Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (2 page)

My father played hockey. There is a picture on the wall of him—dark hair parted like a centre line—posing with the 1927–28
Eganville Senior Hockey Team. He “retired” at twenty-two when he headed into the Algonquin Park bush, where he would stay for the rest of his working life. In his eighties, retired, he came a couple of times to old-timer tournaments I played in with the Rusty Blades of Ottawa. “You have no idea how lucky you are,” he once said. “We had no opportunity to keep playing.”

I do know. And I plan to keep on playing for as long as it makes sense. Or doesn't—who really cares?

It is somewhat ironic that I would dream as a child of a life in hockey and end up with a life in hockey far removed from that original dream. At age eight, I could never have imagined how this would happen. But long after the NHL career dream broke, I chased another in journalism and eventually found my way back to hockey.

Even that was not planned. Though I often wrote profiles of NHL players while working in magazines during the mid- and late '70s, my journalism ambition was to write about politics. For more than a dozen years I covered Parliament Hill, beginning with
Today
magazine and gradually working through the
Toronto Star, Maclean's
magazine and the
Ottawa Citizen
. Though I handled sports for
Maclean's
and, while with the newspapers, periodically would be assigned to hockey stories—world championships and Canada Cups—I never figured to work full-time in hockey.

All that changed in 1992. The
Citizen
was going through a policy change, wanting Hill reporters to pay for their own parking rather than accept the free parking made available to all Hill workers. There was some thought, however silly, that by accepting the parking spot—a heavy hike down a steep hill to the side of the river—we were somehow compromised. Fine, I said in a memo to the editor, Jim Travers, but the paper will have to pay for at least a good portion of a downtown parking spot. One summer day, I got a call from Travers, who sadly would pass away in 2011, asking me to join him for lunch.

“I have a solution for your parking concerns,” he said.

“Excellent,” I gloated.

“You're covering the Ottawa Senators from now on.”

I was stunned. I thought I was a political columnist. I thought I had the pulse of the nation, as we like to say, but I didn't even have a finger on my own pulse, it seemed. I never saw this coming, though perhaps if I had thought about it I might have. A couple of years earlier Ken Dryden and I had written
Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada
, and the book had been a huge success.

The Ottawa Senators were just starting up and Travers wanted to reorganize the sports department, installing me as the hockey columnist and the national editor, Graham Parley, as sports editor. Both of us were given a day to think about it. Neither of us required a day: we jumped at the opportunity.

And so began my return to the life that had first been imagined in that old frayed scrapbook. I wrote a book,
Road Games
, about that first year covering the Senators—easily the funniest and most enjoyable assignment I ever had—and then
The Home Team: Fathers, Sons & Hockey
. In 1995, publisher Douglas Gibson of McClelland & Stewart approached me with an idea: to produce a series of hockey books aimed at the young “reluctant reader,” a.k.a.
boys
. I had never written a children's book but agreed to try one, thinking that would be it. Soon there would be twenty-four books in the series, now also published in Sweden, Finland, the Czech Republic and China.

Once the
National Post
started up in 1998, the chain took me from the
Citizen
and gave me a general column, though each spring I would move into sports to join fellow columnist Cam Cole on the hockey beat. In 2002 I left for the
Globe and Mail
and a general five-days-a-week column that touched so regularly on the national game that in 2010 they asked me to turn full-time again to hockey.

The NHL—with all its growth, excitement and undeniable flaws—had obviously changed since my great heroes were Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull, wingers stayed to their sides and games
were broadcast once a week, usually beginning in the second period; but so too had I.

The one important thing that had never changed since that red Empire scrapbook first opened was a complete love of this magical sport that has, somewhat to my own great surprise, and totally to my great delight, become a game for life.

Kanata, March 2011

WAYNE GRETZKY'S GHOST

“O
ne more year!”
the 18,500 gathered at Ottawa's Corel Centre began to chant with 4:43 left in regulation time.

“One more year! One more year! One more year!”

He heard them—he even raised his stick in salute—but he wasn't listening. Wayne Gretzky was finished. This would be his final National Hockey League game ever played in Canada, his home country, a 2–2 tie on April 15, 1999, back when the NHL still had ties, between the Ottawa Senators and his New York Rangers. It seems a silly thing to say so many years on—“his New York Rangers”—as in Canadian eyes and hearts, and even imaginations, he is an Edmonton Oiler forever.

Wayne Gretzky was thirty-eight years old that early spring day in Ottawa. He was, by his own measure, merely a shadow of what he had once been as a player. He had 61 points for his final season—“99” retiring in 1999—whereas he had once scored 215. He was, however, still the Rangers' leading scorer, and had several of his lesser teammates only been able to finish on the perfect tape-to-tape passes from the corners, from the back of the net, that he had delivered all this game, not only would the Rangers have easily won but his point total would have been in familiar Gretzky territory.

Still, he had missed a dozen games due to a sore disc in his back. He knew it was time. He had once said he would be gone by thirty, but his great hero, Gordie Howe, who had retired early and then returned to play till age fifty-two, had warned him to “be careful not to leave the thing you love too soon.” He had continued on past thirty but would not, he swore, be hanging on at forty.

It had been a magnificent lifetime of hockey. Six teams—Indianapolis Racers and Edmonton Oilers of the World Hockey Association, the Oilers, Los Angeles Kings, St. Louis Blues and Rangers of the NHL—and he had won four Stanley Cups, all with the Oilers, while establishing a stunning sixty-one scoring records, many of which will never be broken. He had scored more goals than anyone who had ever played the game, and just to put that into context, he was never even really considered a goal scorer but a playmaker.

He had been hearing the accolades since he was ten years of age and scored 378 goals for the Nadrofsky Steelers in his hometown of Brantford. “You are a very special person,” his father, Walter, had told him around that time. “Wherever you go, probably all your life, people are going to make a fuss over you. You've got to remember that, and you've got to behave right. They're going to be watching for every mistake. Remember that. You're very special and you're on display.”

On display constantly—whether scoring 92 goals one season for Edmonton, getting married to Janet Jones in Canada's “Wedding of the Century,” getting traded to the Kings in a deal that will be debated as long as Confederation, becoming the country's most recognizable pitchman for corporate sponsors—and measured endlessly. They called him “Whiner” Gretzky for a while. They once said he skated like a man carrying a piano on his back when he went through his first back troubles. They blamed his wife for the trade to Hollywood, where she was an actress. Yet if there were minor stumbles there was never a fall, almost impossible to imagine
in this era of over-the-top sports celebrity, temptation and gotcha journalism. He never forgot Walter Gretzky's good advice.

They tried, but could never quite describe the magic he brought to the ice. Gordie Howe jokingly suggested that if they parted the hair at the back of his head, they would find another eye. Broadcaster Peter Gzowski said he had the ability to move about the ice like a whisper. It was said he could pass through opponents like an X-ray. He himself liked to say he didn't skate to where the puck was, but to where it was going to be. During the 1987 Canada Cup—when he so brilliantly set up the Mario Lemieux goal that won the tournament—Igor Dmitriev, a coach with the Soviet team, said: “Gretzky is like an invisible man. He appears out of nowhere, passes to nowhere, and a goal is scored.” No one has ever said it better.

But here in Ottawa on April 15, 1999, the invisible man seemed like the only man on the ice by the end. Walter Gretzky and his buddies from Brantford were on their feet, Janet and their three children, Paulina, Trevor and Ty, were on their feet. The NHL commissioner was on his feet. There is no possible count of the millions watching on television who were on their feet, but it is a fair bet that a great many were.

“
Gret-zky!”
the crowd chanted as the final minute came around.

“Gret-zky!”

“Gret-zky!”

“Gret-zky! Gret-zky! Gret-zky!”

The horn blew to signal the end of overtime, still a tie, and both teams remained on the ice while the cheers poured down. Then, with a gentle shrug of his shoulders, Ottawa defenceman Igor Kravchuk broke with the usual protocol and led his teammates over to shake Gretzky's hand and thank him.

It was over.

Months passed between Wayne Gretzky's retirement from hockey and a meeting that took place later that summer at the
National Post's
main offices on Don Mills Road in Toronto. The newspaper's
publisher, Gordon Fisher, said he had something important to discuss with me. I was invited to a meeting with him, editor Ken Whyte and sports editor Graham Parley. It was all to be kept top secret. I had no idea when I entered the room what was up.

“We're bringing on a new sports columnist,” Ken said with his enigmatic smile. A
new
sports columnist? I wondered. They already had Cam Cole, the best in the business—snatched from the
Edmonton Journal
—and I was pitching in regularly as well as doing some political work. What did we need with another sports columnist?

“He'll be writing hockey,” Ken said. I blanched. But … but … but
I
write hockey. And Cam writes hockey.

“It's Wayne Gretzky,” Gordon finally said.

I remember giving my head a shake.
Wayne Gretzky? As a hockey columnist? How did they even know he could type, let alone write?

“It's a huge coup for us,” said Gordon. “This will get us a lot of publicity and bring in a lot of readers. He has one condition, though.”

“What's that?” I asked, half expecting to be told to back off and stay out of the rinks.

Gordon smiled. “He wants to work with you.”

“We want you to be his ghostwriter,” added Ken.

Gretzky's agent, Mike Barnett, had done the negotiations for the column and this request had been part of the deal. No one but the senior executives knew what the financial part of the deal was to be—rumours went as high as $200,000, as low as for free in order to keep the recently retired player in the public eye—but soon everyone at the paper, and many beyond, would know that I was also part of the agreement.

This quite surprised me. We hardly knew each other. Unlike Cam, I had never covered the Oilers in their glory years. I had even, long, long ago, written one column, tongue rather in check, suggesting Wayne Gretzky was the worst thing that ever happened to hockey—his brilliance and popularity causing NHL expansion to places that made no sense, his high ability raising fans' expectations for skill
level that would sag once he retired—and I had even gone on the CBC's
As It Happens
back in the summer of 1988 to predict, with uncanny foresight, that Gretzky would be swallowed up in Hollywood and never heard of again. Instead, of course, he became even more famous in the years that followed.

In the late fall of 1994, however, I joined a handful of other journalists to accompany the “99 All-Stars” on a barnstorming trip to Europe during the NHL's first owners' lockout. It was mostly a lark: Gretzky and pals like Brett Hull, Paul Coffey, Marty McSorley and Mark Messier heading off on a tour of Europe with their hockey bags, wives and girlfriends and even, in the case of Gretzky, McSorley, Messier and Coffey, their dads. They played in Finland, including one game in Helsinki where Jari Kurri joined the fun, Sweden, including matches against teams featuring the likes of Kent (Magic) Nilsson and Mats Naslund, Norway and Germany. It was a wonderful experience, the stories filed back to Canada given wonderful play by newspapers starving for hockey and the stories, many untold, of the trip itself something to be treasured forever.

In the intervening years, we'd become casually friendly as Gretzky moved to St. Louis and then on to New York to round out his career. His kids, along with the children of Mike Barnett, were even reading the Screech Owls hockey mystery series. Gordon Fisher asked if I would agree to help out the paper by dropping one of my four weekly columns and using that time to help out. Of course, I agreed. He was, after all, the publisher.