This has been Lou Nanne’s home for the past 60 years. His four kids — he lost one to a brain tumour — and 11 grandchildren all live within a 15-minute drive of his house.
Nobody leaves Minnesota the way Americans generally scatter. That’s the kind of place it is, neighbourhood to everyone. A Norman Rockwell painting. “It’s the closest you can get to Canada without going to Canada,” said Nanne, the longtime hockey man and business man who grew up in Sault Ste. Marie. “We are so much alike it’s unbelievable.”
The last days have been more disturbing than any he can remember.
“Just to see the violence,” Nanne said. “You can understand the protest. But the violence, the fires, you know those streets, those families, this is where we live, to watch it all being destroyed. I understand the anger. I’m angry. I can’t understand the violence.
“It’s very unsettling. You don’t expect this here. A lot of us are appalled by what we’ve seen the last few days. The video — why didn’t anybody stop that? I kept thinking I wish Alan Page had walked by when this was happening. I kept thinking ‘What would Alan Page have done to that guy?’ ”
Page was a Hall of Fame defensive lineman for the Minnesota Vikings who later went to law school at the University of Minnesota and became a highly regarded judge in the state before retiring, speaking for the disenfranchised. Page remains a legend in Minnesota, in many ways larger than Prince or Bob Dylan or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Like Nanne, he stayed in Minnesota. Nanne closed his eyes and wished for a moment that he saw Page sacking the police officer whose knee was choking George Floyd to death.
“Why didn’t anyone step in?” Nanne asked. “Why didn’t someone push him off? I keep thinking that, over and over. I can’t get that out of my mind. It’s crazy this happened. It’s crazy what’s happening here.”
This is his home. He left the Soo as a teenager to play at the University of Minnesota. He then played for Minnesota in the United States Hockey League. He then played 10 years in the NHL for the North Stars, before briefly becoming coach and general manager, where he was on the job longer than anyone in franchise history. The state and the city are part of who he is and he is part of them. He still recruits hockey players to the U, as they call it, and every year for the past 56 he adds his voice to the famous high school hockey championships. This is the best place in America, he’ll tell you.
Now under siege.
“It’s not like we haven’t had racial incidents in the past around here,” Nanne said. “Like everybody else, we’ve had some the last few years. A couple of guys were killed before this. There was no film of that. Nobody saw it. Racism, as far as I know, is not prevalent in Minnesota, but it is apparent. And we have to fix that. And like everywhere else, we have to do something about it.”
Nanne understands leadership. He understands the importance of presence. He was a captain on Team USA, a GM of the Stars, the man who pushed hardest for Herb Brooks to be named coach of the Miracle On Ice team. And right now, he feels let down by the leadership around him, the loyal politicians, the state politicians, the federal politicians. “All of them handling this badly.
“If they handled this properly right from the start, the first night, I think it would be different,” said Nanne, 78. “The Mayor of Minneapolis (Jacob Frey) upset me so much. You don’t run away from this. You don’t get overwhelmed. You can’t change what happened. You can’t change the crime. We all saw it. But you can change the reaction and the violence.
“I have no problem with the men and women who have been protesting peacefully. It’s the jerks who are hurting people and hurting communities and lighting fires and killing people’s dreams. It’s people taking advantage of a bad situation.
“And nobody knows who anybody is. I know people who were out the other night and protesting peacefully and the police rounded them up and arrested them. Apparently they were out after curfew. But they get roughed up. For what? They didn’t do anything wrong.”
It’s clear Nanne isn’t trusting local leadership, local policing and across America the rioting continues.
“I can’t tell you how disturbing it is to live here and see this,” Nanne said. He talked about remembering where he was when President Kennedy was shot, when Martin Luther King was shot, when America protested the war in Vietnam. There was supposed to be nothing like the turbulent 60s in America again.
“This,” said Lou Nanne, lifetime supporter of Minnesota,“is worse.”
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