Joey Payeur
Without the mentors he encountered growing up on the Garden River First Nation near Sault Ste. Marie, Ted Nolan knows he never would have made it as far as he has.
Next February, the former NHL player and head coach will be going even farther—all the way to Sochi, Russia and the XXII Olympic Winter Games as head coach of the Latvian men’s national hockey team.
“I never would have thought back then I would ever make it to the Olympics,” admitted Nolan, who is helping his oldest son and former Carolina Hurricane, Brandon, this week as the younger Nolan’s hockey school became the inaugural major event hosted by the newly-built Couchiching First Nation Arena.
“Brandon wanted to bring the hockey school to First Nations’ kids and talk to them about the importance of living a healthy lifestyle, about education,” Ted Nolan said.
“So we get the kids to the camp because of hockey, but also we can teach them about other things,” he reasoned.
Providing opportunity has been a major theme of Nolan’s life since 1994. That’s when he created the Rose Nolan Memorial Scholarship in honour of his mother, who was killed in 1981 by an impaired driver.
The scholarship is awarded each year to First Nations’ women across Canada to support their educational and training goals.
The Ted Nolan Foundation then began in 2004, with the idea of raising money to help more aboriginal youth pursuing further education.
It made a point of promoting the importance of making solid lifestyle choices while also helping the next generation stay connected with their First Nations’ heritage.
A five-year agreement also was struck earlier this year between the Foundation and the Tim Hortons Children’s Foundation, which will see the two groups fund an annual leadership program for 50 aboriginal youth.
The 55-year-old Nolan (whose younger son, Jordan, won the Stanley Cup as a forward for the L.A. Kings in 2012) won the Jack Adams Award as the NHL’s Coach of the Year after his second season at the helm of the Buffalo Sabres.
But after clashing with soon-to-be-fired Buffalo general manager John Muckler, Nolan walked away from the Sabres after receiving what he considered an underwhelming contract offer from new Sabres’ GM Darcy Regier.
That led to Nolan being branded as difficult to work with by executives throughout the league, with Nolan claiming their problem with him stemmed from a racial bias.
It took eight years for Nolan to get back behind the bench—this time with the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League’s Moncton Wildcats. But the ugly spectre of racism reared its head again during a regular-season road game Dec. 16, 2005 against the Chicoutimi Sagueneens.
The Chicoutimi crowd was relentless in its verbal assault on Nolan throughout the game, shouting racial slurs at him while also pretending to shoot a bow and arrow at him and doing the “tomahawk chop” made famous by Atlanta Braves’ fans.
After the contest, the barrage continued towards Nolan from fans as the Wildcats boarded the team bus.
“I was 47 years old and I had tears in my eyes,” a sombre Nolan recalled. “I couldn’t believe how mean people could be.
“You would think, in this day and age, people would have moved past that way of thinking,” he added.
“But I learned a long time ago you can’t fight ignorance with ignorance.”
The QMJHL reacted swiftly to the incident, introducing an anti-discrimination policy that applied to everyone from team and league officials to players and fans.
The Wildcats, meanwhile, rallied around their coach and went on to win the President’s Cup symbolizing QMJHL supremacy in six games over the Quebec Remparts—only to lose in the Memorial Cup final to the very same Remparts and their high-profile bench boss.
“Patrick Roy was a heck of a goalie and is a heck of a coach,” Nolan said of the legendary Montreal Canadiens’ netminder who used his success in the junior coaching ranks to get hired May 23 as the head coach and vice-president of hockey operations for the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche.
“We got them in the best-of- seven but in a tournament like [the Memorial Cup], sometimes you just have to be better that one day and they were,” he reasoned.
“Maybe with Patrick in Colorado now, and if I get another job in the Eastern Conference, maybe we can meet in the Stanley Cup final one day and have the tie-breaker.”
Nolan finally made his way back into the NHL coaching ranks with the N.Y. Islanders in 2006, lasting two seasons before being let go in 2008.
“It wasn’t a matter of being an NHL coach,” Nolan stressed. “I’ve just always wanted to coach.
“That being said, there was a time I didn’t think I would ever get back into the league.”
Nolan became vice-president of hockey operations for the Rochester Americans of the AHL in 2009, but saw his position become redundant when the Americans’ parent club—ironically, the Sabres—were sold in 2011, with new owner Terry Pegula deciding to incorporate Rochester’s front office into Buffalo’s collection of daily operations.
That’s when an unexpected turn of events set Nolan on his eventual path for the Olympics.
“I got a phone call that Latvia was looking for a head coach,” he recalled.
“I really wanted to get back into coaching.”
Nolan beat out four other candidates for the job but faced a stiff challenge trying to improve a team that finished 13th at the world championships in 2011.
His expertise, however, helped Latvia capture 10th in 2012 and 11th this past spring while also claiming one of the last three remaining spots for the Sochi Olympics by winning Group ‘E’ of a final qualification tournament this past February with a 2-0-1 record against the likes of Kazakhstan, France, and Great Britain.
Currently ranked 10th in the world by the International Ice Hockey Federation, Latvia is led by a man who knows about overcoming the odds and isn’t shy about his team’s chances in Russia.
“I have always gone into every game I’ve played thinking I can win,” said Nolan. “You look back at things like the ‘Miracle on Ice’ with the U.S. beating the Russians in 1980 at the Olympics in Lake Placid.
“It may be cliché but we’ve just to take things one game at a time and see what happens.”
Gold medal or not, and despite the battles he has fought along his hockey trail, Nolan still embraces the memories the game has produced for him.
“When Jordan won the Cup and we took it home to Garden River, it was sure something to see how the community reacted,” he smiled.
“That was something I will never forget.
“And it was a good message for the kids there and aboriginal kids everywhere about how much they can achieve,” Nolan added.
