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03-02-2005, 07:52 AM
FROM INSIDE LACROSSE MAGAZINE:
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Balanced Equation
A visit to Canada’s worst postal code changed the way Jim Veltman looks at life and made him the best all-around lacrosse player in the world
By Matthew F. Sacco (Inside Lacrosse Magazine, Feb. 18, 2005)
Sunlight is just a whisper here. Flung by the wind that only blows cold and ignored by the faces that only wear frowns. It is a rumor, where the truth is dark and cold and gray.
In a place where broken shutters smack against rusted aluminum siding, where people with infectious diseases are the majority, where by 10 a.m. the line to turn in cans for change at the local supermarket is down the block.
Where a graying prostitute will grab any male passerby, rip off her shirt to reveal bruises from poorly injected heroin needles and say, “Welcome to Hastings Street, the worst place on earth.”
In this place there is a man looking for balance.
He doesn’t belong here. In the darkness of Vancouver’s drug-riddled sprawl, he is quite literally the light.
His hair is soft and blonde. His eyes are big and blue and hopeful. His skin is lily white.
On everyone else the hair is wooly, the eyes are hidden by squinted lids and the skin is weathered and ashy.
No, he doesn’t belong. This place has nothing to do with him. But Hastings Street made Jim Veltman the greatest all-around lacrosse player in the world. Because it has nothing to do with lacrosse.
This place, this melting pot of crime and drugs and dread, it gave him balance.
Gave him a balance that allows him to show up at the rink every day and treat lacrosse like he just discovered the game.
And then, just as quickly, forget he ever knew it.
“I used to be a lacrosse-aholic,” he remembers. “But I realize now that there are other things in life. When I’m playing, then I think about lacrosse and only lacrosse. But when I come home and I’m with my kids, that’s who I’m thinking about. When I’m teaching, I’m thinking about that.
“It gave me focus.”
Veltman has always been a great player. Statistics and wins and championships will tell you that. But those are just words and numbers written on paper by people on the outside.
In the lacrosse arena, where he’s a senior citizen at 38, it’s peers and teammates that speak the loudest.
And while many of them call him Mr. Burns for his skin-and-bones physique, some also call him the best player they’ve ever seen.
“If I was starting a team I don’t know if I could pick anybody else besides Jimmy,” says veteran Toronto defenseman Glenn Clark. “The guy just does everything for you. He’s a winner.”
The numbers don’t lie: 12 years in the league, 12 looseball titles, seven Championship rings and one MVP award.
Ah yes, that MVP. After years of being the ultimate team guy, the Swiss Army knife of lacrosse, the NLL finally rewarded Veltman with its highest individual honor last season.
“I really feel like it was a long time coming,” says legendary former Buffalo and Toronto coach Les Bartley.
The MVP award is usually reserved for flashy goalscorers like fellow old timers Gary Gait and John Tavares, who have nine combined. But never a guy like Veltman. In a game defined by jaw-dropping offense and cold-blooded defense, Veltman is the best at neither.
“I’m not really the best at anything,” Veltman admits. “There was a time when I was younger, when I tried to be a big-time goalscorer. But as you can see that didn’t exactly work out.”
But 2004 was a season many will remember as Veltman’s very best, even though he’ll likely look back on it as one of his toughest.
At 38, the guy juggled the fatal illness of his best friend, the firing of one of his longtime coaches and a lot of losing—and still came through with his best year ever.
It really couldn’t have started any worse. After Veltman captained Toronto to its fourth title in five years, his coach, confidant, best friend and de facto brother, Les Bartley, was diagnosed with an almost surely fatal form of colon cancer.
Bartley was a father figure to the entire Rock team but Veltman, who had never been on a pro team that wasn’t coached by him, took it the hardest.
“I can’t even describe the feeling,” he says. “It’s just a terrible, terrible illness.”
Veltman was in the car behind Bartley when the ambulance took him from his home in St. Catherines to a local hospital. He was there the same day when they rushed Bartley to St. Michael’s Hospital near Toronto after local doctors failed to stop the blockage. And Veltman was there still, that night, holding his friend’s teary-eyed wife, when Bartley found out he was staring death in the face.
Months later Veltman and Toronto started their season with heavy hearts. They didn’t have Bartley behind the bench but he was there for the raising of the championship banner, guided out to the center of the Air Canada Centre floor by Veltman.
A six-minute standing ovation followed. Even the Rochester players, who had been dispatched by the Rock in the Champion’s Cup just months earlier, were on their feet.
“If your eyes were dry then there isn’t a tear left in them,” the Toronto Star wrote the next day.
Bartley smiled, waved and choked back tears of his own. Veltman surprised even himself by remaining composed. “I didn’t think I would be able to keep it together,” Veltman said after the game.
He should’ve known better. Ever since leaving Hastings Street back in 1995, he’s been able to keep it together.
This was no different.
Between the glass, Veltman had lacrosse on his mind. And only lacrosse.
Away from the game he was devoted to Les and the other aspects of his life.
Veltman visited him often, spending hours exploring the merits of conversational tangents. Lacrosse was always a topic, but so was family, education, politics and philosophy.
It continued a tradition that had gone on since the two began collecting rings together with Buffalo in 1992. Except then the two had nothing but wins to talk about.
Now, with Bartley out of action, a once -proud franchise seemed to be crumbling under the weight of its own calamity.
Toronto assistant Ed Comeau took over behind the bench for Bartley, guiding the Rock to an unfamiliar place … the cellar.
In last place in an East Division that some local newspapers used to call the Toronto Invitational, team president Brad Watters made a change, bringing in former Junior A Orangeville coaching legend Terry Sanderson.
The Rock went on a tear, winning out and going from worst to first. Sanderson’s hiring was clearly a shot in the arm for the club, but nobody mistook Veltman’s role in the team’s turnaround.
Beyond leading the league in looseballs with 179, he scored 12 goals and set a career mark with 53 assists.
“It’s not easy facing challenges like that,” Veltman says. “It was hard when Les was sick and it was tough losing like that early in the year and seeing how it affected everyone and everything.”
It doesn’t look to be any easier in 2005. Sanderson has shaped the franchise in his image, saying goodbye to Rock regulars such as transition man Steve Toll and defenseman Pat Coyle and bringing in son and blue-chip feeder Josh Sanderson, among others.
The moves even have the mercurial Toronto media questioning how good this team can be. Still, Veltman’s expectations—not surprisingly—have not wavered.
“Sometimes change can be good,” he says. “It can be a real boost for a club. Whenever you face adversity you always think about the things you’ve been through in your life and the experiences that shape you.
“I’ve been through a lot.”
JIM VELTMAN remembers the look on his parents’ faces when he told them.
What he said was simple. “Dad, mom, Teresa and I are not happy with what we’re doing so we’re going to move out to Vancouver to volunteer and try to make a difference.”
The response was just as simple: “You’re throwing your life away.”
As Dutch immigrants, Peter and Coby Veltman never took anything for granted. For most of Jim’s childhood, Peter’s office said Janitor on the door. He was rarely at home, working early in the morning to late at night, only taking a break to come home for dinner with his five children.
“Mom was the main caregiver in the house,” Jim says. “She was pretty tough. She was around a lot and we got our share of spankings. We probably deserved it. It had to be tough with four brothers and just one girl.”
But the Veltmans made it work. Despite the amount of time Peter put into his job, he always found time to spend with the kids.
Jim remembers the many living room wrestling matches with his dad. Going out to watch Holland play in the World Cup on the big screen at Maple Leaf Gardens and Dad in the stands at almost all of his games.
Peter supported anything the kids wanted to do athletically, whether it was gymnastics for Jim’s sister or hockey, soccer and lacrosse for any of the boys.
But they also preached self-reliance.
“If you wanted anything you had to work for it and pay for it yourself,” Jim says. “That taught us a lot.”
Things were no different when Jim told his parents of his plans for Vancouver.
So despite apprehensions, the Veltmans helped Jim and his wife Teresa store their belongings and sent them on their way.
Jim traded in his Eagle Talon sports car for a Nissan pickup truck, threw the bare essentials in the back and, with Teresa riding shotgun, set off for the 42-hour, 2,720-mile drive from Brampton, Ont. to Vancouver.
To some, Veltman was leaving a perfect life behind. He had a steady teaching job and a house. Plus he was playing for a team, Buffalo, that was less than an hour from his home, not a common scenario for the majority of NLL players.
Jim played for the six months he spent in Vancouver, but every practice and every game came equipped with a plane ride, jetlag and increased stress.
Despite that, it took one breath of that Western Canadian air to change his whole perspective.
“We just felt so relieved not having to go back to those jobs we didn’t enjoy,” Jim says. “It was eye-opening.”
As soon as they got there Jim started walking up and down Hastings Street, knocking on mission doors, turning his pasty palms toward the sky and offering them as service.
They ended up at the Salvation Army, handing out coffee and muffins to the hungry and setting up a clothes shelter for the needy. Their payment for such generosity? An occasional thank you, but mostly sideways looks from people who looked totally different.
That’s the trade. Suburbia for the ghetto. A teaching job with a steady salary, benefits and their own home for the occasional gratitude of complete strangers.
But to Jim it was all worth it. Worth it for the stress he left behind and the balance he got out of it.
Somehow he found this in a dysfunctional society where drug dealers, prostitutes and winos sauntered along the same streets that had school bus stops and playgrounds.
It was a bad neighborhood, dropped with ill regard between two of Vancouver’s biggest tourist spots—Chinatown and historic Gastown. Every bellhop and concierge in the area called it Ground Zero, and knew to instruct visitors to steer clear when traveling between the two hot spots. People looked at the area the same way the Hastings natives looked at Jim—with a blatant lack of understanding.
But after some time there, Jim began to understand. He began to see that, while Hastings was a grim place where hope had barely a filament to hold onto, people still helped each other.
Neighbors were like extended family and though there was almost a constant struggle to survive, that struggle did not dominate their life.
“Those people,” Jim says, “the good people there enjoyed everything they had.”
What they had was balance.
Veltman finally got it.
“For me it’s really about balance,” Veltman says. “I love the game of lacrosse and it’s really helped me. But it’s just another thing that’s built who I am. It’s not the only thing. Like now, I have kids and I’m enjoying them as well. I guess lacrosse was just one of those categories. Maybe that’s why I’ve been able to last as long as I have.”
So when a European volunteer service offered Jim and Teresa the chance to go to Uganda to help teachers in a poverty-stricken area for 17 months, they took it.
And even knowing he had to give up playing lacrosse while he was away, Jim never hesitated.
Uganda was another opportunity for Veltman to find balance. Without access to the amenities that many North Americans have grown accustomed to—cable, the Internet, cell phones—Jim and Teresa dug in.
“Uganda was another eye-opening experience,” Veltman says.
His light skin again put him in the minority. But in Uganda, where most whites are extremely wealthy and part of the upper class, Jim was uncomfortably treated as a person of status.
“We would be walking down the street and people would come up to us and ask us how to build a house or cure pneumonia,” Veltman says. “They thought we knew how to do these things because we were white.”
That made their job in Uganda that much more difficult. Jim was there to help instruct local teachers on more effective educating methods.
“In Uganda the teachers acted like college professors in the U.S. and they just lectured,” Veltman says. “They couldn’t really reach the kids that way.”
So Jim and Teresa spent a year and a half sharing a little bit of their knowledge, and getting plenty in return.
“Just spending time there, it’s a life-altering experience,” Veltman says. “It’s the type of thing you couldn’t experience at home.”
Speaking of home, with Jim halfway around the world, Buffalo failed to repeat as league champs in 1997 and the core of its front office—Bartley and general manager Johnny Mouradian—left to run the new Ontario Raiders franchise based in Hamilton.
Still, Veltman expected to slip right back into the Buffalo lineup when he got back before the 1998 season.
“Buffalo was a stable situation for me,” Veltman says. “We were winning, the franchise was committed to success and we got great support from the fans.”
In Buffalo he was captain of the league’s flagship franchise. One that set the standard for success on the floor and in the seats. One that paved the way for a franchise in Southern Ontario. After a season away from the game, Veltman was ready to get back to that.
Until Bartley found the mother of all loopholes.
“As an expansion franchise we were allowed to protect and sign any free agents that were classified as local players,” Bartley remembers. “And since Jimmy technically became a free agent when he left for Uganda and he was technically a local player because his home was in Ontario, technically we could protect him.”
Technically Veltman wasn’t too happy about it.
“I really didn’t have any interest in starting all over again,” he says.
But Bartley and Mouradian, a legendary salesman, sat Veltman down and told him not to fear the worst. He said they wanted to build this team, this franchise around him. That they would win just like they did in Buffalo, but it would be done in the image of Jim Veltman.
They would punish opponents on defense, go after looseballs with reckless abandon, run full throttle in transition and be opportunistic on offense.
“I wasn’t necessarily convinced,” Veltman remembers. “But Johnny and Les were people I could trust.”
And they could trust him. Veltman was named Buffalo’s captain in the first year of the franchise, 1992, as a wet-behind-the-ears 26-year-old coming out of Brampton. He was the unquestionable head of the Bandit leadership corps. A person that Bartley went to for everything from game strategies to the menu for team meals.
“Jim Veltman was a man that helped make my career,” Bartley says.
Literally. Bartley actually started out as a scout with Buffalo. But after starting the season 0-3, he was put behind the bench after an impromptu talk with Mouradian at 50,000 feet somewhere between Western New York and Pittsburgh.
A couple of games later with Buffalo facing defending champ and Gait-led Detroit, Bartley sent Veltman up against Gary, in a lefty vs. lefty matchup that’s one step down from scarfing the forbidden apple in box lacrosse terms.
But the gamble paid off, the Bandits didn’t lose for about two and a half years and, despite a long string of equally impressive performances all over the floor, Veltman was an afterthought.
“The media, the fans, you know they loved guys like Tavares and Derek Keenan and Darris Kilgour,” Bartley says. “They were the flashy guys. Easy to like. But Jimmy made our team.”
So clearly, when Bartley exposed the NLL rulebook, he knew what he was getting in Veltman. Or did he?
“Jimmy was a great player for us in Buffalo, but when he got back, something was different about him,” Bartley says. “Somehow he was better.”
It’s called balance.
“My mind was at peace,” Veltman says.
Before finding balance on Hastings Street and in Uganda, lacrosse was his life.
The guy was constantly thinking, talking and playing the game. He was at home breaking down the opposition over breakfast. At practice running until he couldn’t feel his legs. In Bartley’s office spending hours discussing special teams strategies.
The game was constantly on his mind. But it wasn’t until lacrosse took a backseat to other things that his game really became legendary.
And it didn’t take long to show itself.
In ’98 Jim led a young Ontario expansion team to a 6-6 record, one game out of a playoff berth thanks to a hot finish. “I honestly believe that if we made the playoffs that year we would have made some noise,”
Veltman says.
The momentum carried over into ’99 after majority owner Jim Fritz sold the team to a Toronto-based investment group that included such hockey luminaries as Bobby Orr, Darryl Sittler, Brendan Shanahan and Tie Domi.
The new Toronto Rock, in much the same way Buffalo had done in the early ’90s, set a new standard of success.
Not only was their fan support second to none first in Maple Leaf Gardens and then in the Air Canada Centre, but they were virtually unbeatable, winning the East Division title five straight times and taking the Champion’s Cup four out of five years.
But this time, at the center of it all was Veltman.
“Jimmy set the tone for us,” says Comeau, a longtime Toronto assistant before his brief stint as head coach last year. “He wasn’t our best offensive player or our best defensive player but he was our best player. And it seemed like whenever we needed him, whenever we needed a big goal, or a big stop or just a play, he got it.”
As he had done his first five years in the league with Buffalo, Veltman led the league in looseballs each season. But he was setting a new watermark, collecting over 190 in ’98 for the first time in league history and then topping the 200 barrier in 2002 and ’03. He has also set career marks in goals, assists and points on two occasions while with Toronto.
But his effect had very little to do with statistics.
“He was a leader,” Comeau says. “He played hurt. He set an example for our guys in practice. He did things the right way.”
And everything went right. Before last season, the only time Toronto didn’t win its last game was in 2001, when legendary goalie Dallas Eliuk had to make 40 saves in front of 19,409 fans at the ACC for Philly to pull out a 9-8 win.
But that was until last season’s roller coaster, when everything seemed to go wrong. First Bartley gets sick, then the Rock struggle, Comeau is dismissed and the whole franchise is shaken up. Suddenly there are doubters.
And worst of all, after tearing through the second half of the season to finish first in the East again, Toronto bowed out in the conference final in a very un-Rocklike fashion, getting smacked around by Buffalo 19-10.
Years ago a loss like that would have tormented Jim Veltman. He would have obsessed over it. Replaying things in his mind, wondering what he could’ve done differently. Sleep would have become a myth.
But things are different now. That was before. Before experiences thousands of miles away shaped his life. Before he became the old guy in the locker room. Before he became the world’s best all-around lacrosse player.
So the morning after that heartbreaking loss in last year’s playoffs was eerily similar to any other morning in the Veltman household. With the engine of his BMW motorcycle still warm from an early-morning ride, Jim is in the living room badly outmatched in a wrestling session with his two children.
In the kitchen Teresa is smiling as Jim yells something barely audible over the radio and the sizzle of scrambling eggs.
She doesn’t quite make it out, but Teresa knows it has nothing to do with last night’s game. Because this morning, like most mornings, lacrosse is not on the menu.
FROM INSIDE LACROSSE MAGAZINE:
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Balanced Equation
A visit to Canada’s worst postal code changed the way Jim Veltman looks at life and made him the best all-around lacrosse player in the world
By Matthew F. Sacco (Inside Lacrosse Magazine, Feb. 18, 2005)
Sunlight is just a whisper here. Flung by the wind that only blows cold and ignored by the faces that only wear frowns. It is a rumor, where the truth is dark and cold and gray.
In a place where broken shutters smack against rusted aluminum siding, where people with infectious diseases are the majority, where by 10 a.m. the line to turn in cans for change at the local supermarket is down the block.
Where a graying prostitute will grab any male passerby, rip off her shirt to reveal bruises from poorly injected heroin needles and say, “Welcome to Hastings Street, the worst place on earth.”
In this place there is a man looking for balance.
He doesn’t belong here. In the darkness of Vancouver’s drug-riddled sprawl, he is quite literally the light.
His hair is soft and blonde. His eyes are big and blue and hopeful. His skin is lily white.
On everyone else the hair is wooly, the eyes are hidden by squinted lids and the skin is weathered and ashy.
No, he doesn’t belong. This place has nothing to do with him. But Hastings Street made Jim Veltman the greatest all-around lacrosse player in the world. Because it has nothing to do with lacrosse.
This place, this melting pot of crime and drugs and dread, it gave him balance.
Gave him a balance that allows him to show up at the rink every day and treat lacrosse like he just discovered the game.
And then, just as quickly, forget he ever knew it.
“I used to be a lacrosse-aholic,” he remembers. “But I realize now that there are other things in life. When I’m playing, then I think about lacrosse and only lacrosse. But when I come home and I’m with my kids, that’s who I’m thinking about. When I’m teaching, I’m thinking about that.
“It gave me focus.”
Veltman has always been a great player. Statistics and wins and championships will tell you that. But those are just words and numbers written on paper by people on the outside.
In the lacrosse arena, where he’s a senior citizen at 38, it’s peers and teammates that speak the loudest.
And while many of them call him Mr. Burns for his skin-and-bones physique, some also call him the best player they’ve ever seen.
“If I was starting a team I don’t know if I could pick anybody else besides Jimmy,” says veteran Toronto defenseman Glenn Clark. “The guy just does everything for you. He’s a winner.”
The numbers don’t lie: 12 years in the league, 12 looseball titles, seven Championship rings and one MVP award.
Ah yes, that MVP. After years of being the ultimate team guy, the Swiss Army knife of lacrosse, the NLL finally rewarded Veltman with its highest individual honor last season.
“I really feel like it was a long time coming,” says legendary former Buffalo and Toronto coach Les Bartley.
The MVP award is usually reserved for flashy goalscorers like fellow old timers Gary Gait and John Tavares, who have nine combined. But never a guy like Veltman. In a game defined by jaw-dropping offense and cold-blooded defense, Veltman is the best at neither.
“I’m not really the best at anything,” Veltman admits. “There was a time when I was younger, when I tried to be a big-time goalscorer. But as you can see that didn’t exactly work out.”
But 2004 was a season many will remember as Veltman’s very best, even though he’ll likely look back on it as one of his toughest.
At 38, the guy juggled the fatal illness of his best friend, the firing of one of his longtime coaches and a lot of losing—and still came through with his best year ever.
It really couldn’t have started any worse. After Veltman captained Toronto to its fourth title in five years, his coach, confidant, best friend and de facto brother, Les Bartley, was diagnosed with an almost surely fatal form of colon cancer.
Bartley was a father figure to the entire Rock team but Veltman, who had never been on a pro team that wasn’t coached by him, took it the hardest.
“I can’t even describe the feeling,” he says. “It’s just a terrible, terrible illness.”
Veltman was in the car behind Bartley when the ambulance took him from his home in St. Catherines to a local hospital. He was there the same day when they rushed Bartley to St. Michael’s Hospital near Toronto after local doctors failed to stop the blockage. And Veltman was there still, that night, holding his friend’s teary-eyed wife, when Bartley found out he was staring death in the face.
Months later Veltman and Toronto started their season with heavy hearts. They didn’t have Bartley behind the bench but he was there for the raising of the championship banner, guided out to the center of the Air Canada Centre floor by Veltman.
A six-minute standing ovation followed. Even the Rochester players, who had been dispatched by the Rock in the Champion’s Cup just months earlier, were on their feet.
“If your eyes were dry then there isn’t a tear left in them,” the Toronto Star wrote the next day.
Bartley smiled, waved and choked back tears of his own. Veltman surprised even himself by remaining composed. “I didn’t think I would be able to keep it together,” Veltman said after the game.
He should’ve known better. Ever since leaving Hastings Street back in 1995, he’s been able to keep it together.
This was no different.
Between the glass, Veltman had lacrosse on his mind. And only lacrosse.
Away from the game he was devoted to Les and the other aspects of his life.
Veltman visited him often, spending hours exploring the merits of conversational tangents. Lacrosse was always a topic, but so was family, education, politics and philosophy.
It continued a tradition that had gone on since the two began collecting rings together with Buffalo in 1992. Except then the two had nothing but wins to talk about.
Now, with Bartley out of action, a once -proud franchise seemed to be crumbling under the weight of its own calamity.
Toronto assistant Ed Comeau took over behind the bench for Bartley, guiding the Rock to an unfamiliar place … the cellar.
In last place in an East Division that some local newspapers used to call the Toronto Invitational, team president Brad Watters made a change, bringing in former Junior A Orangeville coaching legend Terry Sanderson.
The Rock went on a tear, winning out and going from worst to first. Sanderson’s hiring was clearly a shot in the arm for the club, but nobody mistook Veltman’s role in the team’s turnaround.
Beyond leading the league in looseballs with 179, he scored 12 goals and set a career mark with 53 assists.
“It’s not easy facing challenges like that,” Veltman says. “It was hard when Les was sick and it was tough losing like that early in the year and seeing how it affected everyone and everything.”
It doesn’t look to be any easier in 2005. Sanderson has shaped the franchise in his image, saying goodbye to Rock regulars such as transition man Steve Toll and defenseman Pat Coyle and bringing in son and blue-chip feeder Josh Sanderson, among others.
The moves even have the mercurial Toronto media questioning how good this team can be. Still, Veltman’s expectations—not surprisingly—have not wavered.
“Sometimes change can be good,” he says. “It can be a real boost for a club. Whenever you face adversity you always think about the things you’ve been through in your life and the experiences that shape you.
“I’ve been through a lot.”
JIM VELTMAN remembers the look on his parents’ faces when he told them.
What he said was simple. “Dad, mom, Teresa and I are not happy with what we’re doing so we’re going to move out to Vancouver to volunteer and try to make a difference.”
The response was just as simple: “You’re throwing your life away.”
As Dutch immigrants, Peter and Coby Veltman never took anything for granted. For most of Jim’s childhood, Peter’s office said Janitor on the door. He was rarely at home, working early in the morning to late at night, only taking a break to come home for dinner with his five children.
“Mom was the main caregiver in the house,” Jim says. “She was pretty tough. She was around a lot and we got our share of spankings. We probably deserved it. It had to be tough with four brothers and just one girl.”
But the Veltmans made it work. Despite the amount of time Peter put into his job, he always found time to spend with the kids.
Jim remembers the many living room wrestling matches with his dad. Going out to watch Holland play in the World Cup on the big screen at Maple Leaf Gardens and Dad in the stands at almost all of his games.
Peter supported anything the kids wanted to do athletically, whether it was gymnastics for Jim’s sister or hockey, soccer and lacrosse for any of the boys.
But they also preached self-reliance.
“If you wanted anything you had to work for it and pay for it yourself,” Jim says. “That taught us a lot.”
Things were no different when Jim told his parents of his plans for Vancouver.
So despite apprehensions, the Veltmans helped Jim and his wife Teresa store their belongings and sent them on their way.
Jim traded in his Eagle Talon sports car for a Nissan pickup truck, threw the bare essentials in the back and, with Teresa riding shotgun, set off for the 42-hour, 2,720-mile drive from Brampton, Ont. to Vancouver.
To some, Veltman was leaving a perfect life behind. He had a steady teaching job and a house. Plus he was playing for a team, Buffalo, that was less than an hour from his home, not a common scenario for the majority of NLL players.
Jim played for the six months he spent in Vancouver, but every practice and every game came equipped with a plane ride, jetlag and increased stress.
Despite that, it took one breath of that Western Canadian air to change his whole perspective.
“We just felt so relieved not having to go back to those jobs we didn’t enjoy,” Jim says. “It was eye-opening.”
As soon as they got there Jim started walking up and down Hastings Street, knocking on mission doors, turning his pasty palms toward the sky and offering them as service.
They ended up at the Salvation Army, handing out coffee and muffins to the hungry and setting up a clothes shelter for the needy. Their payment for such generosity? An occasional thank you, but mostly sideways looks from people who looked totally different.
That’s the trade. Suburbia for the ghetto. A teaching job with a steady salary, benefits and their own home for the occasional gratitude of complete strangers.
But to Jim it was all worth it. Worth it for the stress he left behind and the balance he got out of it.
Somehow he found this in a dysfunctional society where drug dealers, prostitutes and winos sauntered along the same streets that had school bus stops and playgrounds.
It was a bad neighborhood, dropped with ill regard between two of Vancouver’s biggest tourist spots—Chinatown and historic Gastown. Every bellhop and concierge in the area called it Ground Zero, and knew to instruct visitors to steer clear when traveling between the two hot spots. People looked at the area the same way the Hastings natives looked at Jim—with a blatant lack of understanding.
But after some time there, Jim began to understand. He began to see that, while Hastings was a grim place where hope had barely a filament to hold onto, people still helped each other.
Neighbors were like extended family and though there was almost a constant struggle to survive, that struggle did not dominate their life.
“Those people,” Jim says, “the good people there enjoyed everything they had.”
What they had was balance.
Veltman finally got it.
“For me it’s really about balance,” Veltman says. “I love the game of lacrosse and it’s really helped me. But it’s just another thing that’s built who I am. It’s not the only thing. Like now, I have kids and I’m enjoying them as well. I guess lacrosse was just one of those categories. Maybe that’s why I’ve been able to last as long as I have.”
So when a European volunteer service offered Jim and Teresa the chance to go to Uganda to help teachers in a poverty-stricken area for 17 months, they took it.
And even knowing he had to give up playing lacrosse while he was away, Jim never hesitated.
Uganda was another opportunity for Veltman to find balance. Without access to the amenities that many North Americans have grown accustomed to—cable, the Internet, cell phones—Jim and Teresa dug in.
“Uganda was another eye-opening experience,” Veltman says.
His light skin again put him in the minority. But in Uganda, where most whites are extremely wealthy and part of the upper class, Jim was uncomfortably treated as a person of status.
“We would be walking down the street and people would come up to us and ask us how to build a house or cure pneumonia,” Veltman says. “They thought we knew how to do these things because we were white.”
That made their job in Uganda that much more difficult. Jim was there to help instruct local teachers on more effective educating methods.
“In Uganda the teachers acted like college professors in the U.S. and they just lectured,” Veltman says. “They couldn’t really reach the kids that way.”
So Jim and Teresa spent a year and a half sharing a little bit of their knowledge, and getting plenty in return.
“Just spending time there, it’s a life-altering experience,” Veltman says. “It’s the type of thing you couldn’t experience at home.”
Speaking of home, with Jim halfway around the world, Buffalo failed to repeat as league champs in 1997 and the core of its front office—Bartley and general manager Johnny Mouradian—left to run the new Ontario Raiders franchise based in Hamilton.
Still, Veltman expected to slip right back into the Buffalo lineup when he got back before the 1998 season.
“Buffalo was a stable situation for me,” Veltman says. “We were winning, the franchise was committed to success and we got great support from the fans.”
In Buffalo he was captain of the league’s flagship franchise. One that set the standard for success on the floor and in the seats. One that paved the way for a franchise in Southern Ontario. After a season away from the game, Veltman was ready to get back to that.
Until Bartley found the mother of all loopholes.
“As an expansion franchise we were allowed to protect and sign any free agents that were classified as local players,” Bartley remembers. “And since Jimmy technically became a free agent when he left for Uganda and he was technically a local player because his home was in Ontario, technically we could protect him.”
Technically Veltman wasn’t too happy about it.
“I really didn’t have any interest in starting all over again,” he says.
But Bartley and Mouradian, a legendary salesman, sat Veltman down and told him not to fear the worst. He said they wanted to build this team, this franchise around him. That they would win just like they did in Buffalo, but it would be done in the image of Jim Veltman.
They would punish opponents on defense, go after looseballs with reckless abandon, run full throttle in transition and be opportunistic on offense.
“I wasn’t necessarily convinced,” Veltman remembers. “But Johnny and Les were people I could trust.”
And they could trust him. Veltman was named Buffalo’s captain in the first year of the franchise, 1992, as a wet-behind-the-ears 26-year-old coming out of Brampton. He was the unquestionable head of the Bandit leadership corps. A person that Bartley went to for everything from game strategies to the menu for team meals.
“Jim Veltman was a man that helped make my career,” Bartley says.
Literally. Bartley actually started out as a scout with Buffalo. But after starting the season 0-3, he was put behind the bench after an impromptu talk with Mouradian at 50,000 feet somewhere between Western New York and Pittsburgh.
A couple of games later with Buffalo facing defending champ and Gait-led Detroit, Bartley sent Veltman up against Gary, in a lefty vs. lefty matchup that’s one step down from scarfing the forbidden apple in box lacrosse terms.
But the gamble paid off, the Bandits didn’t lose for about two and a half years and, despite a long string of equally impressive performances all over the floor, Veltman was an afterthought.
“The media, the fans, you know they loved guys like Tavares and Derek Keenan and Darris Kilgour,” Bartley says. “They were the flashy guys. Easy to like. But Jimmy made our team.”
So clearly, when Bartley exposed the NLL rulebook, he knew what he was getting in Veltman. Or did he?
“Jimmy was a great player for us in Buffalo, but when he got back, something was different about him,” Bartley says. “Somehow he was better.”
It’s called balance.
“My mind was at peace,” Veltman says.
Before finding balance on Hastings Street and in Uganda, lacrosse was his life.
The guy was constantly thinking, talking and playing the game. He was at home breaking down the opposition over breakfast. At practice running until he couldn’t feel his legs. In Bartley’s office spending hours discussing special teams strategies.
The game was constantly on his mind. But it wasn’t until lacrosse took a backseat to other things that his game really became legendary.
And it didn’t take long to show itself.
In ’98 Jim led a young Ontario expansion team to a 6-6 record, one game out of a playoff berth thanks to a hot finish. “I honestly believe that if we made the playoffs that year we would have made some noise,”
Veltman says.
The momentum carried over into ’99 after majority owner Jim Fritz sold the team to a Toronto-based investment group that included such hockey luminaries as Bobby Orr, Darryl Sittler, Brendan Shanahan and Tie Domi.
The new Toronto Rock, in much the same way Buffalo had done in the early ’90s, set a new standard of success.
Not only was their fan support second to none first in Maple Leaf Gardens and then in the Air Canada Centre, but they were virtually unbeatable, winning the East Division title five straight times and taking the Champion’s Cup four out of five years.
But this time, at the center of it all was Veltman.
“Jimmy set the tone for us,” says Comeau, a longtime Toronto assistant before his brief stint as head coach last year. “He wasn’t our best offensive player or our best defensive player but he was our best player. And it seemed like whenever we needed him, whenever we needed a big goal, or a big stop or just a play, he got it.”
As he had done his first five years in the league with Buffalo, Veltman led the league in looseballs each season. But he was setting a new watermark, collecting over 190 in ’98 for the first time in league history and then topping the 200 barrier in 2002 and ’03. He has also set career marks in goals, assists and points on two occasions while with Toronto.
But his effect had very little to do with statistics.
“He was a leader,” Comeau says. “He played hurt. He set an example for our guys in practice. He did things the right way.”
And everything went right. Before last season, the only time Toronto didn’t win its last game was in 2001, when legendary goalie Dallas Eliuk had to make 40 saves in front of 19,409 fans at the ACC for Philly to pull out a 9-8 win.
But that was until last season’s roller coaster, when everything seemed to go wrong. First Bartley gets sick, then the Rock struggle, Comeau is dismissed and the whole franchise is shaken up. Suddenly there are doubters.
And worst of all, after tearing through the second half of the season to finish first in the East again, Toronto bowed out in the conference final in a very un-Rocklike fashion, getting smacked around by Buffalo 19-10.
Years ago a loss like that would have tormented Jim Veltman. He would have obsessed over it. Replaying things in his mind, wondering what he could’ve done differently. Sleep would have become a myth.
But things are different now. That was before. Before experiences thousands of miles away shaped his life. Before he became the old guy in the locker room. Before he became the world’s best all-around lacrosse player.
So the morning after that heartbreaking loss in last year’s playoffs was eerily similar to any other morning in the Veltman household. With the engine of his BMW motorcycle still warm from an early-morning ride, Jim is in the living room badly outmatched in a wrestling session with his two children.
In the kitchen Teresa is smiling as Jim yells something barely audible over the radio and the sizzle of scrambling eggs.
She doesn’t quite make it out, but Teresa knows it has nothing to do with last night’s game. Because this morning, like most mornings, lacrosse is not on the menu.
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