Team Spirit
Elm Street, February-March 2001

Ted Nolan (photo by Chris Wahl)

When Ted Nolan was a child, there was nothing he loved more than the opening night of Hiawatha. On the wooded side of the beautiful Garden River at the Ojibway reserve near Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, he would don the buckskin costume of the play’s little hero. There in the open air, this touring native drama (produced by his grandfather) would unfold, telling of a boy learning the greatness of his culture from wise Nokomis, who coaches him in the ways of the world. Hiawatha leaves his people but returns a great leader.

Three decades later Nolan is flying on the ice at York University in Toronto. There is a smile on his face. Stick in hand, he picks up a puck, slips it behind himself, then threads it between his skates and back out front before snapping it under the crossbar. “Best hands of any coach around!” he shouts to the bench. On the ice with him is a hockey team no different at a glance than any other group of players ages 16 to 20. But they are of historic significance. Team Indigenous, in the midst of a holistic training camp, wears four-colour uniforms representing the aboriginal belief in the four-cycle nature of life. Every face is native and every face is focused.

Though he would deny it, this is Nolan’s team. This man, who has been through much because of the colour of his skin and his unshakeable commitment to the native spirit within him, is its undisputed chief. With it he has created more than a new national hockey club. He has found a way to inspire young native people, to show them their value, to teach them the greatness of their culture and the ways of the world.

Nolan learned about the world the hard way. He doesn’t bear many scars from the hardships that have shaped his life, at least on the surface. He looks younger than his 42 years, somewhat slight of frame for an athlete and undeniably handsome. He is modest and soft-spoken. But within him there are many wounds. As a kid he lifted himself up from abject poverty; he matured in the bright lights of the National Hockey League and then was rejected and shunned. Now he has returned to his people, to inspire their youth. His life has been a circle.

He grew up in a family of 12 in a house the size of most Canadian cottages. There was no running water or electricity and not much food. Around him was despair, alcoholism and suicide. Two of his uncles drank themselves to death. His father died when he was 14; seven years later a drunk driver killed his mother. But there was something in the boy that never gave up. He skated on the rivers of his reserve until he nearly dropped and ran on railway tracks like a fighter training for a shot at glory. He vowed that when he made something of himself, he’d never forget his people and would help them in a permanent way.

Hockey was his road upward. Learning shinny at the Garden River reserve, he made a few Soo teams and then caught on with the Kenora Thistles of the Manitoba Junior Hockey League. But there he encountered a hatred he hadn’t known existed. To supposed allies and enemies alike, he wasn’t a young man with potential but a “wagon burner” and a “prairie nigger.” One night, teammates suggested they all go “downtown to beat up Indians.” Nolan rose to his feet. “You don’t have to go downtown,” he snapped, “you’ve got one right here!” Later in the season, a player he had often fought in practice was being pummelled near the Kenora bench. “Give it to him, give it to him good!” Nolan said to himself. But, honour-bound, he leapt over the boards and came to the rescue. That night the bloodied white kid stood up on the team bus and apologized to his Ojibway saviour.

Before long, Nolan made the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds (Junior A). Then he played a few seasons with the Detroit Red Wings and Pittsburgh Penguins, a gritty winger, the only player in “the show” born and raised on a reserve. But he was hit hard during a 1986 game in Calgary and ruptured two discs in his back; he was finished as a player at 28. He came home to coach the Greyhounds, and at first they struggled, but by his second season he put his own style into effect and the team took off like few elite junior teams in history. Three straight times they reached the national Memorial Cup championships. On the third try, they won, at home. The Soo will never forget it.

Within a few years he was coaching in the NHL, hired almost as a sacrificial lamb by the Buffalo Sabres, who had traded away star players so they could rebuild their team with youth. But Nolan had met greater challenges, and in two years the Sabres were contenders, dubbed “the hardest-working team in hockey,” a lunch-bucket brigade that came at opponents in waves with speed and fists and always with heart. His tales of how he dealt with hardship inspired them and they bonded.

He put the players in circles each time they met so their spirit went inward to one another; he said that when they played for him they were likes braves going off to war. Their dressing room was sacred ground, their sweaters honoured, not allowed to be even dropped on the floor. A medicine man appeared and blessed their sticks. Nolan always made sure they had fun, telling them that winning was not the most important thing: if they grew as men, if they had the right spirit, winning would be the bonus. And it was.

At the end of the year, Nolan, just 39, was named the NHL's coach of the year. But the Sabres offered him a mere one-year contract and quickly walked away when he demurred.

There had been internal problems, friction with the veteran general manager, John Muckler. Nolan says there were times when he benched players the new GM had just acquired to “motivate them, so they played better when they went back on the ice,” and the team won because of it. He rested star forward Pat LaFontaine after a concussion, initially angering Muckler. (LaFontaine’s doctor stated that another hit would have seriously hurt him.)

Then there was Dominik Hasek, the team’s superstar goaltender. Eccentric and paid millions, he hadn’t seen eye to eye with the man from the northern reserve, and by season’s end he was telling the media he didn’t want to play for his coach any more.

Nolan’s dismissal was controversial. Fans took to the streets in protest; some players were distressed. One, Matthew Barnaby, threatened to deck Hasek on the ice. But Mike Brophy, senior writer for The Hockey News, says such feelings weren’t unanimous. “Some guys loved him, some guys hated him. It wasn’t a case where he had 18 guys on board and two didn’t like him.” In a business filled with unwritten rules, questions were raised about his diplomacy concerning his star goalie and the GM. His record, however - the bottom line in sports - was remarkable. Brophy unhesitatingly calls him “a very good coach.”

Four seasons later, the big leagues still shun him. He was offered a job with the chaotic Tampa Bay Lightning his first year away and didn’t accept. Since then about 40 jobs have become available and he has had exactly two interviews with that pristinely white, old boys’ club the NHL.

“I think he’s been blackballed,” says Brophy. “Muckler is a long-time NHL guy who is well connected. I think it all comes down to the war he had with him, and people are using that.” But Brophy agrees that many coaches have fought with general managers and not been segregated like Nolan. “For whatever reason,” he says, “they are hanging Teddy out to dry.”

Whatever reason? What of an unspoken one? “I don’t know if it is racism,” says Nolan, the only coach of the year to lose his position instantly, “but if we had 28 Indian owners I bet I'd get a job.”

Nolan and the NHL parted in 1997. Soon he was travelling another path.

Nolan had worked with native youth almost from the moment he became a pro hockey player. When the NHL dumped him, he told the Assembly of First Nations be would do it full-time. But he occasionally wondered if his seminars had any real impact. On a late summer day in 1999, he visited Ottawa and put a suggestion to the grand chief at the time, Phil Fontaine. “Maybe we should have something concrete that the kids can participate in.” Nolan kept thinking about a comment, like a spiritual message, made to him by an elder at an AFN meeting: “I had a dream of an indigenous hockey team, and you were standing behind the bench. Wouldn’t that be something.” Next Nolan and Fontaine were planning their own national hockey club. All young aboriginal males in Canada would be eligible.

They began searching for players, pursuing sponsors and asking the Canadian Hockey Association to work with them. Although not all responses were positive, there was enough good news to push them forward.

At first Nolan wanted to get the players together a few times in 2000 and some time later ease them into competition. But just a month after his meeting with Fontaine, Bob Nicholson, head of the CHA, suddenly offered them the chance to compete at a tournament in Finland that August. The level of competition would be very stiff. “My first response was no,” Nolan recalls. “I didn’t want to put our kids in a position like that. Because we’d be playing some of the best in the world.” He called Bill Erasmus, chief of the Dene Nation and vice-chief of the AFN, responsible for sports. “Let’s go, man!” said Erasmus. “At least we’ll get in the door!”

The club had been drawing up a five-year business plan, but suddenly it needed a lot of money and support, fast. It received none from corporate Canada: the only sponsor would be Mission Equipment, operated by the owner of the NHL’s Minnesota Wild, which provided pants and pads. Native people pitched in any way they could, all the way from the AFN, which gave money, to the deeply involved Aboriginal Sports Circle, to the Allied Indian Association, which donated a welcome $600.

Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont., home of a large aboriginal studies program, offered its campus for a training camp and many hours of time from capable volunteers. The team gathered there for the first time in early August for holistic training: discussions about native spirituality, goal-setting, higher education, substance abuse and setting good examples. All in the Nolan style.

Team Indigenous doesn’t exist just to help hockey players succeed at the highest level. Nolan says it is meant “to encourage, to foster, to give some kind of hope to our youth.” Nolan has always told native youth that they must fight, like his hockey teams, for what is theirs. “When I was a young native kid, they said we can’t, and I want to prove we can. I think you fight for respect. You have a certain pride in who you are. You can instill that in people. Don’t wish for things you haven’t got. Work for things. Don’t use excuses. You know, fight!”

He often lists what his people are struggling against: more than half of those over age 15 do not have a high school education; there is staggering unemployment, a high suicide rate and little opportunity; broken treaties have caused problems that remain to this day. A national team might just help show the way toward success. “It’s not a hockey machine we are trying to develop,” Nolan insists, “it’s an opportunity machine.”

After the Lakehead University camp, the team flew to Toronto. Finland and the world’s best loomed.

Bill Erasmus is at the York University practice. His kid Lonny, a strapping youngster who plays on a junior B team in B.C., is on the ice and soon he will be too, his long ponytail flying out behind him as he chases loose pucks for others, unable to resist helping Ted Nolan’s groundbreaking hockey team.

“The kids respect Ted. The coach staff respect him,” says Erasmus. “He doesn’t have a whistle. He’s not yelling at guys, he’s talking to them and he’s helping them understand.”

The imposing Billy Two Rivers is rinkside as well. A Mohawk from the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal, former elder of the Assembly of First Nations and fearsome pro wrestler, he has a special role here: Team Indigenous’s first and only elder.

“I’m advising the players on being themselves,” he says in a deep, measured voice. “The thing we have to instill in the youth is that we have to behave in a manner that exemplifies our culture, our language and history. It’s a tremendous responsibility because it’s a first-time thing, and they’re going out into the realities of not necessarily a harsh world, but a curious world.”

The players race through drills, skaters darting around, receiving passes, everything appearing random but always organized. They are intense, eager to please the man without the whistle. Nolan stands to the side, allowing his assistant, Dan Flynn, to direct traffic. But every now and then he draws the team together in a circle, always a circle. He speaks quietly, watching them closely. “I believe,” he often says, “that you can tell a great deal about a person by looking into their eyes.” The players seem to lean forward.

Terence Tootoo is among them. Tootoo is not your average player. An Inuit, he was born and raised in Rankin Inlet, an Arctic community with a history of human tragedies. He’s a bit on the short side but built like a tank and full of energy. “Myself,” he says, “coming from the little territory of Nunavut, and here Ted Nolan called me up and asked if I wanted to play. Oh, I could barely talk I was talking so fast. I was so thrilled.” He plays in “the South,” in The Pas, Man., in the league where Nolan was hated. He’s a leader on his team, a goal-scoring forward proud of last season’s 316 penalty minutes. He’s hoping to attend the University of Alaska at Fairbanks on a scholarship, but to him and the others, there is nothing like Team Indigenous and the Nolan experiment. “It’s the greatest feeling because we’re the first players on this team, role models for the guys coming up.”

Jonathan Cheechoo, the team’s undisputed star and captain, is big and swift and fires bullets past goaltenders. A Cree, he grew up in Moose Factory, Ont., on James Bay, without organized hockey. He has played in the Ontario Hockey League for the past few years and is a high draft choice of the San Jose Sharks. “I’ve had a lot of honours in my career,” he says, “and being captain ranks right up there. We just want to give something back, a little sense of pride.” Of Nolan he says, “He’s done a lot for every native player that’s on this team as well as the younger kids. We really listen because we know where he’s been and we really respect him.”

Later this day the team will fly to Scandinavia to make history. Their opponents will be some of the world’s best junior club teams, including Finnish champions, elite Swedes and a collection of the hottest young players in the United States. Many opponents will be NHL-bound.

Team Indigenous is bracing for the challenge. And so is Nolan. He wants to win. He always has. His many trips to reserves and villages over the years have made him feel that, for his people, victory is a necessity. These trips, more than anything else, made him dream of a hope-inspiring hockey team.

He recently flew to Gjoa Haven, deep in the Arctic on the island where Franklin vanished. He says modestly he had no idea how he would be greeted, if a single soul would come out to the arena to hear him. The entire village was waiting, banging the glass, erupting into applause at the sight of him. In the dressing room he met a little boy with a big smile. Nolan helped him tie his skates and noticed they had no insoles; his feet were pressed against the heads of the screws that went into the blades. On the ice the boy continued to beam. The famous coach helped him with his mobility and afterwards watched him remove his skates. There were bloody wounds on the bottoms of his feet. Another time at a rink in Winnipeg a native girl approached him and told him she knew why he wasn’t coaching in the NHL. “It’s because you’re brown, too brown,” she said as a matter of fact. “It’s because you’re Indian. It always happens to us.”

There were lots of brown faces on what turned out to be one of the best hockey teams at the Universal Players Hockey Tournament in Finland, proud brown faces with a brown-faced coach who had taught them well. They got off to a roaring start, slaying their first three opponents, two Finnish teams and one Swedish, 5-2, 7-3 and 6-3. Then, during an important game, they were given an astounding, and crippling, 113 penalty minutes by strict European referees and just missed the playoffs, fifth out of 12 teams. The Norwegian national juniors trailed them.

Team Indigenous was the tournament sensation. Crowds packed the arenas every night they played, intrigued by their appearance, their mission and their aggressive style. Billy Two Rivers - watching each game quietly in colourful native clothing, banging a symbolic wooden flagpole on the concrete floor to let the team know he was there - fascinated young Finns. “It was really neat,” says Nolan of the whole reaction, “the players were walking around the malls and everybody kind of stopped and looked and asked for autographs. Finnish kids were running around pretending they were Jonathan Cheechoo.”

The man from little Garden River took his message to the world. “It’s not about winning hockey games,” he told the European press, “it’s about changing attitudes and having an impact.” Cheechoo scored 12 points in six games, six in a single match. But it was what was inside him, the ability to be a person of substance, that impressed Nolan. “Jonathan Cheechoo was a standout not only in his play, but in his leadership role. He’s a fine young man. He really led the team’ “

The players, who are back in other leagues, will suit up as Team Indigenous again, perhaps before the end of this hockey season. The intriguing possibility of visiting China is before them, there is interest from Germany and they are returning to Finland this summer. Nolan will pursue corporate funding and investigate the feasibility of under-17 and under-18 squads and a women’s team. He believes the program will continue whether he can stay with it or not. In fact, he is preparing them for it. His plans call for an economic self-sufficiency that makes Team Indigenous impervious to changes even at the highest levels of First Nations’ leadership. “We don’t want to be a political body,” he says, “we don’t want to go from chief to chief and we certainly don’t want the team to depend on me.” But for now, he will gladly stay with it. Above all, because he loves it. Without a doubt he still burns to get back to the NHL, but helping desperate little players with bloodied feet and teaching native athletes how to lead means so much more than pampering wealthy goaltenders. It’s no longer just a game.

“I kind of went out to seek,” he says, reflecting on his incredible past, “to seek justice or to seek respect. In a lot of places they call me Migrating Bird. I go away every fall and I come back every spring.”

And he’ll keep coming back, it seems. He never forgets who he is and where he is from. It sustains him. Team Indigenous is his Hiawatha and he is their Nokomis.