It was great being back with so many guys I had played with before. But the thing that really made it feel like I had come full circle was having Keith Acton and Craig MacTavish as assistant coaches. At one point I had a small injury that kept me out for about ten days, so I was out skating with the coaches to stay in shape. I used to play with these guys, and now they were telling me how many laps to do—fourteen one way and fourteen the other. I laughed. I don’t think I ever did twenty-eight laps in Edmonton.
John Muckler was there too, still making me do sprints by myself up and down the ice. Players were getting bigger and stronger and faster, and throughout my whole career I was always one of the smaller guys. Now I was one of the older guys too. So I was still working hard. I have always had tremendous respect for every coach I’ve had.
Hockey players have a lot of respect for each other and it’s such a physical game. My last year was kind of funny. Players on the other team would be coming down the boards and I’d hear, “Heads up!” or “Wayne, get out of the way!” They were warning me. I remember thinking, “Okay, this is not good.”
In March 1999 I decided it was time to retire. The only other person who knew was Janet. I didn’t want to do a city-to-city tour with a thousand questions. I just wanted to bow out.
We were scheduled to play a home game on Sunday, April 18, in New York. I decided to announce my retirement the day before. New York had been so good to me and I didn’t want the news leaked out, but it kind of did anyway. Thursday, April 15, 1999, was the day of my last game in Canada, in Ottawa, against the Senators at the Corel Centre. And I think it was a dead giveaway when my dad and wife and family were at the game.
Jim Dolan, the owner of the Rangers, was a great guy, really nice. Saturday morning the day before my final game he said, “Will you meet me for coffee?”
There was a little deli called Gardenia’s near my place in Manhattan. We met there at nine a.m. In those days before the cap, the Rangers could get anybody they wanted. Jim said, “Wayne, you’re still the top scorer on the team. We’re going to build a stronger team here and I want you playing for the Cup in a couple years.”
He handed me a check for a million dollars and said, “I’ll give you this million dollars and you can keep it either way. Just think about it for seven days. And if in seven days you still want to retire, you can keep the million.”
I handed him back the check and said, “In good conscience, I can’t take it. I know in my heart I’m done.”
He asked me why, and I told him, “The older you get as a professional athlete the more time and commitment you have to put in no matter how good you are. I just don’t have the energy physically or mentally to train for three to four hours a day, six days a week to get ready for the next training camp.”
Off-season training was essential. For one thing, it helped prevent you from getting seriously hurt. People say, “Oh, Gretzky never got hit,” which is kind of ridiculous. Guys sticking and whacking and basically tackling you to slow you down is part of the game. You had to train very hard, for hours and hours each day—cardio, Tae Bo, light weights, three-on-three basketball, tennis to stay quick and agile. Training in the off-season is the reason Jagr is still playing and how Gordie Howe made it to fifty-two and Messier and Chelios were able to go for so long.
I told Jim, “Hockey isn’t the reason I am retiring. I could go to practice every day, play every game, travel, compete. That part of it is still great. It’s not about playing hockey, that part of it I can handle. In fact, I feel like I could play another ten years, but I know I don’t have ten years of training left.”
My parents were staying with us at our apartment in New York. My dad had driven me to the first NHL game I ever went to at Maple Leaf Gardens when I was seven years old.
I asked my dad to drive with me to my last game to complete the circle. It’s quiet in New York on Sundays, easy to get around. It was only fifteen minutes to Madison Square Garden. So I was looking forward to our special father-son time.
When I got home after the game Janet said, “How was the drive?”
I said, “You know, it was really hard.”
She said, “What do you mean?”
I said, “He spent the entire ride trying to talk me into playing one more year!”
That final game at Madison Square Garden, I played with fifty sticks. One for each of my teammates, and the rest for different people and charities and organizations like the Hockey Hall of Fame that had requested them. Leechy made the whole night really special with a speech he made in the locker room after the game. I can’t remember it word for word, but he talked about how much fun we had playing together. He let me know that being my teammate was special and he thanked me for everything I did for the game overall. He made us laugh when he said that I was just a part of their team, the guy sitting next to you, until every once in a while he’d look over and think, “Holy cow, that’s Wayne Gretzky!” He wasn’t one for long talks, but what he said will always mean a lot to me.
I enjoyed Leechy’s company so much. That was what I was going to miss most. Every single day for three years I’d sit in the locker room beside him, drinking a cup of coffee, talking about what had happened the night before, or about our families, or about another team or player. We used to giggle and laugh all the time, but hey, life goes on.
I think, for the Rocket, when he got on the ice, trouble seemed to disappear. It was his happy place. It’s how I felt, and I think it was the same thing for Gordie and lots of the guys. When you are on the ice, nothing else seems to matter except going out and doing what you love to do. If I had three points, I wanted four. I always played full-throttle no matter what the score was.
If you’re playing well, it doesn’t matter how old you are. In professional sports, you play from buzzer to buzzer and you don’t stop. You never let up. That never changed. I know that family and kids and all that—that’s the most important thing in life. But doing what you love to do is something that energizes a guy, something that gives a man’s life purpose. The Rocket, Gordie, a few others, and I have had the privilege of retiring on our own terms. And I think for guys like us, it’s always better to leave the game before the fire goes out.
Thirteen
THE FORGOTTEN MIRACLE
Hockey teams love being underdogs. I can’t speak with much authority about other sports, but in hockey, feeling like the odds are against you creates a kind of confidence. When no one expects you to win, you’re loose. And a loose hockey team is dangerous.
In 1981, the Oilers faced the heavily favored Montreal Canadiens in the first round of the playoffs. They were the Wales Conference and Adams Division champions and had finished twenty-nine points ahead of us in the standings. No one gave us a chance. And for good reason. They were the better team, hands down.
The first round was best of five back then, and the first two games were in Montreal. We won the first game 6–3. We had no business winning Game Two, but Andy Moog stood on his head and stopped forty shots. We won that one 3–1. When we got back to Edmonton, we were a different team. Still loose, but now we knew what we were capable of. We swept the series with a 6–2 win.
I sometimes think the American victory at Squaw Valley was a little like that.
The eighth Winter Games, held in 1960 at a pretty little ski resort in Squaw Valley, close to Los Angeles, marked the beginning of the Olympics’ modern era. Scoring was computerized, and for the first time at the Games, a snow-scraping, ice-flooding machine called a Zamboni was used. It was the first time the Games were televised. CBS was the host broadcaster, with Walter Cronkite at the anchor desk. Walt Disney had designed cartoon-like statues of athletes representing the various sports, and Hollywood stars mixed with the athletes and the public.
The 1960 U.S. Olympic hockey team was made up of the very best college players from across the country—players like Bill and Bob Cleary, John
Mayasich, Paul Johnson, Jack McCartan in net, and two brothers with one of the most famous names in American hockey: Bill and Roger Christian. But the American media, which didn’t pay much attention to hockey in those days, didn’t see them as contenders. No one gave them much of a chance.
The team’s new head coach was Jack Riley from West Point. Riley named Jack Kirrane, a tough, stay-at-home defenseman, as his captain. Kirrane brought a veteran presence. He was a thirty-one-year-old firefighter and had played all the way back in the 1948 Olympics.
The opening ceremonies lasted only an hour, compared with at least four hours today. Vice President Richard Nixon welcomed 740 athletes from thirty countries. Nine of those nations had brought a hockey team. The Americans were predicted to place no higher than fifth, behind Canada, the Soviet Union, Sweden, and Czechoslovakia.
To everyone’s surprise, the Americans went undefeated in their first four games. But they had yet to play Canada. The sportswriters gave them no chance, predicting a blowout that Canada might win by seven goals. The Canadians had been playing NHL teams as a warm-up to the Olympics (and some of them would go on to great careers in the NHL).
In those days, there was no distinct Team Canada. The team that had won the previous year’s Allan Cup—awarded to the top senior league in the country—simply pulled on the maple leaf sweater and headed to the Olympics. The winners in 1959 were the Whitby Dunlops. They declined and were replaced by the Kitchener-Waterloo Dutchmen, coached by Bobby Bauer. Bauer, of course, was a future Hall of Famer. He’d played right wing on the Boston Bruins’ Kraut Line with Woody Dumart and Milt Schmidt. The Dutchmen, with Bauer behind the bench, had also represented Canada at the 1956 Olympics, so they were clearly a pretty special team.
Defenseman Harry Sinden would serve as the Bruins’ coach or general manager over twenty-eight seasons and would win a Stanley Cup when Bobby Orr scored his famous overtime goal in 1970. He was also behind the bench for Team Canada in 1972. Bobby Rousseau would go on to score 245 NHL goals and win four Cups, and backup goalie Cesare Maniago would join the Leafs the next year and then go on to play nine seasons for the Minnesota North Stars. Defenseman Darryl Sly would see three seasons of NHL action, and so would forward Cliff Pennington. So the Canadians were solid.
The Americans, meanwhile, had played college teams across the country—and lost to half of them.
The Americans knew that their only chance against Canada was to get ahead early. So they attacked hard in the first period. Bob Cleary batted in a rebound while Harry Sinden knocked him down in front of the net. In the second period, Paul Johnson intercepted a pass and raced down the ice on a clear breakaway. When he got to the blue line he let go a perfect slap shot that beat Canada’s goalie, future Boston Bruin Don Head, over his shoulder into the top corner.
From that point, the Canadians got desperate. They took thirty-one shots on McCartan in the last two periods, and pulled within one about halfway through the third. Sinden remembers that they had scoring chance after scoring chance but were getting nowhere. Afterward a newspaper reporter wrote that Jack McCartan had been “operating with radar.” The Americans hung on for a 2–1 win and rushed off the bench to grab McCartan, throwing gloves and sticks in the air as though they’d just won the Stanley Cup.
Suddenly, the dream of a home-ice gold medal seemed possible for the Americans. But they still had to get by the Soviets. They’d never beaten them. Before the tournament one reporter had called the U.S. team a “ragtag crew of insurance salesmen and carpenters,” but after the win over the Canadians, American fans suddenly discovered hockey. Ten thousand people were packed into a stadium built for eighty-five hundred. The American trainer even had to kick California governor Pat Brown off the bench.
As the clock ticked down to the end of the second period with the score tied at two, American winger Roger Christian got a penalty for slashing. In those days you had to serve the full two minutes regardless of whether your opponent scored on the power play, and you weren’t allowed to ice the puck. But the Americans killed it off without allowing a single shot on goal.
In the third period, the U.S. started to take the play to the Russians. The Christian brothers, Roger and Bill, put the U.S. up 3–2. The Russians retaliated by pressing hard, peppering McCartan, but he kept everything out, even a shot on a clear breakaway. The Russians had never trailed so late in a game. It was also the first time they’d ever pulled their goalie—Nikolai Puchkov didn’t even know to go to the bench for an extra attacker. He simply skated over to the side of the rink and sat on the boards. And suddenly it was over. The American team was on its way to making history.
They’d beaten Czechoslovakia three times in the past couple of weeks and now they were set to take them on with a gold medal on the line. The game started at eight a.m. There were only a thousand fans in the stands. The ref dropped the puck. The Czechs skated it into the American zone, took a shot, and scored. Not the way you want to open a gold-medal game.
But the Americans came back in a seesaw battle through the period. The score was tied 3–3 after the first. The Czechs notched the only goal in the second to lead 4–3 and went into the break just twenty minutes away from the win.
In the second-period intermission, a strange thing happened. The captain of the Russian team, Nikolai Sologubov, came into the U.S. dressing room. This was just never done. He couldn’t speak English, but he kept putting his hand over his mouth. American captain Jack Kirrane figured out what he was saying. He was telling them to take some oxygen to combat the sixty-two-hundred-foot altitude at Squaw Valley. As a firefighter, it made sense to Kirrane. He said, “Okay, Solly, bring it in.” Sologubov rolled a tank into the room and a few of the players tried it.
The Russian wasn’t acting out of the goodness of his heart. If the Czechs won, the Soviets would be out of the medals. The way it was set up, if Czechoslovakia lost the game against the U.S., they would finish fourth with a 2–3 medal-round record, which meant the Soviets would win bronze with a 2–2–1 record. But if the Czechs won, the Canadians would win gold, the Americans silver, and the Czechs bronze.
Whether it was the oxygen or something else, the U.S. was a different team in the third period. They threw everything they had at the Czechs. Roger Christian moved in and tied the score. They kept shooting from the point and deflecting in the shots. Then Bill Cleary skated through the entire Czech team and deked the goalie. They scored six in the third and won 9–4. Christian played the game of his life, scoring four goals.
Even though this was the first U.S. gold medal in hockey, there weren’t any celebrations. Only captain Jack Kirrane was handed a medal—the rest of the team found them on their bunks in their rooms. Hockey wasn’t an American sport yet. Outside a few hockey communities like Minnesota and Michigan, there wasn’t much interest. The team won the gold on Sunday and most of the guys simply went back to work on Monday.
One interesting sidenote to the tournament is the battle of future equipment moguls. The famous Bauer company was run by Bobby Bauer’s father-in-law. And on the American team, Bill and Roger Christian went on to found the Christian stick company. In fact, Roger’s nephew Dave used a Christian stick in Lake Placid. But more on that later.
Much more importantly, the American victory in Squaw Valley started to make hockey an American game. In 1981, when the Oilers hit the ice for Game Three in Edmonton, we got a ten-minute standing ovation. Before 1979, people in Edmonton were either Leafs fans or Canadiens fans. When we came back from Montreal, everyone in Edmonton was an Oilers fan. I think American fans started to feel something like that in 1960. Hockey was their game too. And that made the game better.
Fourteen
THE GREATEST OF THEM ALL
In the 1960s you were either a Leafs fan, a Canadiens fan, a Red Wings fan, a Bruins fan, a Rangers fan, or a Black Hawks fan. My grandmother was a huge Maple Leafs fan. My next-door neighbor, Sil Rizzetto, was a huge Montrea
l Canadiens fan. He had the first color TV in the neighborhood, and so I used to spend a lot of time over there watching Hockey Night in Canada. Sil’s favorite player was Béliveau. Once you identify your guy or your team, you don’t really change. I was a fan of Gordie Howe, and that never changed.
The greatest Christmas gift I ever got was when I was five. It was a Gordie Howe sweater. I can remember opening it and putting it on like it was yesterday. Every kid loves Christmas, right? But I never really wanted anything for Christmas except that jersey.
It was wool and it really itched. My neck would be all red, but it didn’t matter. I wore it every time I went onto the ice in the backyard. At that time Gordie wrote a hockey column in the newspaper, and my dad would read it out loud—things like how Sid Abel had taught him “Anytime you see that net, drill it.” And there was a song the radio stations played during hockey season called “Gordie Howe Is the Greatest of Them All,” by Bob Davies. When I laced up my skates or walked to school or my dad drove us somewhere and I looked out the window, I’d be hearing that song in my head: “Gordie Howe is the greatest of them all. The greatest of them all. Yes, the greatest of them all. You can have your choice of all the rest. If you’re a Howe fan, you’ve got the very best.” Sometimes even today, I’ll be doing something and it will run through my mind.
• • •
Everybody pictures the classic hockey player as a bull-necked Saskatchewan farm boy, with arms like Popeye, who learned the game playing on frozen ponds. Well, that was Gordie Howe. He grew up during the Depression without many luxuries. But according to Gordie, that’s what got him into hockey. A neighbor was selling odds and ends to make ends meet, and that’s how the first pair of skates found their way into the Howe household. From that point on, Gordie was a hockey player.
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