Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  It was the Gretzky cachet that helped to land a new land deal in Glendale. Ellman was able to persuade the rundown suburb to put up three-quarters of the $240 million needed to build the rink, which opened two years ago. It was to be part of his Westgate City Center, a 223-acre retail, entertainment, office, hotel and residential complex, but the development has not gone quite according to plan (he recently paid a $1-million fine to the city for missed deadlines). However, with the National Football League’s Arizona Cardinals now building a new stadium beside the rink, the project’s future appears far more certain, eventually.

  There also have been struggles on the ice. The Coyotes have missed the playoffs three of their past four seasons. Worse, the team last won a series as the Jets. The star players of recent years—Keith Tkachuk, Jeremy Roenick, goaltender Nikolai Khabibulin—have all moved on to richer contracts elsewhere. Phoenix took on an expensive new star back in 2004, veteran sharpshooter Brett Hull, but last season’s long lockout, his age (forty-one) and weight problems, and the league’s new rules that reward speed all contrived to create a situation where Hull voluntarily, and wisely, retired with the new season barely under way.

  That left Gretzky taking over a team without its expensive stars, but with a struggling power play, a defence prone to panic and a desperate need for a goaltender who could replace Khabibulin. Hardly an ideal situation for a man who had never coached anything but his son’s softball team.

  And yet, this week, after a run of seven victories in their past ten games, Phoenix moved into eighth place in the Western Conference. If the playoffs began now, the Coyotes—who were not considered any threat at all—would be there. Gretzky says, correctly, that much of the credit must go to the play of goaltender Curtis Joseph, the thirty-eight-year-old free agent the Coyotes picked up this summer. But hockey is a team game, from goaltender to scorer to behind the bench—and significant credit must go to the novice coach as well as the veteran goaltender.

  It’s still too soon to say that he has proved himself, but Gretzky has answered some of the questions about why a man who has never failed—he became a national figure at ten, after scoring 378 goals for the Nadrofsky Steelers—would take on such a fickle job that it even carries its own defeatist mantra: Coaches are hired to be fired.

  Why, then, would he do it? Why go back to the grind of eighty-two games a year, perhaps a hundred if exhibition and playoffs are included? Why take on the stress, the travel, the media bombardment? Surely not for a coach’s million-dollar salary when he could easily pick up several times that by doing a few more commercials. Or, as Paul Coffey so accurately put it: “???????????????”

  One popular theory holds that, just as Mario Lemieux went back to help save his NHL franchise in Pittsburgh, Gretzky turned to coaching in order to fill seats. The mere announcement that he would be taking the reins sent season-ticket sales soaring 30 percent.

  “Wayne Gretzky is still the only face of hockey in the United States,” says Rick Bowness, the Coyotes’ acting coach before this season. “In fact, he’s still the face of hockey in Canada. Just watch what the cameras do when Canada wins the Olympic gold or the World Cup. They don’t go to the players on the ice. They go straight to Gretzky—that’s where the passion is.”

  And it was passion, not economics, that eventually brought him down from the luxury seats to the coach’s bench. Both he and Mike Barnett—his long-time agent and now the Coyotes’ general manager—deny that there was any intention to “prop up the franchise” by having him on the bench. He is there to be noticed, they say—but by the players far more than by the fans.

  He started dealing with players not in Phoenix, but with the Olympic program, serving as the Canadian team’s executive director for the Salt Lake City Games in 2002 and leading Canada to its first hockey gold medal in fifty years. However, he had already found that he missed playing more than he ever would have imagined. Hockey history is littered with sad tales of greats who stayed too long and left wearing uniforms they should never be remembered for: Guy Lafleur went out a Nordique, Bobby Hull a Hartford Whaler, Marcel Dionne in the minors.

  But he, like Jean Béliveau, had left while still able to perform at a very high level, and he hadn’t forgotten what Gordie Howe, who unretired and kept playing until he was fifty-two, once told him: “Be careful not to leave the thing you love too soon.”

  Wondering if perhaps he had, he started taking advantage of the ice access he enjoyed as managing partner of the Coyotes. As he got back into shape, he lost sight of the fact that he had retired at thirty-eight, which is when most superior players do, or at least should, bow out, and he began to dream the impossible. “You think you can still play,” he now says. “We all do. I would skate on the ice and practise with the guys periodically and do some of the drills.” There were times when he was convinced he could still do it, that a comeback was possible. “I felt like it. I really believed.”

  But was it the right thing? He compares his moment of reckoning to the amateur players who went out for the CBC-TV reality series Making the Cut, only to discover that reality was being not quite good enough. He even found the odd person showing up at his fantasy camps was faster than he was. He also worried that he might be playing a game in his mind that no longer existed. Players had become bigger, stronger and vastly more mobile. Even in his prime, he figures, he couldn’t dominate today’s hockey as he did yesterday’s. “I would have been hit a lot more. It wouldn’t have been as easy for me to freelance out there. I was smart enough to realize I had to retire.”

  Coaching, however, was an option, even if he had ruled it out. He wasn’t still playing, but he knew the NHL inside out, perhaps as well as anyone. “He’s a total hockey junkie,” says Russ Courtnall, a former teammate and long-time friend. “I’ve never known a guy to watch so much hockey. He knows everything about every player.”

  The itch to get closer to the ice really took hold during the 2004 World Cup. He had been coaching his son’s ball team in the summer and had delighted in discovering hidden skills in youngsters and in devising strategy for the team. When the World Cup camp began, he was again executive director of the Canadian team, but found himself increasingly interested in how a professional coaching staff prepared, a side of the game he had never paid much attention to before. He was impressed by the thoroughness—but found the emotional side of coaching fascinating.

  “They really enjoyed being on the bench,” he says of head coach Pat Quinn and assistants Ken Hitchcock, Jacques Martin and Marc Habscheid. “As much as the players loved playing, they really loved coaching that team. I saw the energy they had, and the excitement they had getting ready for each and every game.”

  He decided to confide in Habscheid that he was thinking about coaching himself, and says his former Oilers teammate “told me I’d really enjoy it and have a lot of fun doing it.”

  Much to his surprise, Janet Gretzky thought the same. The family was living outside Los Angeles and growing—Paulina, seventeen, an aspiring singer, Ty, fifteen, Trevor, thirteen, Tristan, five, and Emma, three—but Phoenix was close enough for commuting and easy visits and, besides, she knew that one day he would want to get more involved in the franchise.

  The real deciding factor came during the owners’ lockout that followed the World Cup and shut down NHL hockey for a complete year. He had his promotional work, but it was hardly full-time. He was, in fact, spending most of his time golfing or just hanging about the house. Janet grew tired of hearing the sounds of endless “classic” NHL games coming from the television, and finally her visiting mother actually told The Great One: “You’ve got to get up and go to work—you’ve got to do something.”

  He began to try out the coaching notion on a wider field. During a chance meeting at the Kentucky Derby, basketball coach Pat Riley suggested that he would like it, and Janet says she was “120 percent” behind the move. They began to discuss the logistics of keeping two homes going. Ty, the eldest boy, also could move to Phoenix to
pursue his own high-school hockey ambitions as well as work, part-time, in the Coyotes’ dressing room.

  The marriage, she says, would survive fine. “We’ve been together almost twenty years, and we’re pretty sure how we feel about each other.”

  He talked it over with NHL commissioner Gary Bettman, who was very enthusiastic but had one request: Don’t say anything until the lockout is resolved. He wanted something that would, Gretzky says, “put hockey on the front pages” once again before the games actually started up. By coincidence, or perhaps by design, the day his decision to coach was made public, the league announced that Vancouver Canucks player Todd Bertuzzi, who had been suspended indefinitely for a brutal attack on an opponent at the end of the 2003–04 season, would be reinstated. Gretzky’s return to the game got greater play than Bertuzzi’s return, much to the delight of the league.

  Two games into his new life, Gretzky was on the phone to track down Courtnall on the golf course. “ ‘Russ, I love it, I absolutely love it!’ ” Courtnall remembers him shouting. “How can you not be happy for someone who’s doing something he loves?”

  And yet, it was not his first love, nor his first choice. He would rather have played. “I’m not going to lie,” he says. “I wish I could still play, but I know I can’t. Brainwise, I probably could—physically, I probably couldn’t. But I loved it so much. I endlessly wish I could have played.”

  He is still the most unprepossessing figure on the ice. Here at the Coyotes’ practice facility in Scottsdale, he is barely noticeable as they skate about, a slim figure in a track suit with a thick black toque pulled so tight that only his eyes, mouth and the familiar Gretzky nose are visible. When he blows the whistle, the result is so feeble it seems he ran out of wind just tying up his skates.

  And yet, when he speaks—or sometimes shouts—they listen.

  Mike Ricci, a fifteen-year veteran who came to Phoenix from the San Jose Sharks, says that, increasingly, the team has come to see the man with the whistle as their coach, rather than as Wayne Gretzky. “He’s very talkative, very active. He’s very intense—and we feed off that.”

  Darren Pang, a former NHL goalie who is now the Coyotes’ television play-by-play analyst, says the rookie coach has hardly been the soft touch others perhaps expected. After two dismal performances, he put his players through a gruesome forty-five-minute “bag skate”—no pucks, full out. He essentially forced Brett Hull, a close friend, to retire by cutting his ice time to the point of embarrassment. Other old friends were cut even earlier, at training camp, and later he scratched veteran Sean O’Donnell for a game and publicly criticized the highly talented but under-producing Ladislav Nagy, who responded by becoming the team’s leading scorer.

  “Gretzky didn’t need this,” Pang says. “His life was fulfilled without coaching. So why would you put yourself in a position to fail unless you had total belief that you would ultimately succeed?”

  “He commands respect,” Curtis Joseph adds. “Everybody listens and they don’t question.” Joseph has been on teams whose coaches and players snipe at each other and players often tune out coaches who have lost their respect. “I don’t see that happening here,” he says.

  Coyotes vice-president Cliff Fletcher, now into his fiftieth year of professional hockey management, says it is absurd for people to say that coaching didn’t work out for Rocket Richard so it won’t work out for Wayne Gretzky. “Look,” he says, “I knew the Rocket. He was one of the most capable athletes I ever met in my life. He just did it on pure power and talent. When he coached, he couldn’t understand how nobody could do what he told them to do. He was such an impatient man. Wayne is so patient.

  “There’s always the exception to any rule. He was the thinking man’s player on the ice—always half a step ahead of everyone else. He has such an extreme knowledge of the game that that is what makes him different.”

  Darryl Sutter, coach and general manager of the Calgary Flames, says that there is another fundamental difference between Gretzky coaching in 2005 and, say, Rocket Richard going behind the bench in 1972. Staff.

  “Everybody goes on about how tough it is to coach,” he explains, “but it’s about trying to get the right staff. It’s technical and it’s staff—any area you need can be covered off in that. I knew right away he’d be fine as a coach. He surrounded himself with the right staff. He has the technician in Barry Smith. He has a former player who has the respect of the players in Rick Tocchet. He has a guy who’s familiar with the organization in Rick Bowness.”

  According to Sutter, who took his surprising Flames to the Stanley Cup final in 2004, “it’s not as complicated as everyone thinks.” A successful coach can either be a teacher or a leader, and “Wayne is a great leader,” he says. “One thing that is different about him is that he wasn’t a big guy and he wasn’t the most talented player, but he was the most insightful player there was.”

  With his vast experience, Bowness was a natural to keep on. Tocchet and goaltending coach Grant Fuhr, meanwhile, were old acquaintances, leading some to separate those who were “FOG”—Friends of Gretzky—from those who were not. Smith he did not know, and hired only after a suggestion from legendary coach Scotty Bowman. Having spent a dozen years as Bowman’s assistant in Detroit, Pittsburgh and Buffalo, Smith was negotiating with a Russian elite team and could hardly believe he was getting the Gretzky call: “I wanted to work with him in the worst way.”

  According to Smith, “we’re coaching by committee” while the new kid is “learning the intricacies”—and no one, he adds, could have picked a more difficult year to launch a coaching career. With the new rules, the game is being played entirely differently, with special teams counting for more than ever and defensive strategies still in their infancy. “The first couple of games were tough. I’ll bet he didn’t sleep.”

  Smith and Bowness say they are surprised by how much he listens and how easily he hands over responsibility. Delegating, Gretzky says, is something he learned from Glen Sather, who was coach and general manager of the Oilers as well as the team’s president. Sather’s assistants “weren’t just assistant coaches, getting the pucks out of the corners for the next drill. They often ran the practices. They ran the drills … He did it, not because it was a new way to go. He did it out of necessity. There is no way I could coach right now if I didn’t have the help I’m getting.”

  What, then, does he bring to the bench? According to Smith, it’s the very thing that made Scotty Bowman the best coach in NHL history: “a burning desire to win.” It is this desire, this insistent itch to perform at the very top of one’s abilities, that social commentator Malcolm Gladwell examined in an article published by The New Yorker just three months after Gretzky retired.

  Gladwell, who grew up in Canada, compared the skills of the hockey genius with those of Charlie Wilson, a brilliant brain surgeon still demanding and driven as he headed toward seventy, and Yo-Yo Ma, the internationally renowned cellist. He termed the trio “physical geniuses,” a motor equivalent of exceptional IQ, and found that they themselves were often not even aware of what gave them such control over what they were doing. “It’s sort of an invisible hand,” the surgeon suggested. “It begins almost to seem mystical.”

  Such exceptional people, Gladwell suggested, “are driven to greatness because they have found something so compelling that they cannot put it aside.” After more than three incredibly successful decades in the game, Wayne Gretzky found that he just could not put it aside.

  “When you’re part of the ownership group,” he explains one afternoon after the team’s practice, “you don’t really have a say in the game itself. It’s out of your hands. When you become a coach, you become a ‘player’ again.

  “It’s not as good—but it’s the closest thing. I’m a realist. It’s the closest I can get to playing.”

  Shortly after this article appeared, Wayne Gretzky left the coach’s bench on a leave of absence to spend time with his ill mother, Phyllis, who died of lung
cancer shortly before Christmas. He returned to coach a team finding little success on the ice and financial horrors off of it. The franchise struggled and in the spring of 2009 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. With ownership in turmoil—Research In Motion’s Jim Balsillie failing in his bid to buy the team and move it, the NHL ultimately taking ownership while searching for an owner who would keep the team there—Gretzky found himself a creditor. He stepped down as coach before the 2009–10 season began. In his four-year coaching career, his team failed to make the playoffs.

  EIGHT

  THE ELEMENTS

  “GOOD, WARM, FUZZY MEMORIES”

  (The Globe and Mail, November 24, 2003)

  EDMONTON, ALBERTA

  It was supposed to be, as Mark Messier said, a weekend of getting “back to the roots of hockey.”

  In a way it was; in a way it wasn’t. I certainly do not remember any of us running naked but for a T-shirt and single sock down on the old beaver pond and then sliding like a pink-skinned otter over the McDonald’s sponsor sign. Come to think of it, I don’t recall any sponsors. Nor, for that matter, anyone ever stopping to watch—let alone 57,167 spectators who arrived Saturday afternoon at Commonwealth Stadium looking more like they were a Michelin Man convention than a hockey crowd.

  I do, however, remember playing shinny at –16.8°C. And bad ice that was more unpredictable than a penalty shot.

  The old-timers played and they shovelled their own snow off—“Losers have to do the ice,” Messier joked as his old Oilers took a 1–0 lead at the half—and they wore toques and balaclavas and, after a while, as much steam was coming off their heads as out of their mouths.

  “I don’t know if you can ever duplicate it,” Wayne Gretzky said after the old Oilers had defeated the old Montreal Canadiens 2–0 in thirty minutes of pond hockey. “It’s kind of like the ’72 series—you can never go back and try and do it again.”