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.
As for Lyons, his earliest memories of wooden sticks begin outside the old lacrosse box at Onondaga, when Lyons was a child and grown men would be going at it, full contact, inside those walls. Someone would break a stick and toss it to the side, and the little boys would push and grapple for possession — for the chance to take it home and tape it up and then use it to toss balls against a wall.
“It takes a year to make a wooden stick,” Lyons said last week, describing the significance of each one. He spoke with a sigh of the expensive, technologically advanced sticks used in most competitions outside Indigenous territories today — the sticks that even the Haudenosaunee Nationals will use if they achieve the great lifetime dream of Lyons, one of their founders, and play lacrosse at the 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles.
While Lyons accepts that those sticks — often manufactured from plastic, metal alloys or composite materials — are the international standard, he still laughs softly and refers to them as “tupperware.” What they can never achieve, he said, is the way wooden sticks mesh seamlessly into how the Haudenosaunee see the world.
Lyons, a great-grandfather, has spent much his life serving as a global voice on Haudenosaunee principles. He said the highest value given to any quality within his culture — forget about the idea of hoarding money, or stockpiling possessions — involves appreciating essential connections between living things. “No one had any interest in gold or anything like it,” he said of what he was taught about finding daily purpose. “The value was in relationships, right down to the grass, to every fish and bird.”
In the Onondaga language, he said, “there is no word for wild.” Instead, every element of life is linked. “The whole world is spiritual, and everything has its duty,” Lyons said. “The grass has its duty, and the animals have their duty,” and he said human beings have a responsibility — with the intellect they’ve been given — to recognize, protect and reinforce all those bonds.
That’s at the heart, he said, of why the Haudenosaunee play lacrosse. In purest form, it’s a means of gratitude, a medicine game played with wooden sticks, each one crafted from a hickory tree retaining what Lyons calls “a living force.”
He uses those words, and you appreciate why Alf Jacques didn’t want his sticks — once they left his hand — to be nailed to walls and never used.
Lyons and Simmons will receive the award named for their old friend at a dinner on Sept. 12, a Friday, at the Bellevue Country Club. Over the next two days, in an independent celebration, the annual Haudenosaunee Wooden Stick Lacrosse Festival — along with the Restore Our Sacred Lake 5k Run — will be held at Onondaga Lake Park. A masters tournament at the festival now honors the late Randy Hall, a Mohawk who was one of the founders of the annual gathering.
The Haudenosaunee believe it was on the shoreline of the lake that their Peacemaker convinced five warring nations, generations ago, to embrace peace and throw their weapons in a hole. That is where he planted a tree of peace, a white pine as symbol of an enduring alliance. Whenever Lyons, as an artist, interprets that tree, he portrays it with an eagle at the peak — a vision reinforced in an emphatic way by the bald eagles, in recent years, who’ve returned to the lake.
Rob Carpenter, a filmmaker working on a documentary about Jacques, is coordinating the award dinner. The core idea, he said, came from Jim Calder, a writer and a friend, who told Carpenter — on the day of Jacques’ funeral in 2023 — that something of meaning must be done to continue “all he stood for.”
That shared imperative led to the Ambassador Award. Ryan Sandy, a sandstone artist from the Six Nations territory in Ontario, crafted a magnificent trophy that wraps together Haudenosaunee themes of deep meaning, all intertwined — to Lyons’ point — with the head and pocket of a wooden stick.
The first recipient, a year ago, was legendary Bucknell Coach Sid Jamieson, of the Cayuga Nation. While Jamieson’s teams had memorable success, Carpenter said the idea isn’t so much to celebrate triumphs and achievements on the playing field as it is to recognize spiritual educators who are passionate about “Indigenous roots and bringing people together.”
The choices this year, Carpenter said, were overwhelmingly clear:
Oren and Roy, their lives bound together since the 1950s.
The only team photo hanging above Simmons’ kitchen table is the undefeated 1957 SU team, on which he played for his dad. His teammates included Jim Brown, one of the greatest lacrosse and football players of all time, and Lyons — who played goal with a stick he describes as unusually small for the position, one that allowed him to “pass the ball from one end of the field to another.”
Particularly to the fleet and powerful Brown.
Lyons had been a paratrooper in the Army. He walked away from school in seventh grade when his own dad left the family, feeling an intense childhood responsibility to help his mother feed the younger children. Lyons soon became a fixture in goal for many fine box lacrosse teams at Onondaga, and after playing against a club team from Syracuse one year — those annual showdowns introduced Roy Jr. to the speed and violence of the box game — the elder Simmons approached Lyons and suggested:
Come and play with us, at SU.
It was no small offer. Few Onondagas, in those days, felt welcome at mainstream universities. But Roy Sr. helped clear the academic hurdles. Lyons embraced fine arts classes at SU and became the Orange goaltender. Roy Jr. remembers that it was Lyons and Jim Ridlon — a teammate and another fine artist — who convinced the younger Simmons to step away from a physical education major that did nothing for his spirit, and to pursue the fine arts degree that shaped his life.
Simmons was drawn to the artistic nature of collage, matching the way he approached the world. He coached with the same method as his art, incorporating many disparate elements into Syracuse teams that were struggling when he first took over from his father. That all changed with his wide-open and free-flowing style of field lacrosse — similar in some ways to what he witnessed in the box, at Onondaga — and that transformation would eventually lead to a national dynasty at SU.
On road trips, Simmons used to take his players to museums, remembering how he and Lyons and Ridlon would do the same thing, together, when they were students on the team. They understood that art and a passion for the game, rather than being distinct aspirations, could go back to the same source.
Years earlier, when Simmons was a child, his dad would take him on drives to Onondaga, where the stickmakers would leave wooden sticks leaning against the wall on the front porch as a sign they were available for sale. Roy Sr. would be looking to replenish his supply for his team, a memory that stays with Roy Jr. for one particular reason:
Sometimes the father, as a gift, would buy a stick for his thrilled son.
He began early, then, to understand the inherent meaning of wooden sticks — an education that continued, deep into his life, through his friendship with Jacques. On Simmons’ invitation, the two men would sometimes do presentations for students or community groups, where Jacques would reflect upon the craft and culture of his art.
“I used to call Alf ‘Stradivarius,’” Simmons said — meaning that he placed Jacques in the same celestial artistic tier as the legendary maker of timeless violins.
Simmons is keenly aware of how Jacques played a central role in two intimate traditions within the Haudenosaunee, the way many fathers place a tiny ‘cradle stick’ alongside a newborn child — and how many elders, once they’ve stepped out of this life, make their last journey holding wooden sticks to their chests. Those sticks tie together what Lyons describes as the greatest value between those points, between arrival and departure – how relationships we navigate each day correlate to gratitude and sheer joy in the game.
For these old friends, in their long lives, that’s as local as it gets.
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