Dispatches from the Sporting Life (14 page)

And in March, things weren’t going well. Gretzky was playing without his usual intensity. I asked saucy, streetwise Glen Sather, president, general manager, and coach of the Oilers, if he was guilty of overplaying Gretzky. “Wayne,” he said, “plays something like twenty-two minutes a game. He thrives on work. The more ice time he gets, the better he is.”

Yet Gretzky hadn’t had a two-goal game since February 19 or scored a hat trick for two months. He would, however, finish the 1984–85 season with 208 points (73 goals, 135 assists). This marked the third time he had scored more than 200 points in his six seasons in the NHL. A truly remarkable feat, this, when you consider that no previous player in league history had managed it even once.

Records.

The Official Edmonton Oilers 1984–85
Guide lists a modest three records under the heading, “NHL Individual Records Held or Co-Held by Edmonton Oilers (excluding Wayne Gretzky),” and there follows
a stunning full page of Wayne Gretzky’s contribution to the NHL records. Paraphrasing the guide, here are Gretzky’s statistics:

“No. 99, centre: height, 6’0”; weight, 170 lbs.; born, Brantford, Ontario, Jan. 26, 1961; shoots, left. He is not the fastest or the most graceful skater in hockey; neither does he boast the hardest shot. But he now holds 38 NHL records.”

Of course, he would, as was his habit, set or tie even more records in the 1985 playoffs, as well as win the Conn Smythe Trophy for most valuable player in that series. But back in March 1984 all I asked him was, did he feel a hundred-goal season was possible?

“Sure, it’s possible,” Gretzky said. “Somebody will do it. The year I got ninety-two, everything went my way.” But he had begun to feel the pressure. “Yesterday you got two goals in a game, tomorrow the fans want three.” He has said he would like to retire at the age of thirty, after fifteen years in hockey. “When Lafleur retired, it made me open my eyes,” he said.

Lafleur, who quit suddenly in 1984 (temporarily, as it would turn out) at the age of thirty-three after four mediocre years, had scored sixty goals in his best season, 1977–78. “I wasn’t surprised he retired,” Gretzky said. “You wake up, you’re no longer in the top-ten scorers, you think, ‘Oh, my God,’ and you begin to press. When Lafleur was in his prime, it was a much rougher league, but slower. We get hit, but not as much as in the late seventies.”

Danny Gare, the Red Wing veteran who had played against Gretzky the night before, told me, “They don’t run against him like they did on Lafleur.”
Acknowledging Gretzky’s enormous talent, he added that it had been more exciting to watch Lafleur. Well, yes, so it was. And come to think of it, the same could be said of Bobby Orr.

When either Lafleur or Orr was on the ice, you never took your eyes off him, never mind the puck. Orr could literally establish the pace of a game, speeding it up or slowing it down at will. Lafleur couldn’t do that. He was—in Ken Dryden’s felicitous phrase—the last of the river-hockey players, who had learned the game outdoors instead of in a rink, a solitary type, often lost in a reverie on ice all his own. Gretzky was something else again. Sometimes you didn’t even realize he was out there, watching as he whirled, until he emerged out of nowhere, finding open ice, and accelerated to score. Other times, working out of a seemingly impossible angle in a corner, he could lay a feathery pass right on the stick of whoever had skated into the slot, a teammate startled to find the puck at his feet against all odds.

It’s not true that they don’t run on him. The hit men seek him here, they seek him there, but like the Scarlet Pimpernel they can’t board him anywhere: he’s too elusive. Gretzky can fit through a keyhole. Watching him out there, I often felt that he was made of plasticine. I’ve seen him stretch his arms a seeming two feet more because that’s what was required to retrieve a puck. Conversely, putting a shift on a defenceman, cruising very low on ice, he seemed to shrink to whatever size was necessary to pass. He is incomparably dangerous behind the opposition’s net and unequalled at making a puck squirt free from a crowd.

If, to begin with, Gretzky had a fault, it was his tendency to whine. For a while, all an opposing player had to do was skate past Gretzky thinking negative thoughts for number 99 to fall to the ice, seemingly mortally wounded, his eyes turned imploringly to the referee. In Edmonton, this had earned him a pejorative nickname: “The Wayner.”

In June, Gretzky won the Hart Memorial Trophy, the league’s most valuable player award, for the sixth straight time, this in a year in which he had already won his fifth consecutive Art Ross Trophy, for the NHL’s leading point scorer during the regular season. One hundred and eighteen years after Confederation, the only thing out of Canada more famous than Gretzky was the cold front.

For a hockey player, it should be noted, this was a grand accomplishment, for, as a rule in 1985, NHL stars had to cope with a difficult paradox. Celebrated at home, they could, much to their chagrin, usually pass anonymously south of the forty-ninth parallel. Not so Gretzky. But for all his fame, he remained something of an enigma, a young man charged with contradictions. Ostensibly modest beyond compare, he had taken to talking about himself in the third person. Speaking of the endless hours he clocked on his backyard skating rink as a child, he said: “It wasn’t a sacrifice. That’s what Wayne Gretzky wanted to do.” Discussing possible commercial endorsements, he allowed, “The thing to look for is … is there a future in it for Wayne Gretzky?”

Seemingly self-composed, he didn’t fly on airplanes easily. Obviously, there was a lot of inner tension bottled up in Gretzky, and at thirty thousand feet it began to leak. In 1981, trying to beat his fear of flying, he tried a hypnotherapist, but it worked only briefly. Come 1984 he flew with pilots in the cockpit as often as possible, which helped only some, because they had to send him back into the cabin once they began landing procedures, and Gretzky had been known to sit there, unable to look, holding his head in his hands.

As I sifted through the Gretzky file, it appeared that just about every reply he had ever given in an interview was calculated to oblige. Again and again, his answers were not only boringly proper but tainted by what W. H. Auden once condemned as the rehearsed response. Under all the superficial sweetness, however, I suspected there was a small residue of bitterness. This, in remembrance of a boy deprived of a normal childhood, driven to compete on ice with boys four to six years his senior from the age of six.

Gretzky, for example, unfailingly went out of his way to pay obeisance to his father, his mentor. Walter Gretzky, a thwarted hockey player himself, a man who was mired in Junior B for five years, was still working as a telephone repair man in 1984. In his brash memoir,
Gretzky,
written with Jim Taylor, he gloated, “Wayne learned to skate and Walter Gretzky built a hockey star.” He had Wayne, at the age of four, out in the backyard skating rink well into the dark evening hours, learning to crisscross between pylons made of Javex bleach containers.
Walter Gretzky wrote, “You can just see them thinking, ‘Boy, did he push those kids! That’s a hockey father for you!’ Actually, it was the most natural thing in the world.” But in an epilogue to the book, Wayne, recalling that he had been shipped to Toronto to further his hockey career when he was barely a teenager, noted, “There’s no way my son is leaving home at fourteen.” At fourteen, he added, he thought Toronto was the greatest thing in the world, “but if there was one thing I could do over again, I’d like to be able to say I lived at home until I was eighteen or nineteen.”

Wayne was only eleven years old when he began to set all manner of amazing records in minor league hockey, even as he would later astound the NHL. But in 1984, even as Gretzky was arguably the best player the game had ever known, a much-needed publicity bonanza for the NHL in the United States, he was also, ironically, a menace to the game.

Imagine, if you will, a baseball outfielder, not yet in his prime, who hits .400 or better every season as a matter of course and you have some notion of Gretzky’s hockey stature. Furthermore, since Gretzky’s sophomore year in the NHL, there had been no contest for the Art Ross Trophy. Gretzky is so far superior to any other forward, regularly winning the point-scoring title by a previously unheard of fifty or sixty points, that he inadvertently makes the other star players appear sadly inadequate. And while the other players tend to tell you, tight-lipped, that “Gretz is the greatest … he has all the moves and then some,” I don’t think they really like him, any more than Salieri did the young Mozart.

Peter Gzowski, in one of the very few intelligent books ever written about hockey,
The Game of Their Lives,
ventures, “Often the difference between what Wayne Gretzky does with the puck and what less accomplished players would have done with it is simply a
pause,
as if, as time freezes, he is enjoying an extra handful of milliseconds.” Gzowski goes on to cite experiments done with athletes by a neurologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario. Based on this and other research, he suggested that Gretzky, like other superstars (say, Ted Williams or Bjorn Borg), benefited from motor neurons that fired faster than those of mere mortals. Or, put more simply, time slowed down for him. Gretzky also profited from an uncanny ability to react quickly to everybody’s position on the ice. “What separates him from his peers in the end,” Gzowski writes, “the quality that has led him to the very point of the pyramid, may well have nothing to do with physical characteristics at all, but instead be a manner of perception, not so much of what he sees—he does not have exceptional vision—but of
how
he sees it and absorbs it.”

As Gretzky often emerged out of nowhere to score, so did Peter Pocklington, the owner of the Oilers. The son of a London, Ontario, insurance agent, he parlayed a Ford dealership, acquired at the age of twenty-three, some choice real estate, and a meatpacking firm into a fabled fortune, even by western oil-patch standards. Pocklington got into hockey, he
said, because he wanted to be recognized on the streets. In 1984, he not only owned the most talented team in the NHL, a club that boasted such players as Paul Coffey and Mark Messier, but he also had Gretzky tied to a personal-services contract that made him one of the world’s highest-paid indentured labourers. It was said to be worth $21 million and to extend until 1999.

In 1981, Pocklington’s assets were estimated to be worth $1.4 billion, but the recession got to him, and his holdings by 1984 had reportedly shrunk to a mere $150 to $200 million. Gone, gone, was the $9 million worth of art, the private Learjet, and the Rolls-Royce. I asked Pocklington about the rumours, rampant at the time, that—such were his financial difficulties—he might be offering his legendary chattel to the nefarious Americans, say Detroit or New York. Looking me in the eye, he denied it adamantly. “There’s nothing to it,” he said. “You can imagine what they would do to me here if I sold Wayne. It’s almost a sacred trust.”

September 1985

C
ome spring, I turn hungrily to the sports pages first every morning to ponder the baseball scores, held in the thrall of overgrown boys whose notion of humour is to slip an exploding device into a cigar, drench a phone receiver with shaving cream, or line the inside of a teammate’s hat with shoe polish. But, to be fair, a certain corrosive wit is not unknown among some ball players. Asked if he threw spitters, Hall of Fame pitcher Lefty Gomez replied, “Not intentionally, but I sweat easy.” Invited to comment on whether he favoured grass over AstroTurf, relief pitcher Tug McGraw said, “I don’t know. I never smoked AstroTurf.” On another occasion, a reporter asked McGraw how he intended to budget his latest salary increase. “Ninety percent I’ll spend on good times, women, and Irish whisky,” he said. “The other 10 percent I’ll probably waste.” Then the immortal Leroy “Satchel” Paige
once said, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”

Satchel Paige, one of the greatest pitchers the game has ever known, was shamefully confined to the Negro leagues in his prime. Only in 1948, when he was forty-two years old, did he finally get a chance to compete in the majors, signed by Bill Veeck to play for the Cleveland Indians. Paige helped the Indians to win a World Series in 1949, went on to pitch for the St. Louis Browns for a couple of years, and then dropped out of sight.

The film director Robert Parrish once told me a story about Paige that he then included in his memoir,
Hollywood Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
In the early fifties, Parrish was shooting a western in Mexico,
The Wonderful Country,
in which Robert Mitchum was playing the lead. Mitchum suggested that they get Satchel to play a black sergeant in the U.S. Tenth Cavalry.

“Where can we find him?” Parrish asked.

“Why don’t you call Bill Veeck?”

Parrish called Veeck and learned that Paige was now with the Miami Marlins in the Southern Association, but he didn’t think that Parrish could contact him because he was in jail on a misdemeanour charge and the judge, who was a baseball fan, would let him out only on the days he was to pitch. Parrish called the judge.