Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  Where, many of us ask, is the analyst—imagine such articulate world players as Anders Hedberg or Igor Larionov—who can speak to the creative wonders that delight the imagination of all those youngsters who both play and dream the game: Ovechkin, Crosby, Kane … ? HNIC often doesn’t even seem to like such young stars.

  Where is the coaching voice—Ken Hitchcock, for example—who can articulate how it is that today’s coaches seem more university lecturers than fire-and-brimstone preachers? Where is the calm voice of reason—such as my Globe and Mail colleague Eric Duhatschek—who is both knowledgeable and sensible and might take issue with those who, like Milbury, will speak of a head hit “as a thing of beauty?”

  “If you don’t like it,” he once said, “change the channel.” Unfortunately, we cannot. So please change the show.

  In early 2011, in the midst of a public outcry against violence in hockey, Mike Milbury dramatically came out against fighting during a Hotstove panel discussion. Milbury called for a full ban on fisticuffs and, very candidly, stated: “The only reason we have fighting in the game is because we like it.”

  DEATH TO THE FOURTH LINE

  (The Globe and Mail, October 6, 2010)

  This is a perfect time to bell a hockey cat that has had far more lives than can ever be justified. The fourth line.

  They try not to call them that anymore. Perhaps it’s just not considered politically correct these days. Broadcasters tend to refer to the three forwards on the bottom rung of the team as “the energy line.” This may be because the lesser lines, especially the fourth, tend to have the most media-friendly players on them, players sharp enough and experienced enough to know—and certainly with enough time on their hands eventually to realize, if it’s not readily apparent—that their careers are as fragile as a solution to the Phoenix Coyotes.

  Coaches being asked questions about their roster will say they do not have a “third” or a “fourth” line, as if they are somehow indecipherable from each other. If that were so—and it isn’t—then how much better would “third” lines in NHL hockey be if the three players on it were chosen from the best of the six to eight roster spots currently available to make up the final two lines of a team?

  The reality is that the typical fourth-liner in the NHL could be replaced with any one of, say, a thousand other professional hockey players around the world who had neither the contract nor the luck to land such a position. Or, if the sport would only do so, they could be replaced with … nothing.

  If the modern exhibition season proves anything, it is that today’s NHL players are in remarkable shape. They leap straight from summer into winter. And yet, as the pre-season games drag on, the central question (beyond goaltending) in the era of the salary cap almost invariably boils down to which single player, perhaps two, is going to crack the lineup—and usually so far down the lineup that those covering training camp have to check the media guide to find out where he came from and how his name is spelled.

  This often amounts to more attention being paid to a player who will be on the ice for a handful of minutes or so a game than he will receive in a season of regular play. Think about it: Given that the players are in such good shape, how can it possibly be that a line that takes up three to six minutes of ice time a night is in any way a necessity? The three other lines would, and could, happily consume those rare shifts.

  And even if an argument, however moot, can be made that spreading the ice time out among four lines keeps the other three lines stronger, what exactly is wrong with having periodically tired players on the ice? As the new rule on icing has shown, having a faceoff with fresh players on one side and gasping players on the side that iced the puck adds an intriguing element of possibility to games. If hockey is indeed, as they love to say, a game of mistakes, why not give us more mistakes that can become scoring opportunities?

  The NHL roster is set at eighteen skaters and two goaltenders. We know from fluke experience—the Calgary Flames’ problems with the salary cap and injury as the 2008–09 season wound down—that a team can get by with as few as fifteen skaters against eighteen, as the Flames actually won a couple of games with that shrunken bench. The ECHL sets rosters at a limit that eliminates the need for a fourth line. The American Hockey League had slightly smaller rosters but is at NHL numbers in order to have consistency between the mother club and the affiliate.

  There are, as well, other advantages to shaving off that final line. Team payrolls would come down, in several cases by millions of dollars. The cap could be reduced, although experience tells us it would more likely result in even more money being made available to the Ilya Kovalchuks and other unrestricted free agents of the game.

  Still, team costs would come down, not just in salaries, but in the care and feeding and travel of that unnecessary fourth line—perhaps even come down enough to cause a drop, however slight, in ticket prices. And finally, it would help clean up the game. Most fourth lines are merely support groups for the team enforcer. Someone has to skate out with the player on his way to the penalty box, so two healthy bodies are kept on the bench simply to skate out for the necessary faceoff before the fisticuffs begin.

  All this is fanciful thinking. The National Hockey League Players’ Association would never stand for the elimination of so many jobs: ninety if you simply lopped off the fourth line, but in effect far more as each team maintains plugs for their lower lines both in the press box and in the minors. If that many players retired at once, TSN would have to extend its sports panel to twice the length of an NHL bench.

  However, it is a question often raised in morning-skate corridors and late-night bars. Some in the game say that the only possible modern rationale for a fourth line is to make it specialize in penalty killing, but this is a role easily transferable to other, higher lines. Recent champions—the Chicago Blackhawks, Pittsburgh Penguins, Detroit Red Wings—have all illustrated the benefit in having players who can actually play form the fourth line. But this equally argues in favour of dispensing with that fourth line in favour of creating a superior third line out of the multiple players otherwise available for two bottom lines.

  Others in the game wonder if, in fact, the elimination of that fourth line would have any actual effect on the frequency of fighting in the game. “Even if they went to two lines,” chuckles Jim Schoenfeld, former player and coach who is currently assistant general manager of the New York Rangers, “some team would find a way to put a tough guy on one of those two lines. And then everyone else would follow suit.”

  Perhaps so. Perhaps not. Either way, it all argues the same point: A fourth line is unnecessary.

  PENALTIES THAT MEAN SOMETHING— NOW THERE’S A CONCEPT

  (The Globe and Mail, March 31, 2008)

  It never rains but pours. Even when we’re talking about frozen water, it seems.

  It was Friday evening, and a hockey-mad son and I were flicking through NHL Centre Ice in search of a match that, this time of year, can decide an entire season. It should be the best time possible for the national game. Yet never, it seemed, had the lame old joke “I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out” been more on display.

  We dipped into the Thrashers–Hurricanes match and found Atlanta’s Eric Boulton and Carolina’s Wade Brookbank pounding on each other. We flipped to Flyers–Devils and caught Philadelphia’s Randy Jones swinging away with New Jersey’s Mike Mottau—the scrap barely over when the giddy announcers punched up video from a December match that showed Mottau whaling away on the New York Islanders’ Mike Comrie. Over, later, to Vancouver at Minnesota and a third period with the Canucks’ Jeff Cowan, Nathan McIver and Alex Burrows slugging it out with the Wild’s Derek Boogaard, Brent Burns and Pierre-Marc Bouchard.

  This, after a day in which the news was all about former Vancouver player Todd Bertuzzi suing former Vancouver coach Marc Crawford for allegedly ordering Bertuzzi to go out and make the Colorado Avalanche’s Steve Moore “pay the price” for a previous hit on Vancouver’s captai
n. Some “price”—Moore ended up with a broken neck from the notorious mugging and will never play again.

  It was also a day in which YouTube and the sports highlight shows continually replayed the footage of junior goalie Jonathan Roy skating the length of the ice to rip the mask off another teenage goaltender and beat him into submission, to the apparent delight of his father and coach, Hockey Hall-of-Famer Patrick Roy—earning both Roys minor suspensions and causing the government of Quebec to demand that Quebec junior hockey clean up its act.

  What is going on here?

  The most intriguing development is the story out of Quebec, where the premier and the provincial minister of sport are telling junior hockey it must come up with a solution by June. Premier Jean Charest has further asked all other junior leagues in Canada to “undertake a reflection—and the message from Quebecers is that the moment has come to do away with fighting in junior hockey.”

  This has, obviously, reignited a debate that has gone on in this country longer than free trade. Hockey violence—a much broader brush than fisticuffs alone—has been tackled before by provincial governments, most particularly Ontario, with no discernible effect. It has also been debated for decades within the game itself. The great Muzz Patrick, who was Canadian heavyweight boxing champion long before a Hockey Hall-of-Famer, concluded that “fighting doesn’t make any sense” more than half a century ago. In more recent times, such NHL general managers as Serge Savard (“Stop it altogether”), Glen Sather (“Our fans won’t miss it”) and Harry Sinden (“distasteful”) have called for an end to fighting—all to no avail.

  The players must have a safety valve in such a physical game, the defenders say—a preposterous position given that other games are just as physical and, besides, why is it always the same players who are blowing those valves? It’s the only way we can sell the game in the United States, they say—an increasingly puzzling position given that the game, even with fights, has become a difficult sell in so many U.S. markets.

  You’ll never stop fighting in hockey, even the Quebec minister of sport admits. True, but you can still ban it. Fighting is not allowed in any other like sports, the critics of fighting argue, and they point to football, baseball, basketball and soccer as examples. Yet fighting does occur in football, baseball, basketball and soccer—even if not nearly so regularly as in hockey.

  The difference is that these sports penalize it. Hockey, on the other hand, rewards it. There is no team punishment whatsoever for fighting in hockey—they simply pretend there is. Two players drop their gloves and pound away on each other, stopping play, and then are sent off for what is called a “major penalty.” It is probably the silliest phrase in all of professional sport. There is, in fact, no penalty at all—play resumes with neither side short-handed, as if the fights had never even happened.

  Come contract time, the sluggers table those “majors” just as the skilled players table goals and assists. To use just one convenient example, Carolina’s Wade Brookbank will be far more rewarded for his Friday night “major” than he will be for the single goal he has scored this season.

  If, on the other hand, fighting were made a real penalty in hockey—say each team would play short-handed for the length of the penalty, as would happen if Brookbank had tripped Boulton rather than punched him—it would have the most profound effect on how the game of hockey is played. Punishment would be real and instant, rather than some later-date suspension that might or might not be handed down. Fighting would, in effect, no longer be allowed in hockey, the same as it is disallowed in all those other team sports.

  It would still happen—but a lot more hockey games would break out than is currently the case.

  The Quebec junior league did strike a committee to look into the issue of fighting. Instead of a full ban, however, the league chose to beef up its rules. Fighting continued.

  HOW WAYNE GRETZKY RUINED HOCKEY

  (Today, spring 1982)

  This is the thought of a heretic, I know, but Wayne Gretzky could be the worst thing ever to happen in the National Hockey League.

  The idea first came to me in the perfect place: a drafty, late-night dressing room in a small Ottawa arena. The idea—wacky as it at first sounds—struck hard, and the natural instinct was that such a notion, like some of the underwear in the place, deserved a good airing. Yet I kept it to myself. Why? Well, no one else was talking hockey. Two guys were bitching about who was supposed to have brought the beer. Someone else was recounting how some Brit thought to unfreeze his car door lock by warming it with his breath and spent the better part of an hour lip-locked to the side of his vehicle. How could hockey dare interrupt such intellectual discourse? So I let it pass.

  Trouble is, no one talks true hockey anymore. All thanks to Wayne Gretzky. Last year this same Ottawa dressing room would have been full of Toronto Maple Leaf insults; this year, that sad story is about as compelling as the Canadian Constitution. Someone might have asked who’d be the best bet to build a hockey franchise around, and various names would have flown about, surely even that of Gretzky himself. Someone else might have argued that Mike Bossy is the greatest natural scorer the game has seen, and one of the old guys, surely, would have countered with Rocket Richard. But not anymore. Not since Gretzky.

  No one cares anymore, see. Thanks to him, all hockey talk is suddenly completely academic. Canadian hockey has turned out to be no more mysterious a game than Rubik’s cube, and now that it’s been mastered, perhaps it’s time to throw it out.

  When Gretzky scored his 50 goals in 39 games, he settled once and for all an argument put forward by the Russians a full ten years ago: the NHL is not the be-all and end-all of hockey. Since the definitive 8–1 Soviet victory over the NHL’s best in last year’s Canada Cup, Gretzky has hammered away all season at the Soviet point that the top competition is not necessarily found in the NHL. Moving toward the end of the season more than 60 points ahead of any rival in the scoring race (leading, for heaven’s sake, by more points than Toe Blake, Howie Morenz or Ace Bailey had in total when they won their scoring championships), Gretzky has forever removed any cause to ever again discuss hockey with friends in a heated manner.

  After all, what’s to compare? No Howe–Richard rivalry, no Hull–Mikita debate, no Esposito–Orr race. Wayne Gretzky himself admits he has had to turn to setting his own personal standards to pursue (100 goals this season, 200 points overall), and it has made him less like a true hockey player and more like a scratch golfer who argues he only goes out to play against the course.

  One can’t help but wonder where the rest of the NHL went in 1981–82. Wasn’t there a big trade between Buffalo and Detroit? Didn’t some Philadelphia Flyer punch a referee—grounds for a life suspension in more sensible sports—and get hit with a stunning $500 fine? Who cares?

  Most of the true wonder of sports grows out of its unpredictability, and Gretzky has ruined even that. Picking up The Globe and Mail to read about his three goals and four assists the night before against Minnesota has become as predictable and enthralling as the morning’s editorial against marketing boards.

  Gretzky is simply not in the same league as the others in the league in which he plays. When Post cereals puts out its winter promotion “NHL Stars in Action” and the twenty-eight “exciting action cards” fail to include Gretzky, it is like a late-Saturday-night jukebox without Willie Nelson. Mike Bossy turned up in the box of Alpha-Bits we bought, and the kids couldn’t have been less impressed. For them, hockey, a game played by six-man teams, has become a one-man sport. Nobody, not even Bossy, matters a hoot.

  The only way to repair the shattered egos of the Bossys and Lafleurs and Dionnes and Clarkes is to get rid of Gretzky. Then there might be something worth arguing about once again. And it might not be that hard, either.

  Gretzky is much too modest to say so publicly, but his history would seem to say he might be getting as bored of it all as we are of him. Always, right from the very first, he or his father has pushed for more
competition. At fourteen, under tremendous controversy, he left Brantford for a Toronto team; at sixteen, he went to Sault Ste. Marie for Junior A; at seventeen, again under controversy, he turned professional in the World Hockey Association; and at twenty, after the merger of the two leagues, he was the only hockey player who mattered in North America. There were no more hurdles left.

  Which is precisely why he should consider defecting.

  And why not? The Stastny brothers left Czechoslovakia for more money. Gretzky could go the other way for more competition. He might even work his way up to playing with the likes of the great Moscow Spartak star, Sergei Shepelev, the only player ever to upstage Gretzky when he beat him out for the all-star centre position in the 1981 Canada Cup. Shepelev’s five goals against Gretzky’s one assist in the playoffs might have had something to do with it, or perhaps it was the way Shepelev swept around Denis Potvin and Larry Robinson as if they were practice pylons and scored—whatever, Gretzky could start low and work his way up, just as he has so many times in the past.

  I’ve even found a team for him. It’s on the Danube River in northern Yugoslavia, a town about the same size as his hometown, Brantford, called Novi Sad, where the Izokej Klub Vojvodina lost all twenty-eight of its matches last year by an average score of 17–2. It’s a perfect deal. Gretzky needs a challenge and the NHL needs to get rid of him so he’ll quit making them look so bad.

  Then we can all get back to talkin’ hockey.

  I was obviously being facetious with this tongue-in-cheek piece, but it remains true that Wayne Gretzky changed hockey more than any player in history. It was his popularity in Los Angeles after the 1988 trade that led to a proliferation of franchises in the south—an event that many believe did hockey little good as it watered down the product and created a number of franchises that have not worked out or will not. When Gretzky retired in 1999, hockey slowly began returning to its senses as a largely gate-driven, northern sport, popular more in pockets of the United States than throughout the States as had been the dream in the early 1990s. The fact that Gretzky remained the world’s best-known hockey player a decade after his retirement argues that this phenomenal talent, with an ability to transcend sports into celebrity, was more a blip on hockey’s timeline than a permanent shift to major sports status and continued growth. He really had no peers when it came to the entire package: skill, marketability, celebrity.