Central Current
by Sean Kirst
Oren Lyons and Roy Simmons Jr. have already experienced what might seem like the ultimate forms of tribute. There’s a building named for Lyons, an internationally renowned faithkeeper from the Onondaga Nation, at Syracuse University. A statue of Simmons, alongside a 
matching one of his late father — they both were lacrosse-coaching legends at SU — keeps vigil on Orange student-athletes as they come and go from practice.
Yet Lyons and Simmons both say an award they’ll accept side-by-side in mid-September holds extraordinary lifetime meaning.
“It’s really local for Slugger and myself,” Lyons said, referring to Simmons by a familiar nickname.
Local is right. Glancing at the Latin, the root of the word goes back to “pertaining to a place.”
Lyons and Simmons, friends for 70 years, will receive the Alfie Jacques Ambassador Award, which has everything to do with the Central New York landscape and community at their fingertips throughout most of their lives. The essence of the honor is about wooden sticks, knowledge and lacrosse…
And above all else, the lasting gratitude and perspective they’ve both found in the game.
Jacques, an Onondaga, died at 74, in 2023. Like Lyons — and like Jacques’ own father, Lou — he played goaltender in lacrosse. When he was a boy, out of financial necessity, he started to carve sticks by hand, beginning with the quest to find the right hickory tree in the woods. Jacques learned the art through long hours of work and patience alongside his dad, a Mohawk raised around skilled stickmakers at Akwesasne.
Through his father, Jacques “had it down to a science and he really studied it,” Lyons said of his friend’s prowess at the craft. The idea of “ambassador” relates to yet another step, how Jacques took his understanding of those sticks — and their meaning within Haudenosaunee culture — and carried that knowledge into the world, where for decades he spoke to the spiritual depth of what he felt about each step of the process.
Simmons recalled that even as Jacques neared the end of his life, his growing renown caused many people outside Haudenosaunee territories to seek him out, willing to spend hundreds of dollars to hang a stick on the wall as a statement of natural and artistic beauty.
Jacques always had a message for those customers, Simmons said, before he handed a stick over:
“Please. At least once a year, put a ball in it and play catch.”
That was the only way, Jacques used to tell Simmons, of keeping the stick happy.
Simmons just turned 90. Lyons is 95. Both men, in recent years, have gone through periods of struggle with their health. Simmons, a widower and a grandfather, became emotional in recalling how Jacques, only a few years ago, would make weekly visits to the kitchen of the Simmons farmhouse in Manlius.
At the time, Simmons was recovering from painful back surgery and a subsequent infection that — at least for now — has cost him the use of his legs. Jacques would come over to talk about sticks and lacrosse and beloved characters they both knew around the game, long ago. Simmons said they would swap stories “true and untrue,” old friends with a fierce kindship, though sometimes Jacques would speak for a moment about some ache or pain — remarks soon coupled with a comment or two about chemotherapy.
It gradually became clear to Simmons — a thought he shares now with tears in his eyes — that Jacques himself was dying, yet was still pushing himself to make those visits out of concern for his friend.
“He was a joy to me,” said Simmons, who used to be a regular visitor at Jacques’ workshop at Onondaga — the unforgettable place where Jacques’ late mother Ada would often be outside, working in her garden. Simmons watched as her son — walls crowded with venerable tools and sticks and handmade balls — worked on sticks bent by steam into a shape Simmons calls “a shepherd’s crook.”
Even now, Simmons can spin from his kitchen table, reach into a stack of sticks leaning against the wall and grab one that was among the last Jacques ever made, a stick made to painstaking request: It has an octagonal handle Simmons has preferred since he was young.
He holds the stick, rolls it in his hands, and that brings him straight to Jacques.