Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  Unlike other high-priced hockey talents, Gratton refuses to defend his salary. To him, it’s a source of great amusement. “Nobody should be paid as much as I get. In real work terms I’m worth nothing. I’m not helping anyone, not making anything. What am I doing for the world? I’m stopping rubber—what’s that doing for evolution?

  “The difference between me and a hockey player is this: when summer ends a hockey player gets itchy—I feel like killing myself. If I never played hockey again it wouldn’t matter. A real hockey player would be broken. Me, I’d be liberated.”

  Actually, the differences between Gilles Gratton and a typical hockey player are far more complex than that. Most of today’s players, even the most flamboyant and money-grubbing of them, could have played in other eras, providing the talent was there. Gratton could not have. Were this any other period but the mid-1970s, and had he been nursed along by anyone but gentle, sympathetic coach Billy Harris, Gratton very likely would be back in Montreal collecting welfare and slumming. (“I’ll never, ever hold down a routine job,” he claims.) He could never have played for those he calls “cement heads,” the straight-and-narrow of hockey, the vast majority. It would have meant a major conflict of interest for him, one he could not accept. When Gratton was selected last summer for Team Canada ’74 (as backup goalie to Gerry Cheevers and Don McLeod) he was taken aside by team manager Bill Hunter and asked to shave his freakish beard. “What’s more important,” Hunter asked, “your country or your beard?” Gratton told him—and cut it only when Billy Harris asked him to do it as a personal favour. Otherwise, his career with Team Canada ’74 would have ended right there.

  Ever since the two first met three years ago when Harris was putting together the now-defunct Ottawa Nationals of the WHA (they shifted to Toronto and became the Toros) and Gratton was a hotshot goaltender from the Oshawa Generals Junior A team, the two have had an understanding. Harris maintains that Gratton is treated differently for the simple reason that he is different, and that treating him like any other player would be a grave mistake.

  “Gratton is an exceptional person,” Harris says. “Not just an exceptional hockey player. He’s a brilliant musician; he’s as well read as anyone I know. After you’ve been around him a while you begin to realize that had he shown the same interest in school that he shows in, say, music, you’d be talking with a brilliant surgeon or a top criminal lawyer. His mind’s that good.”

  While so many other players of today are busy investing their money, endorsing products, buying cattle farms, raising horses and thinking hockey, always hockey, Gratton draws astrological charts of people who interest him and writes pop music melodies that come to him. While others go to sleep at night dreaming of goals scored, fights won, and, for some of them, free women—hockey groupies—waiting outside their hotel rooms on road trips, Gratton sleeps dreaming of Spanish moors and blurred villas, of times past, uniforms and war. Sometimes he wakes screaming in pain and clammy with sweat, holding his stomach and scared for no reason.

  He has dreamt again he was being stabbed.

  Two mediums, at different times, have told him he was a Spanish soldier in another life, a soldier who died in combat. And sometimes during the day he gets violent pains in his stomach, always the same place, always exactly where he dreamt he was run through.

  All of this, and much more, has made him hockey’s most curious enigma. On an on night, he’s said to be as good a goaltender as there ever has been; on an off night, as bad. Billy Harris says, “Gilles is probably the most talented goalkeeper in hockey … more potential than any of the young ones and the chance for the same success as Ken Dryden—if he wasn’t so incredibly different.” Les Binkley, the Toros’ veteran backup goaltender who has played for nine teams in seven leagues in the past twenty years, agrees: “Gratton’s great right now. There’s just no telling what his potential is. He’s great—and, boy, is he different.”

  So vastly different is he that Gratton, unlike most of the game’s stars or future stars, could almost be considered dangerous to interview. With him there’s no mumbling, no shy smiles of false modesty, overt praise for the coach and memorized catchphrases that make most players appear parodies of themselves. Gratton is Gratton: refreshing and startling. He told This Country in the Morning he usually wakes up horny; on a night he was selected the game star, in San Diego, he was interviewed live over the arena’s public address system and told the crowd: “You have a great arena here—too bad you don’t have a hockey team.” He tells newspaper reporters that the game bores him, that “intelligence and hockey don’t go together,” that he can’t concentrate, that hockey’s no fun, players are paid far more than they’re worth, and he’s getting out.

  So convincing is his threat to walk away from hockey that he actually used to terrify Harris. “Gilles was always late for practice while I coached, or, even worse, he wouldn’t want to practise, and I had to tolerate it because I simply had no choice. He was the goaltender we depended on; he, more than any other person, got us into the playoffs the last two years. I always knew that if I criticized him too much there was a good chance he’d just pack his things together and never play hockey again.”

  Right now that’s a little unlikely. Gratton genuinely wants the money so he can burn for the rest of his life. But also, even if he’s not having much fun playing the game, he’s having a fine time turning himself into the game’s strangest sex symbol. It’s not just that he likes to sign autographs “I’m easy—Gilles Gratton,” but other, more kinky things. Once, at a practice last year, the gates swung open and out stepped Gratton in goalie mask and skates, nothing else, and he streaked up and down the ice for a while. In Helsinki with Team Canada ’74, he was photographed by one of the wire services, in the nude and asking a female attendant about instructions for the sauna. One of his great ambitions is to pose nude in Playgirl.

  There’s a word in hockey—flake—that is about the worst condemnation a player can receive. Basically, it means wishy-washy, maybe a little garish, a trifle bizarre or eccentric, and usually with an attitude that tells the player’s teammates that he really couldn’t care less. Gratton loves the word (“Me? I’m a superflake”), but Harris maintains this is nothing but a Gratton put-on. “If he was really a flake he wouldn’t have lasted,” Harris’s argument goes. “He’s popular, and flakes aren’t, but the telling thing is that when the team loses he blames himself entirely. Nobody puts as much pressure on himself to play well. And nobody wants to win as badly as Gilles.”

  Still, the image—as he sees it, or as others interpret it—sells well. The letters come in bundles, usually from girl fans who want to know if he’s married and want him to know they’re not, but will be ready in a very few years. “I’ll wait, I’ll wait,” he keeps saying, kissing the letters before he crushes them and tosses them unanswered into the wastebasket. Some of the letters, though, he keeps. They puzzle him, especially the letters that come from the “Contessa Caserina Chloe de Climatis,” who writes turgid, long letters with mythological and mystical allusions.

  “I am the paramount groupie,” she admits in one letter, “being a third-year university student of classics and English literature. I encountered you on the TV profile, and your discussion of women was really sublime. ‘Woman for me is negative,’ you said. Just remember, Gilles, a negative and a positive (which I presume you are) make electricity (and the way you’ve been playing lately indicates that you could do with a couple of billion volts pulsating through you). If you are a firm believer in astrology and a devotee of the occult, you surely must understand when I say that your visage is my destiny.”

  It is his belief in the stars that has made Gratton such a curiosity to practically everyone. In the sports world it’s just not “manly” to believe in horoscopes. Gratton, consequently, has spent many hours trying to convince hockey writers that it’s not simply a matter of reading his astrograph in the daily papers to determine whether he’ll win or lose on a given night; rather, for him
it’s a dedicated and scholarly attitude toward astrology that has led him to shape his life in tune with his planetary influences. Most writers and other players, however, listen a minute, laugh knowingly inside and then walk away smirking. But some do listen. Harris did, and he too had his doubts, so he arranged on a couple of occasions to have fairly knowledgeable astrologers feel out Gratton over a couple of hours’ talk, just to make sure he wasn’t putting the world on. He wasn’t. Less than five minutes after we met, for example, he had told me what my sign was and what traits it had assigned me.

  Since Gratton spends all his spare time either studying astrology or playing music, he seldom gets out socially. He reads constantly, even on the road: on a recent trip to Cleveland, for a game he sat out, he could be seen slouched in the stands reading The Lord of the Rings (in French). When talking in his room—which he rents at the home of teammate Wayne Dillon’s parents—he thumbs through massive textbooks on astrology, breaking away from any one point to illustrate one just past in astrological terms, then returning to the abandoned point without ever forgetting where he left off.

  “See here,” he says, moments after we had discussed his distaste for hockey. “I’m a Leo—right? And my sun is square to my moon. It says right here, ‘Perhaps the subject is tied to a career in which he is not really interested.’ Also, I’ve got Mars in my Fifth House, and it tells me not to gamble [this referring to our earlier contract talk] so that’s why I stay out of the stock markets and keep my money in sure things. I got apartments in Montreal, and I got a $300,000 annuity that’ll pay me $30,000 a year for life after I’m twenty-six. So I got no worries. I’ll just float.”

  With all this emphasis on other-world ideas it’s natural to wonder how he rationalizes spiritual beliefs with material fact. What other mystic, after all, has a $645,000 contract? Gratton’s explanation is a firm belief in reincarnation; he has convinced himself he’s just paying his dues in the material world. “Whatever you do in life has a reason,” he says. “It’s all working toward some kind of evolution. Stopping pucks in the material world might look a little ridiculous later on if I get to see what went on in all my previous lives, but that’s the way it was in the material world. One of my great dreams in this life is that I hope I don’t come back on earth. I hope I go on, higher—and never again as a goalkeeper. That’s the way it is, man. A lot of people’s ambition is to be free from the next life.”

  It’s not surprising that the complexities of this life sometimes confuse Gratton totally; it happens, or should happen, to us all. He can’t understand why people admire him for stopping pucks, something he believes is ridiculous, whereas these same people, given the chance, would despise him if he lived out his life as he properly sees it, as a do-nothing.

  “It’s an unbalanced world,” he says. “And I’m stuck in it. Sometimes I think I’ve become unbalanced, too. I’ll be playing a game and all of a sudden I’ll just freak out. My head starts spinning faster and faster. I’m in the nets and I can’t understand why I’m here at this time. What am I doing? And I look up at all those crazy animals in the crowd watching me. For what? And then I look down and see all this crazy equipment all over my body. And all those other guys—what’re they fighting over a lousy piece of rubber for? So what do I do? I talk to myself. I say, out loud, ‘C’mon Gilly, c’mon Grattoony, for Chrissakes get back in the game.’

  “If only I could concentrate I’d be the best there is anywhere,” he believes. “But I can’t and I won’t be.” He used to put it down to nervousness, fighting back with three beers or a Valium just before sleep. But he stopped the beers himself, and the WHA stopped the Valium when the rules became much stricter on what the team trainer could or could not hand out. So he tried meditation, but it turned out to be a bad thing on game days. (“Made me feel like a lover boy out there.”) Then he decided it was the nervousness that made him a good goaltender, and he cultivates it. He has a theory: Be nervous and irritated all winter, play well, collect the money and doze off all summer. Usually, when his mind wanders during a game, it’s a safe bet that he’s thinking about the off-season.

  A summer for Gratton, it must be understood, is unlike summers for other players. He doesn’t farm, he has no business interests (“that’s my lawyer’s worry”), and he doesn’t even teach at hockey schools.

  What he does is go back to the Highlands, his old neighbourhood in the Montreal suburb of LaSalle. He moves back in with his parents, and two houses away lives his best friend from childhood, Claude Bertrand. Two other Gratton brothers are still at home (one brother, Norm, plays for the NHL’s Minnesota North Stars and there is also a sister), many other friends from past years have also stayed. It is a neighbourhood composed of a gang in their mid- and late twenties, quiet people who liked growing up there so much they’ve decided to put off leaving as long as possible. The ultimate neighbourhood preservation.

  Come summer, Gratton lets his hair and beard grow, continues to pay himself the $150-a-week wage he receives over the winter (and saves even from that). He doesn’t need much. “I spend now what I spent when I was a junior—$60 a week. I got no expenses. I don’t want anything, not even a TV. Since I got the big money all I bought for myself was a $450 guitar. But I probably gave away $25,000.”

  He’s tried to give his friend Claude Bertrand some, but it always gets turned down, even though Claude is unemployed. “I wouldn’t take anything,” Bertrand insists. “Nothing. Never.” But they remain friends because they share a dream: one day, they’ll tell you, Gilles and Claude and Claude’s brother Michel will be professional musicians. All summer long, for five hours and more a day, they practice. Sometime, if the dream goes according to plan, Claude will have a little money, too. Then they can float together. Claude, understand, knows full well that Gilles will never last in hockey. They’ve been friends too long. “Gilles will never be a player for a team,” he says. “He plays for himself. He goes his own way.”

  Gratton, of course, agrees, and says his time as a member of a team is running out, even though he professes great love for the Toros as a “family,” not a team.

  “It means far more to me to win a game of tennis in the summer than to win a hockey game in the winter,” he says. “In tennis it’s me alone; there’s no one else to blame. Hockey, you see, has had too many things come along and take the winning out of the game. It’s contracts now that decide whether you win or lose. In hockey you win even if you lose as long as you have a good contract. That’s part of the reason why I’ll never be the best. What’s it matter? I’ll play as well as I can—but it makes no difference whether I’m the best or not. My paycheque will be the same next week. And the week after that …

  “But once my contract’s up I’m gone. And once I’m gone—I mean really gone—I hope when they lay me in my grave there’s someone there who can say Gratton never worked a day in his life. If someone can say that about me, then I’ll have achieved what I set out to achieve. I’ve already worked out my marker:

  Here Lies King Floater

  Never Worked a Day in His Life

  But He Was Happy

  Gilles Gratton did end up working—as a photographer. He left the WHA to play in the NHL for the St. Louis Blues (he walked out on the team after only six games) and the New York Rangers (forty-one games) before ending his professional career with the New Haven Nighthawks of the American Hockey League. He later lived in Europe, working as a freelance photographer. He is remembered for many things—streaking with nothing on but his mask and skates, the lion-head mask behind which he sometimes growled at opposing players, his refusal to play when the moon and stars weren’t properly aligned—but also for the astonishing talent that he walked away from at twenty-five, with perhaps his best years ahead of him. One part of the story I left out to protect him was that even as he played professionally for the Toros he was coming out some nights to play as an anonymous forward in a casual beer league I played in.

  NO MIDDLE GROUND: THE STRANGE CAREER OF
THE GIFTED ALEXEI KOVALEV

  (The Globe and Mail, March 22, 2008)

  He has no idea what others see in him.

  Mark Messier, who played with the teenage Kovalev in New York, says he is a true “thoroughbred.” Wayne Gretzky, who watched the now thirty-five-year-old Russian when Kovalev’s Montreal Canadiens met Gretzky’s Phoenix Coyotes, says the veteran forward’s play this season is at a level that deserves consideration for the Hart Memorial Trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player.

  “I don’t know,” Alexei Kovalev says.

  He has no idea what it looks like, but he does have a strong sense of what it feels like when everything comes together exactly right, as it has so often this surprising season in Montreal. When he tries to explain the sensation of skating so effortlessly, it does not even require thought. He talks of that one moment of weightlessness he looks for when he pulls back on the controls of a Cessna 172 and climbs until the plane is perfectly vertical, the engine on the verge of cutting out and, just for the most fleeting of moments, the G-force lifts his body clear of the seat and he finds himself floating in space. But when he thinks of what it is like to control hockey’s most potent power play, he no longer thinks of airplanes, but of helicopters.

  “Manoeuvrability,” he says. “I love the way you can make them go anywhere.”