in his life and we support him 100 percent and then the hockey thing will come. He’s working towards that.”
After I got out of rehab, everywhere I’d go in Nashville, people knew my story, but luckily I didn’t have to lock myself away. They understood my situation. And the support that I got from the hockey world and from home was just unbelievable. When you’re in rehab, you can’t receive any mail or anything and you’re not allowed to talk about the outside world. But my therapist at The Canyon told me that they were getting fucking stacks of mail for me when I was there. It made me feel good to realize how many people were behind me and how many people cared about me. You don’t realize that until something hits you hard.
There is a protocol you have to follow with the NHL/ NHLPA substance abuse program. Once you get out of rehab, they want to make sure that your life away from work is stable and grounded before you return to hockey. I stayed in Nashville when the team went on the road, and I had a mentor who had been through the program and who worked with me. He was a local guy who was in AA and had been sober for twenty-five or thirty years. I had to kind of shadow him. When you get out of rehab, there is definitely a lot of temptation. He helped to guide me onto the right track. We talked a lot about the people you talk to, the people you used to hang out with. I actually found the process really interesting. It was a bit like doing homework in high school. You jot down the names of the people in the crowd you hung out with and then try to figure out who your real friends are. There were some people who were my friends outside of my extracurricular activities—so, outside of my drinking and partying. And there were others who I realized were only hanging out with me because I was a public figure. They were popularity-seekers. They wanted to be around me only because they wanted to be in the public eye. They wanted to be noticed. At the time, I thought that those types of people were my friends, but after making those lists and having those conversations with my mentor, I started to realize that wasn’t true. If I ever had a question, he was only a phone call away, and we went to AA meetings together three times a week.
The meetings were good for me. At first, I could relate to a lot of the experiences people shared, how their drinking controlled their lives. But eventually it got to a point where I felt like all of the negative energy was actually starting to drag me down. Hearing how shitty these people’s lives were and how drinking had ruined their families and their work lives. I couldn’t really relate to that. I still had a job—and it was a great job—and I still had a family that loved me.
There wasn’t really a point in the process when I was told that I didn’t need to go to AA anymore. They just kind of forgot about it, and I stopped going because I didn’t really need it to stay sober. Everyone takes a different path. A lot of people swear by AA, and good for them. But everyone has a different route. For me, it was about relying on my family and my close friends—my true friends, not the hangers-on. It wasn’t about going to meetings.
Even with that support, in a lot of ways I was on my own. I had to look at my life as a sober person, really for the first time since I was a kid. Things definitely looked different. There was clarity about why people acted the way they did, and why I acted the way I did. And then there was the process of taking responsibility for what I had done. I had to acknowledge all of the people I hurt during my years of partying. When you’re in a state of mind where you don’t know what’s going on, you hurt people. I was never a physical person off the ice, so it wasn’t like that, but I would put people down verbally when I was drinking. I didn’t think all of the drama that I caused was a big deal when it was happening. But now that I was sober, I started to think about how I didn’t make time for my family and friends when they visited, because the only thing on my mind was going out and partying.
The process of apologizing to all of the people I hurt took almost two full years. Some of them I knew, and some of them I hardly remembered. Random people would come up to me and say, “I’m proud of you for turning your life around, but do you remember when you did this to me?” I might have met this one person one time when I was blitzed out of my mind and not have a clue who they were, but I had to accept that I had done what they told me and take full responsibility for it. All I could do was say I was sorry, and if they chose not to accept my apology, that was up to them. But there were a lot of them. I kept thinking, Holy shit, I never realized how many people I affected with my drinking. For a while it felt like all I was doing was apologizing and apologizing. Was I really that bad of a drunk? I guess I was.
The toughest part was dealing with the people I knew and really cared about—my family and friends—and starting to understand what I had put them through. These were the people who I grew up with, who had been around me for my whole life, and who had distanced themselves from me because of my actions. I didn’t understand why when they did it, but once I sobered up I had a better understanding, and it was a tough pill to swallow. I couldn’t imagine my best friends having to deal with me. So, I took full responsibility. It was hard, but it was a process I had to go through.
I made a list and started working my way through it—all of the people who had stuck by me since childhood, who had always had my back. I thought about the shit that I had put them through and the pain—and not only them, but their spouses and their families, too. I used to go home to Rankin Inlet for a month in the summer and I would just expect them to hang out with me and drink with me. And if their wives or girlfriends objected, I would say, “Tell them to fuck off.” How could they not understand? I was only home for a month; it was my time to party. After talking to those friends and talking to their wives and girlfriends, I started to realize how much uproar I had caused in their lives. I think a lot of those families dreaded me coming home because they knew it would be a shit show for a month.
When I went back to Rankin Inlet at the end of the 2010–2011 season, I made a point of visiting everybody and telling them about my whole experience, and admitting what I had done wrong. I needed them to understand why I was like that—and pretty much everyone did. They all forgave me. That’s a testament to who your real friends are. Your real friends are the people who can forgive you when you fuck up.
I think my parents spent that time hoping that I wouldn’t get off track. I would phone them before I went to bed at night, just to give them a sense of peace so they knew I wasn’t out. I don’t know if they had doubts about me pulling through, or if that was just their way of showing love and letting me know they respected my decision to get sober. Either way, it was always nice to hear their voices and to be able to let them know that everything was okay. At that point, they were trying to stay sober themselves, so we were kind of helping each other out.
BACK IN NASHVILLE, the biggest challenge was filling time and getting my life straightened out while I was waiting to get the green light to play hockey again. Some of my buddies came down to hang out and support me. One of them was my cousin Victor Tootoo, the guy I called just before I went into rehab. He came down from Iqaluit and helped me through the process. He understood because he had been through it twenty years earlier and had stayed sober ever since.
At least people in Nashville knew I had been to rehab, because it was in the news. I can’t imagine what it must be like for a regular person coming out of rehab after living that kind of life for thirty or forty years and trying to change. Everyone around you would constantly be offering you drinks and expecting you to be what you used to be. I know that was the biggest thing my cousin Victor had to face. He was a big druggie and alcoholic, but no one knew that he went to rehab and cleaned himself up. So it took five or six years for everyone to understand that he was sober.
For me, it was different. My situation was public knowledge. When I came back from rehab, my teammates, the hockey community, and the city of Nashville all knew where I’d been, and they were all so supportive. Any time I went out and met people, they knew. I went to restaurants where I used to hang out when I was drinking and they’d say, “Jordin, do you want a glass of water? Do you want a Coke?” Whereas before they would have asked me what bottle of wine I wanted. So, that kind of thing made it a lot easier for me.
That being said, there was always that one asshole who wanted to be the person who could tell everyone that he saw Jordin drink and that he’s fallen off the wagon. But the people who I was with and who I trusted always had my back.
It took about a year or a year and a half until it became completely natural, until I could go out to clubs and the same bartenders who used to serve me a glass of wine just handed me a water or a pop instead. It actually got to a point where it was kind of funny.
To be honest, I was never really tempted to start drinking again. I knew I was done with it. Booze has been right in front of my face since I quit, but it’s never come to the point where I’ve wanted to drink. For me, it is all about living one day at a time and staying sober one day at a time. You can’t tell yourself that you want to be sober for, say, three years and mark it down the calendar day by day, though I know that works for some people. For me, it’s not like that. I guess everyone deals with their sobriety differently.
Because I’m in the public eye and part of my job is making appearances and going to events, I had to deal with some different challenges. When I first got out of rehab, we had team functions, and it was suggested that I shouldn’t go. I understood why. They didn’t want to put me in an awkward situation. But as time went on, I wanted everyone to understand that it was my choice not to drink. I made that point to everyone I was around: Don’t feel bad if you grab a drink. If I feel uncomfortable, I’ll leave. Eventually, everyone understood where I was coming from and I felt free to be myself.
The other challenge for me was to separate drinking from playing hockey. I always believed it was the norm, that one was connected to the other. Being a hockey player meant that you drank, and when you got the green light—no game or practice tomorrow—you’d go hard every time. Now that I look back at it, I understand that our job was to make sure we were at the top of our game every day. And I didn’t give myself that opportunity. I didn’t give myself the chance to be the best every day because of my addiction. Not that I was the only one. I’ve seen a lot of guys questioned by coaches or management over the years, asking them if everything is okay, because they know that they’re going hard. It’s kind of funny now. When I show up at the rink and guys are hung over and complaining about how terrible they feel, I think to myself, I sure don’t miss those days at all. You hear them talking, saying that they feel like shit, wondering why they drank so much. Then they look at me and say, “You must feel great.” Hopefully, they’ll understand one day.
Of course, I didn’t limit my drinking to my hockey friends and it’s not like hockey caused my problems. It was me who took it to the next level. If the bar closed at two o’clock and I wasn’t done, I’d be looking for the after-party. By the end of most nights, I wasn’t drinking with hockey players, but I always knew that those other people would be around at the end of the night, because they knew that Tootoo was going to have booze at his house and everyone was welcome. For me, it was more about having the people around to keep me occupied and make time pass; looking back, I realize that it was more about that than about the drinking. I didn’t care who came over as long as people were there and I wasn’t alone. I’m sure things were stolen from my house without me knowing it, but I didn’t care. I just wanted the company.
In those first weeks after I got sober, that was an adjustment. The crowd was gone, and at the end of the night I was alone. Thank God for Ambien, because there were times when I would be lying in bed at ten o’clock on a Saturday night, restless and wondering what I should do. I’d pop an Ambien, knowing that it would put me out and get me through to the next morning, get me through until tomorrow.
WHEN I GOT BACK on the ice after rehab, I noticed a huge difference. I felt amazing every day. And I had a new clarity and understanding of the game, plus a new recognition that when I was younger, and I was drinking, I just did what I had to do to stay on the team. I didn’t think about the game much. I just did my job, rather than try to expand my game. Having conversations about the subtleties of the game with my teammates … that had just never crossed my mind before. I had been doing my job and that was good enough.
But now I had a better understanding of what I brought to the team, what kind of player I was, what it really meant to be a teammate. Mentally, I was a different player, and you could see it in my game. The coaches noticed that I could see the ice better, that I was making solid, smart plays. My confidence built up and built up. And having my legs every day was a big change. It was like, Wow, I didn’t realize I could play like this for this long. It was as if there had been a cloud over me, and when I smartened up it was as if that cloud lifted away. I felt better about myself, and I knew that my teammates had more respect for me. Before I quit drinking, they were constantly saving my ass, whether they wanted to or not. If the coach asked a question about me and what I’d been doing off the ice, they covered for me. They covered for me on the ice when I was hung over. Now I could prove myself with my actions. Nothing had to be hidden. You could just see in their eyes that they felt differently about me, that they knew Toots was healthy now, they didn’t have to make up stories to protect me, they didn’t have to worry about what kind of mood I was in, and about whether I’d go off on them. The truth is, it was great not having to walk that tightrope anymore.
The NHLPA doctors had a meeting with my teammates when I first got back, just to brief everyone on the process I’d been through. And then a doctor looked at me and said, “Toots, do you have anything to say to your teammates?” I said, “No. I’ve said enough. I’m just going to go back to work.” I think that was a relief to them, because they knew that I wasn’t going to fucking bullshit them anymore. I didn’t want to say something and not follow through—I just wanted to show by example. I wanted to be judged on what I did, not on what I said.
On February 19, the Predators took on the Phoenix Coyotes at home, which the doctors had decided would be Jordin’s first game back. He played for a little over ten minutes, and didn’t score a goal, record an assist, or get into a fight. But everyone on the team, everyone in the building, understood that was beside the point.
After I got out of rehab, the NHLPA doctors and our team doctors would talk to me every week and ask me how I was doing. They were trying to decide when my life was under control enough that it would be okay for me to get back into a game. Eventually, everything just fell into place, and they told me that the Phoenix game on February 19 would be my first game back. I had a couple of weeks to get ready for it.
It was nerve-racking counting down the days. I just tried to stay focused on maintaining my health. It was a daily thing, keeping in contact with the doctors. They asked me if I was hanging out with my old friends, if I was finding new ways to keep myself busy, if I was eating at home or going to restaurants. Stuff like that.
I wanted the process to be a lot quicker because I wanted to play right away, but I knew that the more I pressed to come back, the longer they would keep me out. So, I just kept my feelings hush-hush within myself.
The whole day leading up to the game, everyone was so happy. The Nashville fans had been watching me for five or six years and they had really missed the element that I brought to the game. I remember, in warm-ups, there were signs out in the crowd and people cheering me on. When I took my first step out on the ice, I got a standing ovation that lasted for five minutes. The crowd just went apeshit. That’s when the emotion really hit me.
We were playing the Coyotes, and I remember their players getting up on the bench and tapping their sticks on the boards. It was one of those days that you wish would just keep going on. There were a lot of emotions. That night, it felt like the whole city of Nashville embraced me.
I’ve never come close to drinking again. I mean, frick, there are times when it’s been tough, but I have great resources and people I can call and count on and talk to. When I need them, there are a lot of people around who help keep me grounded.