Read Wayne Gretzky's Ghost Online
Authors: Roy Macgregor
Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (3 page)
And besides, it sounded like fun.
His first column appeared on September 18, 1999. “No regrets,” it began. “I still feel good about my decision.”
It was a long first column, sixteen hundred words, and it covered everything from his feelings about retirement to his plans to keep busy to his thoughts on Alexei Yashin's contract holdout with the Ottawa Senators. “There's a lot of talk now about players
refusing to play out their contracts,” he wrote. “I never refused to honour mine.”
He said he had no “pangs of regret” when training camps started up and he wasn't going anywhere. His Los Angeles neighbour and friend Claude Lemieux, then with the Colorado Avalanche, had pestered him all summer about getting fit and ready but he had held to his promise to call an end to it after twenty-one seasons. He had visited with the New York Rangers and coach John Muckler had tried to talk him into coming back, saying he needed someone who could get the puck to newly signed Theoren Fleury, but he had not been tempted. “Somebody asked me the other day if I'm going to be involved in hockey,” he wrote. “I don't have any time. I really don't.”
It seemed like a casual chat from one of the few players in the game identifiable solely by his number, 99, but the work that went into it far, far surpassed what would have gone into the one column a week I had given up in order to help out. First I had interviewed him at length over the telephone, then I had written a draft and faxed it to Mike Barnett, his agent. (This was in the early days of e-mail, and fax machines still dominated.) Mike had faxed back suggestions and changes, and then he had run it all past his main client and Wayne had suggestions and changes. I changed and rewrote and recast and refaxed, and finally they faxed back a version that they were okay with.
The first column had gone to print.
I was beginning to think I had made a horrible mistake, that a single column looked as if it might take up a full week's workâand the column wouldn't even be appearing under my byline. I would
disappear
from the paper.
But gradually we worked it all out. From initially dealing with one telephone number, Mike Barnett's, I soon had a half-dozen numbers including his and Janet's cell phones. I even struck up a relationship with the housekeeper to let me know where he was and how he could be reached. Calls took place on the road, on golf courses (I could hear the click of ball on metal in the background),
by the pool, in his office and, increasingly, on the run. As he became more familiar with my style and I became more familiar with his thoughts, the columns became easier and easier.
He wrote columns about overtime, shootouts, playoff heroes, various teams, individual players from Mark Messier to Jaromir Jagr, about junior hockey, minor hockey pressure and the value of playing sports other than hockey in the summer. He wrote about how he came to wear No. 99ânot his idea but that of his junior coach in Sault Ste. Marie, as an older player already had 9âand how at first people laughed at the number that is today retired throughout the NHL. He left hockey from time to time to talk about the Grey Cup, the Super Bowl, Tiger Woods' domination in golf, his grandmother and her rocking chair.
Here are some of the highlights from that year of weekly columns:
He said if he were starting his career again, he would wear a visor to protect his eyes. That week, during a match between the Ottawa Senators and Toronto Maple Leafs, an accidental high stick had struck the eye of young Toronto defenceman Bryan Berard, threatening to destroy a promising career. If he had grown up playing with one, Gretzky said, he would have continued to wear it, not thrown it away as so many juniors were doing when they reached the NHL, where such protection was not obligatory. “Without question,” he wrote, “in my opinion, the National Hockey League now needs to grandfather a rule that would require all players who have come up through the system wearing a visor to continue to do so in the NHL.” In what now seems an eerie exchange, he talked about how the year before, when he was still playing in New York, he had talked to young Manny Malhotra about keeping the visor on. “He was just a rookie and he wanted to keep it off. âYou're crazy,' I'd tell him. âKeep it on.'Â ” A dozen years later, while playing for the Vancouver Canucks, a visorless Malhotra would be hit in the eye by a deflected puck and require extensive surgery to save his vision.
Following a devastating hit on Dallas Stars forward Mike Modano by Anaheim Mighty Duck Ruslan Salei, he called for the league to take a strong stand on hits from behind. He also suggested that something be done about modern equipment, though he was fully aware that “I'm in no position to preach.” But he said that today's game was so fast and the players so big and strong that “I would never let anyone get on the ice with the helmet I wore.”
With Canadian teams struggling to survive in a time of escalating salaries and a low Canadian dollar, and with the Calgary Flames rumoured to be on the brink of failure, he said it would be a “tragedy” if hockey failed to support “small-market” franchises. Calgary, he said, had won a Stanley Cup and had been “a hockey hotbed” throughout its history. “Sometimes it makes you wonder. If hockey can't make a go of it in places like this, there must be something wrong.”
He wrote about Dominik Hasek, then starring for the Buffalo Sabres, and he argued that in the 1998 Nagano Olympics “Canada played as well asâand I'd say better thanâany team in the tournament, but we couldn't score against him. It took a lucky deflection to put our game against the Czech Republic into overtime, and we knew they were just going to play for the tie. We spent the entire overtime in their end, but we still couldn't score. We knew it wouldn't be on a two-on-one and we knew it would never be on a shot from the blueline. It would have to be on a scramble. We'd have to crash the net and we'd have to distract him somehow. When we couldn't do that, that was it. I always say we didn't lose in the Olympics, we lost in a skills competition. But that doesn't mean Dominik Hasek wasn't brilliant. He was.”
He was forced to comment, no matter how uncomfortable it was, on another incident that caused national outrage in Canada: Marty McSorley's stick attack on Donald Brashear that led to
McSorley being charged with assault with a weapon and subsequently found guilty. McSorley, a former teammate of Gretzky's and long one of his closest friends, was suspended for the remainder of the season. “It's no secret that Marty's one of my best friends,” Gretzky began, detailing their years together in Edmonton and in Los Angeles. But, he added, “nobody, absolutely nobody, is going to stand up and say it was right to do or that it wasn't Marty's fault. He's a grown man. And he'd be the first to agree that he has to take full responsibility for what happened. I deplore what happened, but I can still admire the fact that Marty didn't take the easy way out. He didn't slip out the back door. He stood up front and centre and immediately apologized to Donald Brashear, to both teams and all hockey fans. No excuses. Full responsibility.” He hoped both players would eventually return to play in the NHL. Brashear did; McSorley never played another game.
He talked about his minor hockey days and tournaments, remembering how his Brantford team insisted on billeting the players in order to save the parents money. He talked about fund-raising through draws and candy sales. He spoke fondly of the famous Quebec International Pee-Wee Hockey Tournament, where more than ten thousand people packed the Colisée to see them beat a team from Dallas 25â0. Best of all, though, was when a knock came at the dressing room door and in walked Jean Béliveau, who shook every child's hand as if he were already in the NHL.
He wrote about the death of golfer Payne Stewart, killed in a plane crash. He admitted to his own legendary fear of flying and how he had once been afraid even to board airplanes, how he had tried hypnotherapy to cure him and how he only grew more comfortable after Air Canada pilots let him sit in the cockpit to watch the takeoffs and landings and he saw how confident and sure they were even under tough weather conditions. In speaking of Stewart, whom he knew, he confessed to his own deeply
religious side. “I believeâI'm not at all ashamed to say soâand I also believe in life after death.”
He allowed himself, at one point, to gaze into hockey's future, and saw expansion into Europe, the levelling off of salaries (though not for the top players), the survival of the then-struggling Canadian teams and improved equipment to cut down on collision injuries. He predicted three rule changesâdropping the red line and “touch-up” offsides that would allow the defence to fire the puck back into the offensive zone without waiting, and opening up the game by having officials call obstruction penaltiesâall of which eventually came to pass.
He addressed the rumours of his own return to hockey as a potential investor in Steve Ellman's purchase of the Phoenix Coyotes. “I never made any bones about my intent of one day returning to what is, essentially, the only thing I've ever known. Hockey has been a large part of my life, it's given me and my family a great deal, and I still love the game and all the crazy, wonderful people involved in it. There were a few chances early on, but I knew immediately that the timing wasn't right. Nor, for that matter, was the location.” Location, it turned out, was of extreme import, as he then said what had long been believed. “What living here most gives us,” he said about the family's home in California, “is the opportunity to live a fairly normal family life.” Phoenix, he said, would also give the family that chance. Phoenix, he said, was “a natural fit. Tougher to ignore. It was made clear right from the start of discussions that I wouldn't be expected to move. I wouldn't be the coach. I wouldn't be the general manager. I wouldn't be the team president.⦠One thing I am certain on is it couldn't possibly be coaching ⦔