By The Associated Press
Saturday, May 27, 2006
SYRACUSE – Brett Bucktooth smiled broadly as he paused to sign a slew of autographs, a row of kids leaning over the stands inside the Carrier Dome, T-shirts and programs in hand awaiting a flick of his pen.
“Brett! Brett! Brett!” they shouted in unison at the senior co-captain of the Syracuse men’s lacrosse team just moments after he had scored his fifth goal of the game to give the Orange an important overtime victory in late April.
They cheered Bucktooth for his prowess in the game his Onondaga Indian Nation forefathers invented centuries ago. He has developed into one of the premier players in America, with 35 goals in 14 games this season as Syracuse prepared to play Virginia Saturday in the national semifinals of the NCAA tournament.
It is what he has accomplished off the field that sets him apart.
Brett is the fourth Bucktooth to play lacrosse at Syracuse in the past three decades, and he’s on track to become the first to graduate. He expects to receive his bachelor’s in communications at the end of fall semester.
“My dad always stressed academics first, then athletics,” said Brett, born and raised on Onondaga land just a few miles from the Syracuse University campus. “If you can’t have the grades, then you obviously can’t play lacrosse.”
Of 2.4 million Indians who live in the United States, just three in five graduate from high school, and those who make it to college have the lowest completion rates in the country, according to the National Indian Education Association and the National Education Association.
“Eighty-two percent drop out of college,” said Dr. Dean Chavers, director of Albuquerque, N.M.-based Catching the Dream, Inc., which for the past 20 years has awarded college scholarships to Indians nationwide. “The thing we live for is guys like Brett.” Before Brett, there was half brother Drew, cousin A.J., and Freeman, Brett and Drew’s father. Freeman received one of the few lacrosse scholarships available at Syracuse in 1974 but dropped out after his second year.
“My parents were real proud,” Freeman, now 52, said as he sat on the porch of the impressive log home he built from 140 hand-picked and shaved Adirondack timbers.
“They pressed me to do well in school and keep my studies up, and the first semester I went in there gangbusters and did all right. The second semester was not quite as good as the first, and it just went downhill. It was the party life and then working (for a local utility) during the summer that did it.”
Freeman is quick to place part of the blame for his college failure on a lack of preparation. The Onondaga Nation has around 2,000 people who live on 7,300 acres, and its lone school serves students in kindergarten through eighth grade. Most high school-age students attend a public high school nearby.
“I didn’t have the correct studies in high school,” Freeman said. “The shock that came to me was when a freshman student said from the time she went to kindergarten her parents programmed her to go to college. I didn’t know until 11th grade that I was going to go to Syracuse.”
Freeman landed a permanent job with the utility after he left Syracuse and still works as a lineman, logging countless hours of overtime each year to provide his children with educational opportunities – Brett and Drew went to prep school in Maine – most Indian kids never get.
“It’s impressive,” said former Syracuse lacrosse coach Roy Simmons Jr., who recruited Freeman. “Brett has a fabulous mother that understands the value of an education and a father who came here and understood that he walked away too soon. He realizes if he’d gone four years, maybe he wouldn’t be climbing poles.”
The hope was that Drew and Brett would break the family mold together. After unsuccessfully trying for a career in professional hockey in Canada, Drew came home and enrolled at Syracuse in 2001. And even though he was a latecomer to college at age 21, Drew was determined not to take the same path as his dad.
“My dad always reminded me that my cousin came here and didn’t make it,” Drew said in an interview his freshman year. “I just don’t want that to happen to me, too. There’s no way I’m going to let that happen.”
And yet it did. After academic deficiencies prevented him from playing lacrosse as a freshman, Drew suffered shin splints his second year, got frustrated when he couldn’t play the game that is such an integral part of his life – for Onondaga men playing lacrosse is a cultural rite of passage, something they do from infancy almost until the day they die – and dropped out.
The disappointment in the household was palpable.
“It was tough because I’ve brought my kids up to think of family first, school or work second, and lacrosse third,” said Freeman, whose daughter, Nikki, took that message to heart. Despite giving birth to twins and having to regularly make the 100-mile round trip from the reservation to school, she graduated with honors last year from Cornell University with a degree in architecture.
Brett Bucktooth’s accomplishments stand out even more when you factor in that he and his girlfriend, Nicole Shenandoah, have an infant son, Brett Jr., to care for. His birth last August delayed his dad’s graduation, but there is no complaining.
“It’s been a wonderful experience from that very first moment, and I’ve been able to play lacrosse,” Brett said. “I never thought that I couldn’t get through. It just took more concentration, more work. I never got down on myself. I just kept working, prioritized.”