by John Fox
Box got its start in Canada during the Great Depression when the owners of the NHL hockey team the Montreal Canadiens were looking for a way to make money from their rinks during the off-season. While Iroquois teams continued to play field lacrosse right up to the 1950s, they consistently found themselves shut out from competitive play as the sport became the domain of middle-class “amateurs” in eastern prep schools and elite eastern universities. Exhibition games played between the Onondaga and college teams during this time were often marred by racism. As documented by Fisher, before one 1930 game between Onondaga and Syracuse University, local papers described the Indians as “a fighting band of Redskins” who were “out to scalp the Hillmen.”
So the Iroquois turned to box lacrosse. It was a more physical, high-contact game that appealed to their traditional style of play, with looser rules around checking and more opportunities for every player to run the whole field, shoot, and score. As field lacrosse got coopted and remade into the sport of choice for upwardly mobile Easterners, box was a game the Indians could make their own.
“Every Onondagan player gets his start here,” said Freeman, leaning against the splintered boards of the box.
Shannon agreed, reminiscing. “As soon as you’re old enough to hold a stick and get here on foot or bicycle, you show up for pickup games. If you’re the first, you start shooting around. Soon, another kid will be there to toss the ball with. Then, a third will arrive, and a fourth. In no time, you’ve got enough for a game.”
Freeman trained his four sons here. He took them up I-81 to the Carrier Dome, where they studied the field lacrosse game that their great-grandfathers had been excluded from.
“I’d teach them how to apply what they learned in the box to the field. I’d quiz them on plays as they happened. ‘Would you have made that pass?’ ‘What other options did he have?’ ”
Two of his boys went on to play for the Orange—Brett becoming captain and All-American—following in the footsteps of pioneering Onondagan Orangemen like Hall of Famer Oren Lyons Jr., Barry Powless, Travis Cook, and more recently, Marshall Abrams.
Now Freeman’s two young granddaughters have picked up sticks, a novel and even radical concept in Onondaga. Despite the explosion of popularity of women’s lacrosse elsewhere in the United States, Iroquois women are by tradition barred from playing the game. This may not always have been the case, however. There are accounts dating to the late 18th and early 19th centuries of women of several tribes playing the game, sometimes alongside or opposite men.
As Shannon explained the prohibition, “There’s medicine in the stick and the ball that’s not good for women. If your stick is lying in the middle of the living room, your mother or wife or sister can’t pick that stick up. That’s the way it’s always been with the Creator’s game.”
But Freeman’s granddaughters weren’t content to just watch and cheer from the sidelines, so they begged their father and grandfather to be allowed to join a girls’ league that had formed off the nation.
“Those girls worked on me real hard!” said Freeman. “So I went and asked two of our clan mothers for their permission, and they granted it.” He then proceeded to tell me how many goals they’ve scored this season, clearly proud that the Bucktooth touch had successfully jumped the gender divide.
Here in Onondaga, it’s not unusual for people to speak of lacrosse, even in casual conversation, as “the Creator’s game.” For all Indian tribes that have played it, lacrosse is, like everything on this Earth, a gift from the Creator and therefore bestowed with supernatural power, or “medicine.” One Ojibwe legend, as retold by Thomas Vennum, explains how the way of playing lacrosse first came in a dream to a boy adrift in a canoe:
In his dream, the boy saw a large open valley and a crowd of Indians approaching him. A younger member of the group invited him to join them at a feast. He entered a wigwam “where a medicine man was preparing medicine for a great game.” The lacrosse sticks were held over the smoking medicine to “doctor” them and ensure success in the game. After the players had formed into two teams and erected the goal-posts, the medicine man gave the signal to start, and the ball was tossed in the air amid much shouting and beating of drums. In his dream, the boy scored a goal. When he awakened, he related the details of his experiences to his elders, who interpreted it as a dictate from the Thunderbirds. This is how the game of lacrosse began.
Traditionally, the outcomes of games were believed to be controlled by spirits that could be manipulated only by powerful medicine men, or shamans, who were hired by teams to help ensure victory. One anthropologist who studied the Iroquois game in the late 19th century described how “shamans were hired by individual players to exert their supernatural powers in their own behalf and for their side.” Cherokee conjurers made the equivalent of voodoo dolls from the roots of a plant and used them to cast spells to make opponents sick. Mirrors were used by Choctaw medicine men during games to transfer the power of the sun to their players.
Balls were often made under the direction of the medicine man and imbued with magic in the process. Cherokee balls had to be made from the skin of a squirrel that hadn’t been shot. Parts of animals or birds would be secretly sewn into the ball to help it fly or roll fast or to otherwise invest it with magical properties. Among the Creek, Vennum relates, a team that had scored three goals could substitute a special “chief ball” that contained an inchworm and was believed to make the ball hard for the other team to see. Other objects placed inside balls included herbs, snake nests, fleas, and—much like the early tennis balls of the French—human hair.
Just down the road from the lacrosse box in Onondaga is a large open field where men still gather on occasion to play ceremonial games, which they refer to as medicine games. There’s no season schedule or roster for medicine games. They’re played only when they’re needed, for example, when there’s a serious illness or a social problem affecting the community.
“If I called a game now,” said Shannon, holding out his cell phone as though about to dial, “within a half hour I’d have thirty or forty men of all ages here with their sticks ready to play.”
The very first European accounts of lacrosse dating to the early 17th century describe remarkably similar ceremonial games being called by the medicine men. Father Brébeuf described such a game in 1637, referring to the game’s organizer as a “juggler”:
Sometimes, also, one of these Jugglers will say that the whole Country is sick, and he asks a game of crosse to heal it; no more needs to be said, it is published immediately everywhere; and all the Captains of each Village give orders that all the young men do their duty in this respect, otherwise some great misfortune would befall the whole Country.
Medicine games are still played the traditional way, with wooden sticks and a stuffed deerskin ball instead of a rubber one. Sides are chosen symbolically, often pitting married men again single men, or old against young. The number of goals to be reached is decided in advance. The emphasis is not on winning but, as Shannon put it, “playing the Creator’s game with a pure mind and heart.”
Alf Jacques handcrafts all the wooden sticks used in Onondaga medicine games in a small workshed down the hill from his mother’s house. The day I paid a visit he was also in the middle of washing all the Redhawks team jerseys in preparation for that night’s game.
How, I asked him, did the greatest living stick maker get stuck with such an onerous duty?
“Well, who else is gonna do it?” he shot back gruffly. “If I don’t do it, they show up to a game without their jerseys or they stink and look like hell.”
As the general manager of the Redhawks for the season, he was so busy with practices and road trips and laundry, he complained, that he was getting backed up on stick orders. He grabbed a beat-up notebook off his workbench to show me how he records the more than 200 orders a year he receives from all over the world. He has no website or email address.
“All word of mouth,” he said. “No one else in
the world can make a stick like I do.”
Alf, 61, has a bushy mustache and wears his frizzy gray hair in a long ponytail down his back. He’s been making sticks in the same workshop since 1962. That year, he was 13 and a promising and tenacious young goalie who’d come up under the tutelage of his father, Louis Jacques, a Canadian Hall of Famer. As for so many on the reservation at the time, jobs and money were scarce, and when his stick broke the family couldn’t afford the $5 it cost to buy a new one. So, his father decided, they’d just make their own.
“We went in the woods, cut down a tree, and made the ugliest stick you ever saw. Then we made another that was a little less ugly.”
Alf Jacques crafting a lacrosse stick in his workshop.
Within six years the father and son had hired a team of workers and were producing 12,000 sticks a year. But they and the other Iroquois stick makers still couldn’t come close to matching the rising demand of a growing sport. In those years, even as the Lacrosse Hall of Fame was being enshrined at Johns Hopkins University and new programs were cropping up at colleges and prep schools up and down the East Coast, any player who needed a high-quality stick had to make the long road trip to the reservations of New York and neighboring Canada to buy one straight from the source. Efforts to mechanize the careful twisting and bending required to shape a stick failed repeatedly. The traditional technology of wooden sticks, which took up to a year each to produce, had become a major obstacle to the growth of the sport.
Even though it was forty years ago, Alf still sounds wounded when he talks about what happened next. In the early 1970s, after years of experimentation by entrepreneurs, the Brine Company in Boston and STX, a subsidiary of DuPont, began introducing plastic heads that were durable, flexible, and interchangeable with different sticks.
“Our production,” recalled Alf, “went from twelve thousand to twelve hundred almost overnight.”
Alf’s shed is one part museum and one part wood shop. On the wall behind his bench, in no apparent order, can be found a shiny new regulation stick ready to be shipped to Europe, a 19th-century replica of a Great Lakes stick with its signature small round pocket, and a prized stick he made for himself in 1978. Several metal sticks with purple and orange plastic heads propped in the corner look like children’s toys next to Alf’s originals, which are made from hickory.
The wood is split with a club and axe, carved into the right lengths, and then set aside to dry over a stove. He then steams the wood in a wood-fired oven to soften it for bending. Using a metal plate as a vise, he bends the head into the traditional crook form, ties it with wire, and leaves it for eight months until it’s dried and permanently bent. He then hand-carves and finishes the stick, using deer gut for the netting.
He pulled his own stick off the wall and handed it to me. The wood was worn and patinaed from 32 years of play. The handle is noticeably darker than the head, cured over years by the oils and sweat of countless games. Carved along its length are the Iroquois tree of peace, a turtle representing his clan, a fish (Fish being his nickname), and an image of male genitalia pierced by an arrow. “Dead nuts,” he said, referring to an old expression used in the building and machinery trades. “Means it’s perfect.”
I turned the stick in my hand, feeling the perfect balance of its weight, tracing the grain running lengthwise for strength. Alf grabbed it from my hand suddenly.
“You don’t want this stick!” he declared sarcastically, throwing it aside with practiced flare. “It’s old and worn out. You want the latest model, a 2010 titanium stick with an aerodynamic ultra-light molded head that comes in five different colors. Right?”
Once he’d gotten through his rant (which included the declaration that “there are a lot of things about plastic that truly bother me”) Alf acknowledged that nothing could stand in the way of progress and that if sticks were still made of wood there would be no forests left. For the game to take off and be accessible to millions of people all over the world, the technology needed to change and adapt. He knew that.
But, he added, something has been irretrievably lost in the process. He picked up the first stick he ever made with his father in 1966. “The spirit of the tree is alive in that stick, and the life of that tree came straight from the Creator.” He gripped the stick and began to dodge and roll around me as though advancing on an opponent. “When you’re playing, the life of that tree, that energy is transferred to you. That stick is talking to you, and if you listen you can learn.”
“With this”—he held up a titanium and plastic version—“you’re on your own.”
It was Friday night and the first semifinal game against the Braves was the big-ticket event of the weekend. The Redhawks were coming into the playoffs as the clear favorite, having lost just one regular season game. Families were piling into the metal bleachers, sporting team T-shirts and caps. Visitors from the Tonawanda Reservation had driven six hours for this event, and everyone would be making the journey to Tonawanda the next day for the second game of the series. For hundreds of years, games between villages or between nations have been major social events, providing a welcome excuse to visit old friends and renew ties. Thomas Vennum described such a game played in 1797 between the Seneca and the Mohawk: “On one side of the green the Senecas had collected in a sort of irregular encampment—men, women, and children—to the number of more than a thousand. On the other side the Mohawk were actively assembling in yet greater numbers.”
In earlier times, before the Onondaga decided to reject gambling and casinos altogether, a game like tonight’s would have involved widespread betting. Money, blankets, food, land, sometimes even human services were staked in collective bets intended to inspire players to give it their all. But even with thousands of dollars of bets on the line, winning has never been of much concern to Indian players and spectators. As the lacrosse great and spiritual Faithkeeper of the Onondaga, Oren Lyons Jr., once explained, winning and losing “didn’t seem to be so much a point of the game as the celebration, the sense of community, the being together with pride.”
A pregame announcement was made over the PA: “Women and girls attending tomorrow night’s game in Tonawanda are kindly asked to respect their nation’s ways by staying clear of and not touching the lacrosse box.”
Freeman spotted me and called me down to the box to watch his team warm up. Players were practicing power plays, setting up the pick-and-roll to free up the shooter. Eighty-mile-an-hour shots pounded off the enormously oversized pads of goalie Ross Bucktooth, a nephew of Freeman’s, who deflected every attack with one of Alf Jacques’s wooden goalie sticks. Freeman introduced me to assistant coach “Meat” Powless.
“How’d he get that name?” I made the mistake of asking.
Freeman leaned over, elbowing his friend and laughing, “Because he was blessed by the Creator!”
He walked me into the locker room and introduced his sons Brett, Drew, Grant, and the other players. Several, I noticed, wore Indian-themed tattoos and mohawks or long braids that trailed out of their helmets. After more than a century fighting stereotypes and caricature—especially in the world of sports, where tomahawk-wielding Indian mascots have been a sore point for years—these young Iroquois were comfortably reclaiming and reinventing symbols of their Indianness as if to say, “Still here, still warriors.”
The game was about to begin so I found my way to a safe seat behind the glass. The rubber ball was placed in the center rink for the face-off. In the 18th century, by contrast, games were often initiated by a young maiden throwing the deerskin ball down the field toward two facing lines of players. Jeremy Thompson, the Redhawks’ face-off master who had just finished his first season at Syracuse, won the battle and snapped the ball to a runner who quickly worked the ball into the crease, opening up a shot and scoring the game’s first goal.
The action was riveting and chaotic. The hard rubber ball ricocheted off the boards and glass, bouncing high off the cement. With no limit on substitutions, Alf worked one of
the two doors to the Redhawks’ bench, opening and slamming it as players got sent on and off the rink. Penalties called for illegal checks or the occasional sucker punch or fistfight set up tense power plays.
The Braves hardly lived up to their name that night, giving up nine goals before scoring their first. Every play called by the announcer seemed to involve a Bucktooth: “It’s A. J. Bucktooth to Drew Bucktooth who takes a shot. Miss! Scooped up by Wade Bucktooth and fired hard. Goal!” They won 26–3, and in the days and weeks ahead would sweep the series and win the Can-Am League championship, earning them a trip to British Columbia to play against the best indoor Canadian teams in the Presidents’ Cup. They went all the way to claim the gold medal for Onondaga, a first in league history.
“They couldn’t handle us,” Alf boasted later. “We took care of everybody.”
Lacrosse, slow out of the gate, continues to pick up steam as one of the fastest-growing sports in the United States. According to the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association’s annual participation study on team sports, it’s one of seven “niche” sports that saw increased participation in 2009 (up 6.2 percent). That’s all the more striking when you learn that basketball, baseball, soccer, and football all saw declines in participation in the same year. An early beneficiary of Title IX, women’s lacrosse has exploded, with the number of U.S. high school teams growing 127 percent between 2001 and 2009. The surprising departure at the end of the 2009 season of Princeton’s fabled winning coach, Bill Tierney, for the University of Denver—the edge of the known lacrosse universe—signaled that the era of eastern dominance and provincialism might finally be on the wane. And yet, even as the sport grows up and broadens its reach, it still can’t quite shake its reputation as an affluent white sport, more than ironic given its humble and diverse roots. In 2010, lacrosse in the United States had the highest percentage of participants (48 percent) from families with household incomes more than $100,000.
