LIFE, HOCKEY, AND LESSONS LEARNED
Craig McCallum took winding path to fulfilment, writes Kevin Mitchell.
On a winter morning in Saskatoon, Craig McCallum fidgets with hands that have gripped a thousand hockey sticks and fired a million pucks.
He’s telling a story, and words roll easily. A culture is lost, then found. A game is loved, then hated, then loved.
Pain, defeat, victory. When he was a kid, enthralled by hockey, McCallum — whose future included careers in both the Western Hockey League and with the University of Saskatchewan Huskies — would flop onto the ice and inhale.
“You get really close, and smell the ice,” McCallum says. “That was one of my favourite things, was smelling the ice. I loved the whole game.”
Years later, after little Craig had become big Craig, when the joy of hockey had been stripped away, came a certain summer night that changed his life. McCallum was 17 years old, locked in the grip of a drugged, alcoholic stupor, unable to move his limbs and abandoned by friends. He’d quit a once-promising hockey career a few months earlier, and on this night, McCallum was terrified.
“Growing up on the reserve, I thought drinking and doing drugs was just something you did at a certain age,” he recalls. “That’s just how it was. Everybody did it. And I knew that at some point, I was going to do it, too. I had no idea it was a choice; I had no idea you didn’t have to do that stuff.
“I didn’t have role models to look up to who didn’t; I never learned it was a choice. I was destined to go down that path at some point in my life.”
There’s dysfunction on the Canoe Lake Cree Nation, where McCallum spent much of his youth, but there’s also beauty. He got clean, and played three WHL seasons after that terrible night, five more with the Huskies. It took a community effort to get him there.
His family didn’t have much money. Hockey is an expensive sport when you’re a promising upand-comer, which McCallum was during his early and mid-teens.
“My chief and council at the time helped my parents with gas money, rooms, registration costs,” he says. “There were aunts and uncles who would help with equipment. The stores in Canoe Lake ... there were times we were between cheques and needed money to get to a tournament, and they’d give us a loan. It never stopped.
“One of the things my grandma used to tell me is, never forget who you are and where you come from. I think about that all the time. Without those people in my community, without their support ... people would give their money, contribute to fundraisers, offer to drive me.”
Then one day, McCallum landed his dream spot on a WHL roster. The reserve kid was never far removed from the WHL kid.
“You could almost count (First Nations WHL hockey players) on one hand,” says McCallum, who is now 28. “It was interesting: When I’d play against those people, there was an unspoken bond we shared. We’d talk to each other, and there was a level of respect, because we knew the struggle each of us had. We had this shared experience of breaking into the league, playing in the league, and staying in the league as a First Nations person.”
Indigenous kids play a lot of sports at the grassroots levels, thanks in part to charitable efforts that ensure sticks, bats and gloves are a common childhood experience.
But the people who work with Indigenous youth in the sports realm say there’s a problem, and it’s a big one: A massive crack separates the grassroots and elite levels, and that’s where they fall, tumbling en masse, leaving just a handful of survivors.
“Where we lose Indigenous athletes is when it gets to that higher level,” says Thunderchild First Nation member Michael Linklater, one of the world’s better threeon-three basketball players and a former standout at the university level with the Saskatchewan Huskies. “It’s not because of the talent. The talent is there.”
McCallum’s story is instructive: It includes a range of barriers, internal and external, that block so many Indigenous kids.
Cultural divides? Racism, both subtle and overt? He experienced them.
Drugs and booze? They almost wrecked him, until he found a different path.
Money? He remembers a day, at a tournament, when his father ordered him a full and nourishing meal before a game, and got soup and coffee for himself. McCallum wondered at that, and he later learned the truth: there wasn’t enough money for both of them to have a meal. McCallum’s gratitude to his parents knows no bounds.
He busted through those choke points, while events spun in unexpected directions. Think of it: Eight combined seasons of major junior and university hockey.
“My life,” he says, “has been kind of a series of fortunate events.”
Hockey is a joy to McCallum — but the relationship has been rocky.
One of his earliest memories is begging his mother to take him skating, and her having other things to do. So he snuck out the door and travelled down the road on his little skates. He remembers the dark, and the blowing snow.
“You could find little patches where you could at least glide a little bit, and that was the best thing in the world,” he says.
McCallum got a late start in competitive hockey. He first played formally at age eight, after moving from Meadow Lake to North Battleford. He broke his mother down, he says, by steady begging. She worried he’d get hurt.
He wasn’t very good. He remembers scoring just one goal that entire first season.
McCallum moved, after his Grade 3 year, to his reserve at Canoe Lake. There he played with kids at his own level and enjoyed regular access to the rink. He’d arrive after school, his mother would bring his supper, and he’d skate until the rink closed for the night.
He’d watch the older kids, try to do the things they did, and he got better, better, better.
By the time he reached the bantam level, it was obvious he needed to leave home if he was going to maintain his trajectory.
The transportation costs were prohibitive, so he moved more than an hour away to Meadow Lake, where he lived with Dwight King’s hockey-loving family.
King, who later won two Stanley Cups, played with McCallum. King ’s older brother D.J. was in the WHL at the time, and would later play in the NHL.
McCallum is a thinker, adept at watching and learning, and he did that in this household, too: Study, absorb, examine.
“(Dwight King) took us all along on the ride,” McCallum says. “Any information he got about training programs or what have you, he’d share it with us, so we could access it, too.”
‘I DON’T WANT TO DO THIS’
Lethbridge selected McCallum in the seventh round of the 2004 WHL bantam draft, and he went to North Battleford for midget hockey. He encountered “kind, loving and generous people there,” he says, but it wasn’t a good place for him to be. He struggled with the cultural divide.
His community was going through a rough time: drunk driving crashes, suicides, elders passing on. In First Nations communities, family ties extend a long way and carry cultural significance. He’d try to get home for funerals of reserve members he regarded as close family even if, to an outsider, they seemed more like distant relations. He’d miss practices and games, while playing in a culture that just didn’t understand.
“It’s just how it is in our communities; we have closer ties to each other,” he says. “By the end, I was scared to say I needed to go home to a funeral.”
He says some players used racial slurs in the locker room — directed not at him, but at Indigenous people outside the team circle. He was a teen, trying to find himself. It hurt him, but he didn’t know how to handle it.
By his second year, drugs and alcohol — which he first indulged in at 13 — invaded his life with hurricane force. Hockey wasn’t fun. He was miserable. He drank, drank, drank. He didn’t want to rejoin the team after the Christmas break, but his parents said he had to — they were spending money they didn’t have on his hockey pursuits.
On Jan. 11, he got some birthday money.
“It was all I asked for,” he says. “And I drank every night, from my birthday to Jan. 28, tried to get as drunk as I could. I was calling in sick to school, skipping practice because I was hung over. The only reason I stopped on the 28th is I ran out of money. (Drinking) was all I wanted to do.
“We finished the year, and after it was done, I said ‘I quit; I’m done. I don’t want to play this game anymore. I don’t want to do this.’”
McCallum got a job at a gas station, working seven days on, seven days off. He’d make $700 at a shot, and spend his off week drinking up that salary.
FORK IN THE ROAD
Then, one awful July night, that miserable life clobbered him — and changed him. He was out with friends, drinking, smoking weed, and at one point, they went to a house for more booze.
“I sat down on the steps, and (a friend) was in and out, maybe two minutes,” he says. “I tried to get up, and I can’t move. My body shut down, because of the mixture of alcohol and drugs. But because of the drugs, my mind was wideawake. I was very, very conscious. My friends, who were also very drunk and high, tried to lift me, but I was dead weight. They just left me.
“I had no idea where I was and what was going on with my body. I was starting to scare myself. I’d try and get up and try to move, but even lifting my arm to get onto the railing was impossible. Because I was wide awake, I’d start to think things, like what if I was behind the wheel of a vehicle when my body shut down? What if there were passengers in the vehicle with me? What if I hit another vehicle, with innocent people? What if, God forbid, somebody wanted to take advantage of me, right now? What if somebody wanted to hurt me?
“I thought about all these things, and it really started to scare me. I tried harder to get up, to get out of there so I could go home. I remember trying so hard that it hurt me, and I started to cry, because I couldn’t lift myself.
“I prayed. I told the Creator, ‘Just help me get through this night safe, and I’ll never put myself in a situation like this again.’ Shortly after that, I passed out. I woke up in the house, on the couch. I looked around; there were people having breakfast at the table, like I wasn’t even there. I got up, didn’t say a word, walked out the door, and walked home. I started going over everything again, and I remembered the promise I made to myself and the Creator. Ever since then, I’ve never put myself in that situation. I haven’t drank, I haven’t done drugs.
“It was at that point everything else in my life started to turn around. I was taking care of my body physically, not putting these toxic things into it, and other areas of my life started to balance out. I started to have those fortunate events.”
McCallum still didn’t want to play hockey, but a Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League coach scolded him, telling him he was a waste of talent.
“He said it was a slap in the face to everyone who just wanted to make the WHL, or just make the SJHL (Saskatchewan Junior Hockey League),” McCallum says. “There’s people who strive for those things and there I was, turning it down, just because I felt like it.
“I started to think about the statistics. How many times have you heard, ‘Oh, this person could have made it here, this person was so good, but they got into drugs, or alcohol, or they were in love.’ I thought about all the people I’ve heard that about in my life — people from my community, people from the north. It resonated with me, and it made me mad, because he was right.”
BACK ON TRACK
The season rolled around. McCallum played one final season of midget AAA hockey in Beardy’s, a First Nations-run team where he found his comfort level. He led the league in scoring with 85 points in 42 games.
Most of the team was Indigenous, including a handful from his own community. He was living clean. He got to thinking and learning about his culture, which had been stripped away in part by his family’s history in the residential schools. He learned to be proud. It was a great season, on and off the ice.
Lethbridge had dropped his WHL rights the year before while he spiralled out of control, and now the Edmonton Oil Kings picked him up.
He made the Oil Kings in 2007, spent two seasons there, then moved on to the Prince Albert Raiders for his 20-year-old campaign.
He recalls one overtly racist incident of note during his three WHL seasons, in Edmonton.
“I grabbed a roll of tape,” McCallum recalls, “and (a team veteran) tells me to get my hands off that, you dirty Indian. It broke me. I thought (that stuff) was over. At that level, and after my interactions with that team to that point, I’d thought it was over — that I wouldn’t have to experience that anymore within my own dressing room. But nope. That’s not the way it is.”
McCallum told a trusted veteran what happened, and the Oil Kings dealt with the matter.
He was crushed two seasons later when they traded him to Prince Albert on the cusp of his 20-yearold campaign.
He remembers making the sombre drive from Edmonton to Prince Albert, hating every kilometre, and stopping at a Tim Hortons in North Battleford. He ordered a coffee and muffin, got to the window, and was told the people in front had paid for his order.
It was a small moment, a tiny piece of kindness, but it changed his outlook. Today, he’ll sometimes pay for the next person’s order, knowing what it might mean to somebody having a bad day.
That one act got him thinking about the positives: No other WHL team was closer to his home community, and his parents, friends, and other family members could watch home games.
From there, his attitude changed. He loved the team and the city, and scored a career-best 27 goals and 72 points in 72 games, thriving the whole time.
SCHOLAR AND ATHLETE
Then it was on to the U of S Huskies, and the best experience of his hockey life: He played on nationalcalibre teams, travelled to Spain for the 2015 FISU Games, loved his studies and the men he suited up with.
“The players were all educated, and there was a certain level of respect within that dressing room towards me, and who I was as a First Nations person,” he says. “They understood what it meant to be First Nations, and the dynamics.
“It’s like a brotherhood, more like a family, in a stronger sense of the word, than I’ve felt with any team. People always say your teammates are your family for the next year, but I’d never felt that. Getting to the Huskies, it didn’t matter how small, how tall, what colour you were. We were all equals there.”
Race and culture issues aside, McCallum stresses that many things he encountered aren’t restricted to Indigenous people. Lots of families don’t have the cash to put their kids into high-level hockey. Other kids struggle with substance abuse.
But as Saskatoon Tribal Council Chief Mark Arcand notes, “in First Nations, we’ve kind of had it rough for a while.”
McCallum hurdled the crack where others have fallen, and he’s moved closer to his culture. He pauses when asked what he’d tell a young Indigenous kid today, trying to move into elite-level sport.
“Cultural barriers and work views clash when you’re not in an environment that’s built around understanding and wanting to learn,” he says.
“There’s going to be people out there who don’t understand who you are, and what it means to be First Nations. But that’s OK. Push through it. Instead of internalizing that, letting it eat at you, talk to somebody. Talk to family, friends, people you respect. Ask them to help you deal with it. Lean on them. You don’t have to go through it alone. Once I started to learn that, everything got better and better over time.”
Today, McCallum works as a marketing specialist at Al Anderson’s Source for Sports in Saskatoon, and plays senior hockey.
Arcand, the Saskatoon Tribal Council chief, says McCallum’s outcome is a fine blueprint for aspiring Indigenous athletes.
“He played AAA hockey, he played in the WHL, he played at the university level,” Arcand says. “Those are the kinds of guys who make a difference. Did he make it to the pros? No. But he’s content with what he’s got right now. He’s happy. And that’s good. He’s got a good job, he’s paying his own bills, and he’s not relying on the system. He’s taking care of himself, and that’s what we want for people.”
McCallum’s scary, drugged-up night as a 17-year-old is both close and far away. It happened a long time ago, but occupies an important place in his story. He won’t forget it, just like he won’t forget what he did to rise above it all.
“The rewards, the things I got to see and do because of hockey ... I got to pull out those investments I made in myself,” he says. “I played hockey for my country in Spain. I got an education. I played in some national championships. I played all over Western Canada, the northwest United States, all over Canada, because of hockey. If you’re willing to put in the work, you can do anything.
“I’m really content with where my life’s at, and everything I’m doing.”