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Jordin Tootoo may have retired from professional hockey, but a more important job is just getting started. He's made it his mission to encourage people to talk about more important things than hockey. Issues like mental health, addiction and suicide.
Tootoo speaks openly about his own battle with alcoholism and his ongoing battle to stay on a sober path. He stopped-in at KelownaNow ahead of a special event hosted by Third Space Life Charity tomorrow (Wednesday) evening.
Jordin Tootoo's path to a 13-year-long NHL career was as unlikely as they come. Before him, no Inuk athlete had ever played in the NHL, and at 5'9" in height, he was not an NHL prototype. But he was a fighter, and he beat the odds.
"Reaching out and asking for help was the best thing I ever decided to do," said Tootoo about his decision to seek help for alcoholism. This was years into a promising career that was threatened by his drinking. "I knew it was my time to get help and to really be vulnerable," he added. Tootoo grew up in Rankin Inlet, a tiny, isolated, fly-in-fly-out settlement on Hudson's Bay. It was a place riddled with addiction and all the problems that go along with that, but he has fond memories.
"My father taking us out and hunting for our food and fishing and just being present in the moment," he recalled. "It was a time where I just got to be a kid." And he likes to get back there when he can. "To get out on the land and just forget about everything that's going on."
But it wasn't all good. "I remember five-six years old," he recalled, "watching my parents party on the weekends and being scared to go home."
So he feels he has something to offer when he returns to Rankin Inlet and when he visits other similar places. "I think it's been a great experience all around for me to reach out to these remote communities," he said. His main message is to encourage people to open up about issues like mental health and addiction. "It shows that it's okay."
Tootoo lost his older brother to suicide. Terrence Tootoo took his own life despite a promising future as a hockey player himself.
"If we only knew how to talk about our feelings and express our feelings," the younger Tootoo wondered aloud, "maybe my brother would still be here."
Tootoo has a home in Kelowna where he lives with his wife and two daughters.
Unfortunately, the event at the Innovation Centre is sold out with a waiting list for standing room only tickets.
Tootoo will also be speaking at the International Indigenous Tourism Conference at the Delta Grand Hotel in November.
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