Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (45 page)

“This, to me,” said Cassie Campbell, captain of the Olympic team, “completely legitimizes women's hockey. This is our Stanley Cup—there's no turning back now.”

The obvious relief expressed by both Wickenheiser and Campbell, the two biggest stars of the women's game, had to do with a growing sense that women's hockey was beginning a downward turn. With elite competition boiling down to only two teams, Canada and the USA, the legitimacy of the sport had reached a point where, as Campbell said, “there was a real fear it might be dropped from the Olympic program.” In fact, this was precisely the talk at the Turin Winter Games up until Sweden stunned the Americans, and all women's hockey, by reaching the finals against Canada. The emergence of a third force and the creation of a serious cup could not have come at a better time for the game.

“This is big,” said Campbell. “It's not just about Canada, it's about the world.”

“We needed something that the world of women's hockey can focus on,” added Wickenheiser. “It's something people can relate to. That's going to be our Stanley Cup.”

Initially, Clarkson's intention was to have the trophy played for by the best women's teams in the country, but negotiations between the east and west elite leagues faltered to a point where she decided, instead, to turn it over to Hockey Canada to administer. The first band will hold the names of the women who won Olympic gold, but future bands are expected to be for individual teams.

The new silver trophy was built by Inuit artists working under Beth Biggs, who teaches art at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit. Pootoogook Qiatsuk, who did the engraving, says he was “speechless” when asked to work on it. Clarkson, known for her love of the North, never thought of having it built anywhere else. “It's out of the North that ice comes,” she said. “Get it?”

Bob Nicholson thinks everyone will. “Young boys have their dreams of winning the Stanley Cup on the streets and ponds,” said the head of Hockey Canada. “Now young girls have their own dream.”

Clarkson is acutely aware that, for the general public, only two governors general in Canada's 139-year history have registered: Lord Stanley, who left his name on a hockey trophy, and Lord Grey, who attached his to the one for football. “You hope you do something that catches on,” she said. “But you just can't know.”

The Stanley Cup has been hoisted in American cities since 1994, and it's just possible that if the Clarkson Cup is still being awarded when it too is 114 years old, the Swedish or Chinese woman raising it will not have a clue where it came from or who Clarkson was.

If that happens, said Clarkson, the Cup will have accomplished her goal. In 1892, Lord Stanley spent ten guineas on the silver bowl that has been hoisted, dropped, kicked, bent and even lost for periods of time—only to survive as the most recognizable sports prize in North America. Yesterday afternoon during the photo shoot to honour the gold medal winners in junior hockey, sledge hockey and, of course, women's hockey, a cry suddenly went up from the front row.

“Where's the Cup?”

“Where did we put it?”

Hopefully, in the history books.

The Clarkson Cup did indeed become a major focus for women's hockey. Montreal defeated Toronto 5–0 at the Barrie Molson Centre after a four-day tournament that also featured teams from Brampton and Minnesota. Several Canadian and American Olympians were on the teams, as well as players from Europe
.

N
ot much is known about her … She always stayed in the background …

They were, understandably, at a loss for words when it came to describing Phyllis Gretzky, when her family announced this week that this special woman—mother of Wayne, Canada's greatest hockey hero, wife of Walter, Canada's national hockey dad—is undergoing treatment for lung cancer.

They don't even know her age. And that, of course, would be just fine with Phyllis Gretzky. She'd just as soon have it that no one even knows she is ill. But when your last name is synonymous with the national game …

“The funny thing is,” her son said in his 1990 autobiography,
Gretzky
, “my mom isn't even that big a hockey fan. She only wanted the kids to be happy.”

She raised four sons and a daughter, and insisted on equal treatment even if the media had eyes for only one. She drove the kids to their games, pinched budgets to pay for new equipment and stood up for her children as any other parent would. When the extraordinarily gifted Wayne shone so brightly that other jealous parents would boo him, she froze them out; there are still people in Brantford, Ontario, Walter once said with a chuckle, whom she refuses to speak to for things they yelled at her son thirty years ago. She once told hockey great Bobby Hull to mind his manners around her boy.

Hockey mothers are an understudied group when compared to hockey fathers, who are forever being analyzed as the guiding light, the inspiration, at times the overbearing, even destructive force in a hockey star's life. Even Wayne Gretzky is too often seen as the creation of the easygoing, decent Walter when common sense argues that Wayne Gretzky did not pop, fully dressed, from a hockey dressing room.

“A lot of people know about my dad,” the younger Gretzky
wrote back in 1990, “but the sacrifices my mom made to put me into the NHL never get talked about.”

True, and there are a great many other stories of hockey mothers who should be better known:

“It was through the kindness of my mother,” Gordie once told an interviewer, according to Roy MacSkimming's fine
Gordie: A Hockey Legend
.

There is, today, a new breed of hockey mothers who play the game themselves and who, like Olympic champion Hayley Wickenheiser, bring their little boys out onto the ice to share moments of triumph.

And yet there will always be something to celebrate in those parents who, like Phyllis Gretzky, merely offer unconditional support, usually quietly. She offered it to her five children; she gave it to Walter after he suffered an aneurysm in 1991. His remarkable recovery, he says, was only possible with the support and patience and, yes, prodding of Phyllis.

Calgary poet Richard Harrison has a poem he calls “Hockey Moms” in which he speaks of those mothers who sit in the stands “with nothing but your breath to hold.”

That situation has now been reversed. It is the ones Phyllis Gretzky watched who now hold their breath. And trust that, as has so often happened in the past, the game turns in their favour.

Phyllis Gretzky died in December 2005
.

NAGANO, JAPAN

T
hey will still point to the $25 million that Canadian centre Joe Sakic will be paid this season alone by the Colorado Avalanche, and they can, if they have the adding machines capable of doing so, total the annual payroll of the Canadian men's team until it reaches approximately $125.7 million.

But the most important dollar of all at these, the twenty-eighth Winter Games, may turn out to be a soggy, sweat-stained bill that is taped to the inside of Angela Ruggiero's helmet. It has been there for more than three years; it will stay there until the United States of America, not Canada, wins the Olympic gold medal in women's hockey.