Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  What was the point of denial, even if he doesn’t touch alcohol? There are no gloves to drop when you fight a stereotype. For a decade, Nolan was essentially “blackballed” from the NHL, regularly dismissed as “a GM killer.”

  “I tried everything,” he said. He sent resumés out that were not acknowledged. He called, but calls were not returned. His name would come up whenever a coach was fired, but calls never followed. It reached a point where he thought he should ask the media just to let his name disappear.

  “It’s one of the great mysteries,” he said. “I still don’t know what happened. But I’m a strong, strong believer that things happen for a reason, and when I look back on it and look at everything that came out of it, I now think that it was the best thing that could have happened.”

  It took him a long time, however, to come around to this way of thinking. He spent the first two years in what he calls “a real dark period” of anger and blame. “I lost my drive,” he said. “I always believed if you worked hard, you would be rewarded, but …” His voice trailed off. “For a long period of time … I quit.”

  Two people were there to change Ted Nolan’s life, one in his home and one in a movie. At home was Sandra, the pretty teenager he’d first seen walking across the parking lot outside the Sault Ste. Marie rink, the mother of Brandon and Jordan, who are today both promising young players. “She was always, always there,” he said.

  The other was the Will Smith film Ali. Nolan was smitten with the boxer’s stubborn determination not to change who he was, regardless of the pressures put on him. He left the movie steeled to remain exactly the person he had been before the nightmare of Buffalo descended. And if the consequence was no more hockey, so be it.

  “There’s an Ojibwa word that means ‘now,’ ” he said. “I learned to really appreciate every day. There’s an old song that says yesterday is history, tomorrow’s a mystery, today is the present, that’s why they call it a gift.”

  Finally rising from that dark period, Nolan began devoting more and more time to his heritage. He got involved with hockey tournaments for Native youth and operated a hockey school that included sessions on nutrition and spiritualism as well as skating and stickhandling. He began working with the Assembly of First Nations on various projects, including the Make Poverty History campaign.

  Hockey, he said, gives Native youth “an outlet. It makes you forget about your personal problems for a couple of hours.”

  “We want to try and make a difference,” said Chabot, who has joined Nolan in various projects designed to build self-esteem among young Canadian Aboriginals. “Hockey gives us a segue into their lives.”

  Nolan also poured his energies into a project he started years ago in the hopes of honouring the memory of his mother. “It took me ten years before I could even talk about her death,” he said, still clearly fragile from the memory.

  Rose Nolan had raised the dozen children on her own after the death of her husband, who was thirty-nine. She had turned Ted into a fancy dancer and a traditional drummer, taking him off to powwows in summer and getting him to hockey in winter. She was the one who kept him going in the game when he thought he could fight the racism no longer. The day he fled his first professional camp in Detroit, she turned her back on him when he came through the door, and she refused to speak until he went back, which he did, though he admits he cried himself to sleep for weeks.

  It began with a golf tournament—a sport he didn’t even know how to play—and is now the Ted Nolan Foundation, which hands out bursaries. For the past dozen years, an average of five young Native women a year have gone on to postsecondary education through the Rose Nolan Memorial Scholarship Fund. “If I can make a difference,” he said, “I will.”

  Nolan had turned so completely to Native issues—even toying with the idea of entering politics—that the call back to coaching caught him off guard. It was Moncton on the line, requesting a meeting he wasn’t at all sure about. Sandra encouraged him to go, and seven minutes after he sat down, he was on the telephone telling her to start packing. “It had nothing to do with getting her to Long Island,” he said.

  Success in Moncton, however, combined with disaster in Long Island—bad trades, fired coaches and changed general managers—led to eccentric Islanders owner Charles Wang deciding to hire his own coach. Wang went to former Islanders all-star Pat LaFontaine for advice, and LaFontaine, who also had a Buffalo connection, immediately recommended Nolan. Nolan believes he would never have been hired if there had been a GM in place.

  Wang then hired and dropped a new GM before promoting backup goaltender Garth Snow to the job. When Snow surprised the league by signing goaltender Rick DiPietro to an unheard-of fifteen-year, $67.5-million deal, the rest of the NHL howled with laughter.

  Fifteen months later, the Islanders are the ones smiling. It was Nolan who suggested the Islanders honour legendary coach Al Arbour by bringing Arbour back to coach his fifteen hundredth game, and Nolan who insisted on moving himself into Arbour’s old windowless office. The team made the playoffs last season and is challenging again this season, hoping to regain a swagger not seen on Long Island since the Arbour years.

  Chris Simon says the essential difference has been Nolan. “If there’s one word that describes Ted,” Simon said, “it’s leadership.”

  Simon likely knows better than anyone. The relationship between the two goes back to Sault Ste. Marie, when Nolan was coaching. He persuaded the teenager to quit drinking before he ruined his life and any chance of a hockey career. “He was 247 pounds and had all kinds of off-ice problems,” Nolan remembered.

  “He pretty much told me his opinion of the life line that I was going along,” said Simon, who added he has never touched alcohol since and has played nearly eight hundred NHL games. “With Ted,” Simon said, “it was never only about hockey.”

  It is a familiar refrain among the players. Mike Comrie, who arrived this fall as a free agent, says he had always heard “what a great players’ coach he is. Well, it’s true. The first thing he thinks about is the player. You get so you almost don’t want to let him down. He wants you to have a life off the ice. He brings everything back to a life lesson.”

  “Hockey’s only two hours a day,” Nolan said. “There’s a big life out there.”

  Ted Nolan was fired, again, in July 2008. The Islanders had missed the playoffs and were, it turned out, on a downward spiral that has continued. Nolan has never returned to the NHL. Instead, his time is devoted to the Ted Nolan Foundation and the training of future Aboriginal leaders and the education of Native women. His foundation is now partnered with the Tim Horton Children’s Foundation, sending fifty Aboriginal children a year off to summer camps. Ted and Sandra Nolan’s sons have both been drafted by NHL teams, Brandon by the Vancouver Canucks and Jordan by the Los Angeles Kings.

  THE NOT-SO-GLORY DAYS

  (The Globe and Mail, November 11, 2010)

  OTTAWA, ONTARIO

  Here is where it all began, where it all came crashing down, and where Thursday evening—should they happen to win together again—the celebration of the improbable will take place over a quiet beer and a few chuckles. Alain Vigneault, coach of the Vancouver Canucks, would have his three hundredth win.

  Fifteen years ago, he believed he’d never see his first.

  It was another mid-November back in 1995, and Vigneault had his first NHL job as assistant to Rick Bowness, coach of the hapless Ottawa Senators, which were then mired in an eight-game losing string after standing dead last in the NHL the previous three seasons. There was no surprise when the axe fell. More relief than anything else that, finally, it was over.

  The Vigneault–Bowness combination is one of the more intriguing marriages in all of hockey. Bowness was named the Senators’ first coach in 1992 and interviewed Vigneault, a local junior coach who had taken his Hull Olympiques to the Memorial Cup, merely “out of courtesy.”

  But he took on Vigneault because the young coach had been “so impr
essive” in the interview. He also had a great sense of humour and Bowness, fully aware of what he was taking on, felt that would be as important as knowing how to run a power play.

  The Senators—given what the Tampa Bay Lightning’s Phil Esposito called “snow in winter” in the interleague draft—were dreadful. They lost seventy games that first year, including forty-one successive road games. They held a rookie camp in which the leading scorer turned out to be writing a first-person column for the local Sun newspaper. They had a break-in during which the thieves made off with everything but the game tapes—“Burglars with taste,” remarked E.J. McGuire, the other assistant coach. They made the ESPN highlights only once, when a player fell down the stairs at the old Chicago Stadium. Sports Illustrated claimed they were “the worst team” in sports franchise history.

  By the time the coaches were fired they had been through the wars together. They had dealt with Alexandre Daigle’s nurse’s uniform, Alexei Yashin’s salary holdouts and, at one point, a goaltender who skated over to the bench in the middle of a game and told them he had just had a heart attack.

  “It was tough on you,” Bowness remembers. “Losing just beats the living crap out of you when it’s night after night. It takes its toll.”

  “Those years were real challenging and real tough on a personal level and a professional level,” Vigneault says. “You go through those times where you know even if you’re putting your best foot forward you have no chance of winning.”

  But they learned from their mistakes and discovered, as well, how compatible they were behind the bench. Bowness moved on to coach the New York Islanders and then went off to help Wayne Gretzky coach the Phoenix Coyotes, and he tried, unsuccessfully, to get Vigneault to join. Vigneault went back to junior, then to the minors and at thirty-nine was named head coach of the Montreal Canadiens, where he unsuccessfully tried to talk Bowness into signing on.

  Finally, after Vigneault had been fired in Montreal, he landed in Vancouver and immediately went after Bowness again—this time succeeding. Only this time their roles would be reversed: Vigneault as head coach, Bowness as associate.

  “I was just a kid when I went to work for Rick,” Vigneault says. “He’s helped me out a lot more than I was able to help him back then. Now, mind you, I could say that he could have had Scotty Bowman coaching that team and it wouldn’t have mattered that much.”

  Fifteen years on, it’s working fine. Vigneault, now forty-nine, was named NHL coach of the year in 2007 and says he couldn’t have done it without Bowness, now fifty-five, from whom he learned so much so many years ago.

  “I learned about challenging yourself,” Vigneault says, “about trying to stay positive, trying to keep moving forward, trying to work with guys to make sure their spirits aren’t too down. Players aren’t stupid, either—they know when they look at the lineup on both sides that they don’t stand much of a chance.”

  Bowness today says he couldn’t have done better than hire the local kid he thought he was seeing as a courtesy only. They’ve been lucky to have each other, and lucky to have survived to enjoy, finally, some success together.

  “Every day in this league is a good day,” Bowness says. “I tell the players, ‘Count your blessings—you’re lucky to be here.’ ”

  In the spring of 2011, the Vancouver Canucks, coached by Alan Vigneault and Rick Bowness, won the Presidents’ Trophy as the top team in the entire NHL and reached the Stanley Cup final. Their personal triumph was saddened, however, by the tragic death of E.J. McGuire, who had become the head of NHL’s Central Scouting Bureau. McGuire, fifty-eight, died of a swift-moving cancer the week the NHL’s regular season ended. The three had remained close friends since their days together in Ottawa.

  COACH GRETZKY

  (The Globe and Mail, December 10, 2005)

  SCOTTSDALE, ARIZONA

  Here, at the luxurious Resort Suites, with palm trees swaying in the background and steaks thicker than hockey pucks sizzling on the barbecue, four full teams of dreamers are gathered to raise an opening-night glass to Wayne Gretzky Fantasy Camp IV. For a mere $9,999—a portion of which goes to charity—men who are plumbers and dentists and real-estate dealers in their regular lives will, for five days, live a grown-up version of Wayne Gretzky pajamas and Wayne Gretzky wallpaper. They will play a round-robin tournament—no hitting, no slapshots—of beer-league-level hockey, each team sprinkled with retired stars such as Hall-of-Famer Paul Coffey, Rick Tocchet, Kirk Muller and the Courtnall brothers, Russ and Geoff. The paying players are guaranteed one game with Gretzky himself, as well as an autographed picture of the hockey wannabe standing with the one so many believe to be the greatest ever to play the game.

  And some dreams cannot be bought—at any price.

  Take Wayne Gretzky’s, for example. He sits at the head of the room as the cigars are being handed out. He is dressed, as always, like someone out of GQ, impeccable in a tight, thin leather jacket, dark turtleneck, pants and shoes. He is rich beyond belief. He can drive a Bentley one day, a Hummer the next. He has a solid marriage to a Hollywood actress and five children who are as polite as they are blond. He looks younger than the forty-five years he will turn next month. His face is unlined and, remarkably for a hockey player, unscarred.

  He is so famous that even now, into the seventh season of his retirement as the National Hockey League’s all-time leading scorer, winner of four Stanley Cups, holder of a stunning sixty-one NHL records, small boys who never saw him play will stand outside the rink hoping for a signature from the man even they call “The Great One.” He will park in a reserved space that no one else will dare take because of its instant identification with the number he once wore: 99. And when they announce the starting lineups at the game to be played the following evening, the home crowd will cheer loudest not for any of the players, but for the rookie Phoenix Coyotes coach, Wayne Gretzky.

  And yet, on this night, when the old stories flow and the cigars glow, the rookie coach is no different from the plumber from New York or the dentist from Ontario. He is dreaming, dreaming, dreaming of playing in the NHL.

  Paul Coffey stands at the back of the room and still cannot believe that his great friend, his former teammate on those glorious Edmonton Oilers Stanley Cup teams, has done what no one ever expected and what Gretzky himself once said he would never, ever do.

  “I knew something was up when he went quiet,” Coffey says. “I sent him an e-mail and he never answered back. All I said was, ‘Coaching, are you nuts?’ Then I pushed down on the question-mark key—until it had filled the whole screen.”

  “I know, I know,” he says, smiling sheepishly.

  —

  Wayne Gretzky is standing at the edge of the Coyotes’ dressing room in the Glendale Arena, which is on the other side of Phoenix from Scottsdale. He is trying to deal with the demands of five-year-old Tristan—“Tie my shoe! Tie my shoe!”—and the question that has trailed him ever since he announced this summer that he was returning to the ice surface, albeit not to play.

  He is acutely aware of the sports theory that holds the truly great cannot coach. Rocket Richard was such a bust with the Quebec Nordiques that he quit less than two weeks into the job. Bobby Orr couldn’t take being an assistant coach in Chicago. Brad Park failed in Detroit. Basketball’s Wilt Chamberlain, football’s Bart Starr, baseball’s Ted Williams—all brilliant players who found managing lesser mortals too much to bear.

  Gretzky himself once believed this. Five years ago, in a column he wrote for the National Post following his retirement—a column I was then assigned to help out on—he said that, even though he might one day return in some capacity to the game, “it couldn’t possibly be coaching.”

  At that time, he bought into the rule of thumb that successful coaches are the Freddie Sheros, not the Rocket Richards. The examples of fine players who make fine coaches—Larry Robinson in New Jersey, Jacques Lemaire in Minnesota—are rare enough; there is, unless Wayne Gretzky proves the theorists wrong, no mo
dern example of a brilliant player succeeding on the other side of the bench. “Most successful coaches,” he continued in his column, “are either guys who had their careers cut short, like Scotty Bowman, or guys who—he’s going to kill me for this—weren’t on the ice all that much, so they could do a lot of watching and studying, like my old friend Glen Sather,” mastermind behind the Edmonton dynasty of the 1980s.

  He couldn’t see the likes of Paul Coffey or Mark Messier going into coaching and trying to deal with players who wouldn’t work as hard as they had and can’t “see the game the same way that they do.”

  Somewhere along the line, he had a change of heart. First, he came back to hockey far sooner after retiring than he had intended. A year after his last game as a player in April 1999, he joined Phoenix as managing partner in charge of all hockey operations. The opportunity was simply too good to turn down.

  The Coyotes had been the Winnipeg Jets, allowed by the NHL to move south in 1996 after years of losing money. Relocation seemed a ready solution, especially in wealthy Phoenix, but it has not been as simple as it seemed. Plans for a new arena based on a real-estate development in Scottsdale fell apart, forcing the franchise to scramble to avoid being moved again, this time to Portland, Oregon.

  Owner Steve Ellman, a real-estate developer, knew the Gretzky name had a currency not even the banks could match, and so he offered the recent retiree a chance to become part owner. It is not known how much Gretzky paid—friends suggest nothing—nor how much of the convoluted hockey and real-estate deal he has, though a rumour in Phoenix says 18 percent. Whatever the stake, if everything Ellman has planned comes off, he will profit massively.