Sports
Patrick E. McCarthy / Newday / AP
This Friday in Denver, the Iroquois men’s lacrosse team will play its opening game of the World Lacrosse Championships against England, which hosted the last edition of the quadrennial tournament.
And this time, all is relatively quiet — at least in the travel department — for the Native American team whose ancestors invented the game.
Four years ago, the Iroquois squad made international headlines en route to the world championships in Manchester when, at the last minute, the British government wouldn’t recognize the tribal passports they had been using for decades. Hillary Clinton, then secretary of state, stepped in to grant the team members one-time travel waivers. Oscar-winning director James Cameron donated $50,000 to defray costs while the team was stuck in New York City as bureaucrats dickered over documents.
In the end, rather than travel on expedited U.S. passports — an affront to Iroquois sovereignty, the squad felt — the team forfeited.
The 29 teams in Manchester were stunned when the Iroquois didn’t show up at the opening ceremony. “It was a bummer," said Randy Mearns, an assistant coach for Canada at the time. “You just knew they were going to be phenomenal.”
The U.S. ultimately won its ninth world title, but the Iroquois’ 2010 absence subsequently generated an emotional conflict within the sport over rankings that took its international governing body nearly a year to settle and led to the resignation of a European official. The solution left no guarantee that similar complications wouldn’t recur in 2018, when the U.K. hosts the next world championships.
For now all eyes are back on the Iroquois. “We’re going to play to win,” said goalie Marty Ward of his third world team. “The last couple of groups have been good, but they haven’t been as determined as this group. But we’re going to play with a clear mind, clear heart and a free spirit when we’re out there.”
Ward was born in Syracuse, New York, and grew up just outside the nearby Onondaga reservation. His grandfather is from the Onondaga nation, one of the six of the Iroquois Confederacy, but the Iroquois bloodline is matrilineal, so Ward is a registered Cherokee and will be one of the team’s two players in Denver who don’t hold Iroquois passports. (Rules allow four per team at worlds.)
The Iroquois men’s lacrosse team has been competing internationally under its own flag since 1987. It is the only Native American team officially sanctioned to compete worldwide as an independent entity. Nike has been a sponsor since 2006. And its players represent the six Iroquois nations — the Cayuga, Mohawk,
Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca and Tuscarora — which once controlled most of what is now New York state.
Although the Iroquois men’s team has never placed higher than fourth at the senior world championships, winning is not always the point. For the Iroquois, who refer to themselves as Haudenosaunee (People of the Long House), the game is deeply spiritual.
On Iroquois reservations, predominately located in New York and eastern Canada, the game is frequently used for healing purposes and can be summoned by clan mothers on behalf of any person or people who needs its healing powers. But what they call the medicine game is male only, and in the most traditional households, Haudenosaunee women are forbidden from touching a lacrosse stick.
“We play for the creator, and the game was put here to please the creator,” said Ward. “Every time we pick up a stick, it is a medicine game first.”
Some say the Iroquois’ sacred motivation can be seen in their playing style. “Watching our game,” Ward said, “is way different than watching the U.S. or these other teams. You see a lot of Native American guys nowadays in college, having such great Division I careers — and they play with such a free spirit and free-flowing style that I think a lot of people are really starting to pick up on it and understand that that’s our way.”
The 2014 team might be the most talented Iroquois squad ever assembled.
It includes a dozen players from the 2010 world championship squad that never got to play in England, as well as seven members of the 2012 Iroquois team that took a bronze at the under-19 world championships while upsetting the United States, 15-13, in round-robin play to mark the Iroquois’ first outdoor victory over the U.S. in international competition.
But many lacrosse fans will simply be focused on four brothers and a cousin, all named Thompson.
In May the youngest two, Miles and Lyle, became the first co-winners of the Tewaaraton Award, the Heisman Trophy of college lacrosse.
While leading the State University of New York at Albany to the Division I quarterfinals, the brothers tied a pair of longstanding NCAA records. Miles, a senior, scored 82 goals (in 18 games) to match the Division I record for most goals in a season, and Lyle, a junior, tied the single-season record for assists, with 77.
The brothers are easy to recognize, as each has a long thin braid flowing beneath his helmet to remind fans of his heritage.
“We’re just proud of who we are, of being Native American,” Lyle said of the braids. “That’s how we show people.”
With behind-the-back missiles, backhanded shovel shots and a highly intuitive sense of space and timing, the Thompsons were a walking highlight reel this spring, along with their cousin Ty, who just complete his college career as Albany’s fourth-leading scorer in history (with 154 goals).
“There’s never a time when I go out there looking to be fancy,” Lyle said, "A lot of times, it just comes to me. We pretty much had sticks in our hands since we could walk. When it comes to game time, it just kind of happens.”
Lyle started playing organized lacrosse at age 7 or 8, earlier than his brothers: Miles; 27-year-old Jeremy, who was Syracuse’s highest-scoring midfielder in 2011; and 25-year-old Jerome, a former star at Onondaga Community College. But, Lyle said, “it’s actually a little late compared to most kids on the rez.”
The team is aiming for its first senior outdoor world championship medals at this year’s tournament, which runs through July 19.
Although the Iroquois and the U.S. won’t meet until their last match of the round robin, on July 15, U.S. head coach Richie Meade already knows “it’s going to be a challenge to guard them,” he said. “But we’ve never really had a chance to be on the field with them” as a unit.
It has been eight years since the Iroquois last competed at the outdoor world championships, and the 2014 roster was announced only in late June. The lack of formal practice time has been a bit frustrating for Iroquois head coach Steve Beville, a non-Haudenosaunee, who has coached Division III SUNY Cortland since 2007 and helped coach the Iroquois under-19 world team two years ago.
“I’m used to a lot more structure” when it comes to scheduling, he said. But on the field, “I’d be crazy to have too much structure. They’re still doing things you don’t ever see,” and the element of surprise can be a great advantage. “If we coaches don’t know what they’re going to do, the [opponents’] defense certainly doesn’t know what they’re going to do.”
But the road to Denver was not all smooth. Just ask the German lacrosse federation.
At the 2010 worlds, Germany finished sixth. According to Federation of International Lacrosse (FIL) bylaws, teams that finish in the top six at a world championship are slotted into the blue group at the next world championship. A berth in the blue group is a major advantage because it offers a shorter route to the finals. (The top four blue teams automatically advance to either the semifinals or quarterfinals after pool play.)
For two years, Germany leveraged its coveted blue group status to obtain funding and sponsorship.
Then in December 2013, realizing that the Iroquois deserved a place in the world’s elite division and after considerable lobbying (which reportedly included a petition signed by 15,000 people saying they wouldn’t attend the world championships if the Iroquois weren’t in the blue group), FIL members voted 17-8 (with four abstentions) to add one sentence to the bylaws to allow for the 2014 world championship blue group to include the top five teams from the 2010 championships plus the Iroquois Nationals.
Germany was bumped, and the team’s general manager, Tim Gruenke, immediately resigned.
“No doubt they deserve to in be in the blue division,” he said of the Iroquois. “I don’t blame the members of the team. There’s no doubt they have the best players. But we’re not discussing who has the better players.”
“Personally, it was the hardest decision I had to make,” said FIL president Stan Cockerton. “I still have a hard time with it. Germany didn’t do anything wrong. In fact, they stepped up [to the blue group] in 2010 when the Iroquois didn’t show. They earned their spot on the field, and we’ve taken that away from them. It doesn’t make me feel good, but we went through every scenario we could think of.”
And the problem is only temporarily resolved.
The current FIL rules say nothing about what would happen if the Iroquois or any other team doesn’t make it to the U.K. in 2018 — for passport reasons or any other unforeseen catastrophe.
For the moment, that scenario will have to wait. This week and next, the real battles are going to be fought on the field.
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