Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  “He wants more. He wants to be Alex. And Alex is different.”

  “Sometimes” [he said to her,] “when I walk down the street I bet people will say there goes Roy Hobbs, the best there ever was at the game.”

  She gazed at him with touched and troubled eyes. “Is that all?”

  There are no secrets to the great Canadian dream that a young Alexandre Daigle shared with millions of others who were then very much like him: every one of them a natural, a different stick in their hands, though, sharp blades on hard ice, the rest of the known world trailing, the blade of the stick snapping, the puck soaring, the goaltender missing, the Stanley Cup rising.

  “Dreams really do come true,” NHL Hall-of-Famer Lanny McDonald later wrote of the first day he reported to the Toronto Maple Leafs. “… I’d finally made it. There I was at the Gardens, about to begin playing for the Toronto Maple Leafs, the team I had cheered for like crazy as a kid. I sat there, realizing that everything I had dreamed about had come true.”

  Jean-Yves Daigle shared this common Canadian dream, only his took him to the Montreal Canadiens instead of to the Toronto Maple Leafs. Like most young dreamers, Jean-Yves Daigle would eventually give up on something that just wasn’t going to happen and settle down to a different life. He married Francine and began working for a Laval printing company, just outside Montreal. And the dream he simply passed down, as is done in households all over the country every single winter.

  “Everyone thinks, ‘My son will play in the NHL,’ ” says Jean-Yves Daigle today. “Every father believes that. Even when he says, ‘No, no, no, it’s not true.’ They all think it. Believe me, I know.”

  He tried to interest the first son, Sebastian, and encouraged the girl who followed, Veronique, to play hockey as well. He spent hours building a backyard rink, shovelling and pounding down the snow, levelling the surface and flooding long into the night with pails of hot water and a garden hose that would stiffen the moment he laid it down. But it didn’t work. Sebastian and Veronique learned to skate, but were not very interested. By the time the baby, Alexandre, was walking around and wanting to go out to play, Jean-Yves’s rink was a memory. What, he had decided, was the point?

  The youngest boy, however, was different. He hounded his parents and older siblings to cart him off to neighbourhood rinks and wait for him, and soon he was demanding to be signed up for hockey. Jean-Yves laughed at the youngster’s first attempts to get the stick to move the puck, yet there was something different about this youngster. He could move faster than anyone else. And he also had what Jean-Yves Daigle calls “la loie de conviction—if you want something, if you work hard enough, it’s there for you.”

  The father saw this enormous desire in the son, and decided to do whatever he could to help. “Every parent puts skates on their child,” Jean-Yves Daigle says, “and then it starts. It’s a big job, but nobody has any experience. It’s like a horse race. Ten horses start out, but only one wins. Sometimes it’s a photo finish, the difference between first and second, and the difference can be just a detail.

  “That’s why I worked for ten years on the details. Skates just right, always new laces, the right way to lace up a skate, black tape on the stick, the right sleep. It’s just the details. All the boys are the same, good parents, good boys, good skaters. What’s the difference, then? I work on the details.”

  This was not Walter Gretzky teaching passing techniques on the backyard rink. This was not the stereotypical hockey parent pounding on the glass and calling the coach at all hours of the night. This was merely Jean-Yves and Francine Daigle doing what they could do to support their child’s great dream. “I never said to him to shoot for the top,” says Jean-Yves Daigle. “It’s attitude. And attitude is the job of the parent.”

  If Alexandre’s team lost, Jean-Yves would say to him: “You have to think about losing. Then you go to sleep. When you wake, it’s gone. When you win, when you score five or six goals, I want you to think about that very hard before you go to sleep. But tomorrow it is gone. You have to forget a bad game; you have to forget the best game.”

  This may seem a small point, but it was to have the most profound effect on the boy as he grew. Instead of being serious and driven, even angry, he was happy-go-lucky, easy-going, confident in himself and content. The parents never pushed, never yelled. The one time the father did criticize the son’s play—for a dumb penalty he took in junior hockey—the boy burst into tears. “When parents yell, I don’t understand that,” says Jean-Yves Daigle. “It is important to be positive all the time. He’s a hockey player, but first of all he’s a child.”

  The child had a gift, an extraordinary gift of speed. From the moment he was set down on the ice, he was the fastest in his age group, and soon faster than even the older players. It seemed a phenomenon, but in fact it was an oddity. Alexandre simply raced up the ice and scored, and because of his extraordinary feet, his hands—and to some extent his brain—never had to deal with the traffic and congestion of the game as other youngsters had to. The blessing of such speed was also a curse—but, of course, no one knew this at the time.

  By peewee age, Alexandre Daigle was already being noticed, the thirteen-year-old who had scored 150 goals for his Laval team. By sixteen, he was Quebec junior hockey’s rookie of the year. By seventeen, he was threatening Mario Lemieux’s junior record of 282 points when, dramatically and unexpectedly, he was suspended by the league for a vicious cross-check on another player. The suspension cost him a chance at the scoring record but—as can only happen in hockey—it increased the interest of NHL teams in him. He was not only fast, they thought, but also believed, incorrectly, that he had North American hockey’s beloved “mean streak.”

  It was all happening so fast, the youngster simply stepped back and let it unfold. In his heart, he had hoped to go to Michigan State on a scholarship. But the world, it seemed, wanted him to be a hockey player, not a student, and he was more than content to go along without protest. After all, he was having great fun and he was enjoying the attention. He loved the spotlight, and nowhere did it shine more brightly in Quebec than on a hockey rink. Already they were talking about the money he might make playing professional hockey. His father, however, kept telling him that there were more important things in life.

  “It’s just money,” says Jean-Yves Daigle. “It’s not the most important thing in life. The most important thing, être heureux—to be content.”

  Money, however, would soon become the story, just as it had forty years earlier for another junior phenomenon named Jean Béliveau, who had starred for the same Victoriaville team that Alexandre Daigle joined. In the days before the NHL entry draft, the gifted Béliveau had been the object of a great struggle between Quebec City and the city of Montreal. It went on for years, the Montreal Canadiens finally winning in 1953, when they lured Béliveau to the NHL with a contract unheard of in those days: $110,000 over five years. “All I did,” said Montreal general manager Frank Selke, “was open the Forum vault and say, ‘Help yourself, Jean.’ ”

  Four decades later, in Quebec City, Alexandre Daigle was drafted first overall. The right to draft him became a bizarre battle between two terrible teams—the Ottawa Senators and the San Jose Sharks—to see which one could come last in order to claim what was called, in the press of the day, the Daigle Cup. And the contract he was offered—$12.25 million over five years—changed both the young man and the old game before it had run its course.

  That hot and hazy June day when he was drafted, Daigle joined the silver-haired Béliveau in a horse-drawn calèche that carried them through the streets of Old Quebec. Women laid roses in their path. A young couple brought their newborn to be touched. And Béliveau, sitting in the seat opposite, was struck by both similarities and contrasts that took him back to when he was just starting out.

  When Jean Béliveau was nineteen, a year older than Daigle was that sultry day in Quebec, he was equally famous, but hardly as rich. He was paid $6,000 a year to play for
the Quebec Citadels, and picked up another $60 a week in the summer, driving around with a dairy cooler in the trunk of his car, looking for kids to treat to complimentary ice-cream bars.

  The only pressure Jean Béliveau had back in 1953 was to play. Alexandre Daigle didn’t even have to play to prove himself. His face that morning was not only on the front of Le Soleil and Le Journal de Québec, he was the cover of the Hockey News, a main feature in Sports Illustrated and the subject of a television documentary, The Franchise Kid. His selection, so predictable, was carried live, coast to coast. When he signed his first endorsement deal it was covered as if it were a treaty between two governments—and yet the deal, with a sports card company, struck the first sounding note in the reefs hidden ahead: Alexandre Daigle appeared on glossy trading cards in a variety of uniforms, including dressed up as a nurse.

  Béliveau had always said exactly the right thing. In the ’50s, the ’60s, the ’70s, when he had retired as gracefully as he had played. But these are the ’90s, where saying the right thing is no longer desired. If Jean Béliveau had been a media darling in a time when the media tended to romance character and heroics, he was nothing compared to Daigle at a time when the media sought a different kind of character and controversy.

  What is the difference between you and Eric Lindros? Daigle was asked in the city that still felt snubbed by Lindros, who had refused to sign with the Quebec City team that had drafted him two years earlier. “I drink my beer!” Daigle had laughed, and the world, for the moment, laughed with him. Lindros, of course, had been in court, ultimately acquitted of allegedly spitting beer over a young Ontario woman. Daigle’s quick wit—even in a language he was still learning—was the hit of the day. And how does it feel to be drafted first overall? he was asked. “Nobody remembers who was picked second,” he laughed. And again, everyone laughed with him.

  Chris Pronger, the gawky eighteen-year-old Ontario kid who was drafted second, was asked what he thought, and Pronger stammered and blushed and eventually suggested everyone check back in five years or so. Five years later, Pronger—after his own battle with various demons—is the respected captain of the St. Louis Blues. Just turned twenty-three, he has been named to the Canadian Olympic team that will compete in Japan in February.

  “I remember,” Pronger said one day recently when his Blues were in Ottawa. “But there’s more than just No. 2.” Pronger ticks off the other graduates of that 1993 draft who have excelled, so far, beyond Daigle: the third pick, Chris Gratton, who recently signed a deal that will pay him $14.4 million to play this season for the Philadelphia Flyers; the fourth pick, Anaheim’s Paul Kariya, who may well be the best player in the game today. Others might add Rob Niedermayer, who was taken fifth, Kenny Jonsson, twelfth, Adam Deadmarsh, fourteenth, Saku Koivu, twenty-first, Janne Niinimaa, thirty-sixth, Eric Daze, ninetieth. Earlier this fall, it was rumoured that Ottawa and the Chicago Blackhawks were talking about a deal: Daigle, even up, for Daze. No. 1 for No. 90.

  “I guess someone is going to have to eat his words, isn’t he?” smiled Pronger.

  Five years after that glorious day in Quebec City, Alexandre Daigle’s NHL career has been spotty, at best. His rookie year included a respectable 20 goals and 31 assists, but his play paled against that of another Ottawa rookie, Alexei Yashin, and the comparison was salted by the fact that Daigle was so overpaid and Yashin underpaid—a complaint that Yashin and his agent would soon take public. His second season was blurred by the owners’ lockout, and his quite adequate 16 goals and 21 assists lost in open questioning about his desire and defensive liabilities.

  What was happening was that the neglected arts of his childhood play—working in traffic, in particular—were catching up to him at the NHL level. The Ottawa coaches of the time, Rick Bowness and his assistants, E.J. McGuire and Alain Vigneault, began to wonder how much of the ice surface Daigle could see. As he ran out of ice space for the first time in his life, he seemed to lose both pucks and confidence.

  It was said he showed fear on the ice, a charge he denies and says his reactions were simply a matter of not being prepared. No one had taken care of the “details.” “I’m not afraid,” he says. “But at first, young players don’t know what to expect. After five years, if you go into Philly, you know what kind of game to expect.”

  Early in his third year, Daigle tried to answer his accusers by “driving hard to the net,” and he ended up breaking his wrist the first time he tried the move. It caused a disastrous season—five goals in 50 games—and the naysayers and non-believers only grew. In his fourth season, he began well, but there were always unfortunate distractions. A joke about carrying a “bomb” onto a flight leaving Pittsburgh backfired badly, embarrassing both Daigle and the Senators. He ended with 26 goals and 25 assists, many of the goals spectacular, but he tailed off terribly as the Senators fought to make the playoffs, and his playoff output was embarrassing: zero goals, zero assists.

  This fifth season began with enormous promise. At the urging of general manager Pierre Gauthier, he switched his sweater number from 91 to 9—Roy Hobbs’s number—and got off to a quick and impressive start. In California in October, however, his elbow suddenly ballooned with infection, and the healing was slow and painful. He hurt his arm on a goalmouth scramble. His line was broken up because of ineffective play and, even though everyone else on the team stopped scoring as well, his play was always more noticed than that of the others. He, after all, was Alexandre Daigle, former No. 1 pick.

  Sitting across from Daigle as that calèche rumbled through the streets of Old Quebec, Jean Béliveau could not see into the future, but he did know that this future would always be under special examination. “The hopes of several million Québécois ride with him,” Béliveau said of Daigle in his 1994 autobiography.

  Players who come out of such a background, said the former Canadiens captain, “have a particular cross to bear. The expectations of an entire province often go with them, and the pressure exerts itself in unusual ways.”

  Another Quebec teenage sensation, Marcel Dionne, had felt that pressure a generation before Daigle took it on. Now retired and an NHL Hall-of-Famer, Dionne once spoke of how deeply he grew to resent the game and his great gifts before he and some of his family moved out of province, just to avoid it. “Hockey, hockey, hockey, hockey!” said Dionne. “I was going nuts!”

  Guy Lafleur felt it so profoundly in his early NHL career with the Canadiens that there were times when he would walk up to the small office that the retired Béliveau kept in the Montreal Forum, sit on Béliveau’s blue, red and white chesterfield and weep.

  “When you are preceded by the publicity,” Béliveau said of Lafleur in a 1980 interview, “people expect so much. Sports fans are so demanding … I told him, ‘You have a heavy load on your shoulders. I remember some nights I would score three goals and on the way out people would say I could have scored four or five. Whatever you do, people expect more. And it makes you press when you’re on the ice. You want to do well to get rid of this anxiety.’ ”

  Béliveau preached patience to Lafleur, but the people would not be patient. All he could do was sit with the troubled young Canadiens player and wait for the tears to dry. “I’ve always been there when he needed somebody,” Béliveau said. “And he knows I’ll always be there.”

  Alexandre Daigle has proved far more reluctant to share his moods. Toward the end of his first year, he did, however, open up to Bertrand Raymond, the respected columnist with Le Journal de Montréal, conceding, “I’m often depressed. Some mornings, I’m all alone with my Rice Krispies … I try to convince myself that I can’t let the situation affect me—but, frankly, I never thought that it would be so difficult.”

  “Some nights I’ll play well,” Daigle told Raymond, “but the next game I’ll be rotten.” It is a pattern that has, to a large extent, persisted.

  He says the criticism doesn’t bother him. He says he never reads the papers. He shies away from much of his fan mail, fearing attacks
, and has not once investigated the massive website on the Internet that is faithfully maintained by an avid fan in England. But still, he knows what is said.

  Yannick Mailloux remembers being at work at a clinic when, at two o’clock in the morning, the telephone rang. It was Alexandre, weeping.

  “I don’t feel good,” he told his friend.

  “What happened?” demanded Mailloux.

  “Nothing. I just don’t feel good.”

  “He was melancholy,” remembers Mailloux of the call. “I just talked to him for a long while and he was fine. I was there for him.”

  Like a good friend, Mailloux deeply resents the criticism, particularly when he feels it goes too far. “It hurts me, too,” he says. “I feel they don’t know him. I feel they don’t have the right to judge him—but then I think, I guess they do. He’s making about $3 million. They’re paying $80 to watch the game. He’s not scoring.”

  Mailloux has heard most of the stories that can circulate in a city as small as Ottawa. He knows there have been times when Alexandre Daigle has been guilty of the boorish behaviour of the young and pampered, but he has seen his friend mature in the past few years. “He’s a completely different guy than he was a year and a half ago,” says Mailloux. While there is no doubt Daigle indulged himself in young women who were attracted to a rich, handsome young hockey star “for a while,” and that he loved to be the centre of gatherings, there has been such a change that Mailloux now calls his friend “a loner.”

  The bar scene has largely lost its appeal, and often now if Daigle goes out with Mailloux and Mailloux’s live-in girlfriend, Julia, the three will sit and talk quietly with other friends, drinking nothing stronger than water. Just being there, however, is usually enough to strike a new story of Alexandre Daigle on the town.