Bucktooth blends natural ability and acquired skills
Thursday, February 23, 2006
By Donna Ditota
Staff writer
Brett Bucktooth was 7 years old when he first made the eight-mile journey up Route 81 to the Carrier Dome.
There, the Syracuse University lacrosse team served as a teaching tool. His father, Freeman, had played for the Orange and would become a respected high school and box lacrosse coach.
On SU game days, Freeman would pile his four sons into the car and drive to the Dome, where he saturated them with the kind of lacrosse knowledge only time and experience can teach.
“Did you see that guy open on the far side of the field?” Freeman would ask, pointing to an area of the Dome. “Maybe he should have made that pass.”
The boys would nod and watch, mesmerized by the Gait brothers and the subsequent parade of Syracuse talent. Brett studied their shooting mechanics and paid particular attention to their movement without the ball. His father advised his sons to enjoy the games, but cautioned them to leave the building with a skill worth practicing at home.
“After awhile,” Freeman said, “when they got a little older, they would say, ‘Dad, he should have passed that ball.’”
Those Dome outings contributed to a lacrosse education that would later form the foundation of Brett Bucktooth’s status as one of SU’s smartest, most instinctive players. Now a captain, the 6-foot-2, 191-pound attackman returns for his senior season after leading SU in assists last year with 20 and tying for second in points with 41.
His coach and his teammates point to Bucktooth’s cleverness, his intuitive feel for the game, as a contributing factor to his success. And while all those treks to the Dome nourished Bucktooth’s lacrosse intellect, the roots of his lacrosse education reach deep into Native American soil. Bucktooth grew up on the Onondaga Nation, where lacrosse holds sacred, spiritual significance. Everyone he knew played lacrosse, he said, not because elders demanded it, but because the game appealed to young boys who spent hours watching fathers and uncles play.
At age 4, he already was wielding a stick, imitating the moves he saw in a box the size of a hockey rink, where the tight confines required players to rely on cunning and creativity to free their sticks and score. By the time he was 7, his father was gathering boys on open land behind the box to teach them the intricacies of the field game.
The Bucktooth boys practically lived outside, exploring the woods and running through the neighborhood. On most days, they gathered at the box to participate in pick-up lacrosse games, where teams and loyalties would be randomly selected.
When we played, it was fun,” Brett said. “It wasn’t really intense. We never fought, never tried to beat each other to make the other person lose.
“Except my second-oldest brother, Tyler. He kind of had a mean streak. It would be fun until it came time to get the game-winning goal and he would just pull out the cheapest thing. Sometimes you’d just let Tyler win so you didn’t get hit in the back.”
Sometimes,those games shifted to the Bucktooth basement, where the brothers would hold makeshift lacrosse and hockey games. Brett traces his stick skills to some of those sessions, when the boys relied on their imaginations to create shooting angles in the cramped, crowded quarters.
By then, Brett had developed other lacrosse heroes. The Shenandoahs. Rex Lyons and Neal Powless. Gewas Schindler and Marshall Abrams. When Abrams, a reservation neighbor, attended SU and achieved All-America and NCAA Defensive Player of the Year status, it fostered Bucktooth’s own dream of an Orange career.
He never considered another college. His admittedly negligent attention to high school classwork led to his enrollment at Bridgton Academy, a prep school in rural Maine. There, the school’s isolation and its insistence on mandatory study hours narrowed his focus on academics and prepared him for college.
He came to SU as a combination midfielder/attackman, but he quickly sized up the competition at attack (Mike Powell, Mike Springer, Liam Banks, Brian Nee) and figured his best chance of playing time resided in the midfield.
“The stick skills were always there,” SU coach John Desko said. “But his challenge, like any young player, was adjusting to the speed of the game, and the size and athletic ability of the players he was facing on a daily basis.”
Last season,he switched exclusively to attack and blossomed. His assist numbers came as something of a surprise, given his reputation as a lethal shooter. But Bucktooth had always believed a good player cannot be defined by any one skill. That mantra was evident in the way he played.
“He’s got a great combination of being a feeder and a shooter that a lot of people don’t have,” SU attackman Mike Leveille said. “He has great vision on the field and a very powerful shot, too.”
Leveille and Bucktooth formed a crucial combination last season. Many of Bucktooth’s assists resulted from passes to a cutting Leveille, who subsequently buried the ball. Bucktooth attributes their chemistry to intersecting lacrosse instincts. Leveille, he said, simply gets the game. And Bucktooth acknowledged he has relied on that same lacrosse intuition to shape his own career.
I’m not real fast or strong or anything,” he said, “but I’m able to get a step on players because I see plays happen and I can see where a defense is weak or where the offense is going. You know where the ball’s going to move and then you’re able to anticipate.”
These days, Bucktooth is nurturing other instincts, as well. His girlfriend of five years, Nicole Shenandoah, gave birth to a son they named Brett Jr. on Aug. 24. Bucktooth and Shenandoah live together on the Onondaga Nation and strive each day to balance the demands of school (she attends Le Moyne College) and parenthood.
Bucktooth, who majors in communications at SU, was playing in a lacrosse tournament in Canada last summer when Shenandoah called to announce she was having an immediate cesarean section. Bucktooth jumped in a car commandeered by former SU player Scott Ditzell and his parents and made the five-hour journey back to Syracuse, only to learn he’d missed his baby’s birth by a little more than an hour.
He has made up for it since. He worries about his boy’s health. He frets when he’s not eating properly. His day starts at 7:30 each morning, when Brett Jr. insists it’s time to get up. It ends when he takes one last glance at his boy before flopping into bed.
“It’s been an exhilarating experience,” he said. “The best moments are when you wake up in the morning and you roll over and he’s looking in your eyes. Just the feeling that nothing else can give you. Someone asked me yesterday about having a son and whether winning the national championship was better. And I was like, ‘No.’ At the end of the day, it’s a sport. You love it, it’s your passion, but it doesn’t come close to loving your child.”
He acknowledgesthe added responsibility has forced him to mature and shelve his selfishness. It also wears on him physically. Leveille said that SU players understand “what’s going on with his life,” and appreciate the way Bucktooth has managed to focus solely on lacrosse when he steps onto the field.
“He’s balanced that very well. He’s never missed a practice, and he’s never been late,” Desko said. “It’s not easy. You can definitely see some days he’s tired having to juggle family and school and lacrosse. He’s got a full plate.”
His parents (Brett’s mother is Shirley Hill) have always stressed the importance of family and the value of work. Freeman Bucktooth has worked as a Niagara Mohawk (now National Grid) lineman for 30 years. Last week, when fierce winds downed power lines across Central New York, he logged 18-hour days with his crew trying to repair them. As teenagers, Brett and his brother Drew helped build a barn on the Bucktooth property with their father’s guidance.
Today, when Brett wades into his community, he encounters youngsters with that same reverential look he reserved for lacrosse players he idolized as a child. Many of them have made that same trek up Route 81 to watch him play. Now, they ask him to show them a stick fake or teach them a move. Bucktooth said he’s happy to oblige.
“That’s what I love to do, give back to the game and the community,” he said. “It’s given me a life and an education and an opportunity.”
These days,he still talks lacrosse with his father, who continues to attend SU games and offer advice. Freeman Bucktooth wants Brett to be more assertive and less gentlemanly on the field. He wants him to be more creative.
“Nice game,” he’ll say after a typical performance, “but I think you’ve got more in you.”
For Brett, those words mean more than he can articulate. He respects the SU coaching staff and appreciates his chance to start for an esteemed national program. But in the end, lacrosse is all about those childhood afternoons in the Carrier Dome with his dad and his brothers and the abiding spirit of the game he loves.
“My dad has actually relaxed in the last couple years. He’s not as critical any more,” Brett said. “Maybe it’s because we’re growing up. But we’re never too old or too good to stop learning. He’s always instilled that in us.”