Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  In the best years, sixty or more people would be on the Bacon Street Omni. Last year, only sixteen people went for a skate. “I know from twenty-four years’ experience that we have fewer skateable days now than we did when I started the rink,” Falla says. “But even if I knew we’d have skateable ice for only one weekend, I’d still put up the rink. Bottom line on a backyard rink—or at least on my backyard rink—is that it connects me with the people I love.”

  Despite the constant talk of global warming, he once again had his boards up in early November, waiting for the first cold front to announce the start of the 2007–08 skating season. No fancy refrigeration units and imbedded piping for Falla, who frowns on what he sees as little more than an artificial-ice indoor arena without the roof and walls. “Maintaining and building it is half the fun,” he says. As for those elaborate ice surfaces, he wonders aloud: “Aren’t you getting awfully close to tennis?”

  Falla’s motivation has never been to produce future hockey stars—though the game is regularly played on the Omni—but to provide some alternative activity for an already active family. “Some people see their rinks as a springboard for getting ahead in the game,” he says, “but my rink was never just for that. It was to give my overscheduled kids some time on their own.”

  His reward, he says, came only this past year when he happened to overhear his son, Brian, now thirty-six, talking about the Omni to a visitor. “It’s my father’s legacy,” Brian said. It was, Jack Falla says, the only thanks he ever needed to hear.

  With the warm autumn rain still falling outside, two of Walter Gretzky’s less-famous sons—Keith, forty, and Glen, thirty-eight—sit around talking about their father’s legacy and their own recollections of Wally’s Coliseum. They talk about the floodlights their dad would string above the ice, how he would so carefully mould the banks so they froze hard and could serve as boards. They laugh about the wood-framed nets he built. But mostly they talk about the ice.

  “Great ice,” Glen says. “Absolutely great.”

  “Glass ice,” Walter adds. “Not bumpy at all.”

  “I remember the shovelling,” Keith laughs. “We were the ones who had to shovel it off. We used to have snowbanks higher than the fences.”

  But no longer. The snow comes and goes these days, banks rise and fall. It is, of course, still possible to build outdoor rinks and, in deepest winter, even possible to hold outdoor shinny tournaments in various parts of North America. But all bets are off when it comes to sustaining an outdoor rink from first cold snap to final thaw in a country where, for the most part, the mercury in outdoor thermometers now dances as much as it shrinks.

  Walter Gretzky’s own memories include the precise point in the yard, pool included, where he established his rink each winter. He recalls the best years and the funny moments, like the time he asked Phyllis to drop in to Canadian Tire to pick up a new lawn sprinkler in ten-below weather and they treated her like “she was crazy.”

  The clarity of Gretzky’s recollection here is significant, as his memory was largely deleted the fall day in 1991 when he was painting out at the farm and suddenly went dizzy. In one of fate’s more cruel moments, the most famous hockey father in the world lost his entire remembrance of his famous son’s hockey life. He lost each one of the four Stanley Cups in Edmonton; he lost the NHL records, the all-star games, the Canada Cups; he even lost the infamous 1988 trade to Los Angeles.

  “It’s like I was asleep for ten years,” he once told me. “It’s all kind of like a dream.”

  The neurosurgeon who saved him after the aneurysm, Dr. Rocco de Villiers, told him that he would one day come to remember those things “that really mattered” to him. At one point, purely as an experiment, the doctor played a small game to demonstrate how Gretzky’s memory could suddenly jump back without him having to wander aimlessly inside his own head in search of it.

  Dr. de Villiers told Gretzky that each time he clapped his hands, Gretzky had to tell him the first memory that came to mind.

  Clap! He remembered being in church the day of his mother’s funeral.

  Clap! He remembered one of the hymns sung at his father’s funeral.

  Clap! He remembered the length of the train—“about three and a half miles long,” he giggled—on Janet Jones’s wedding dress the summer day in 1988 she and Wayne married in Edmonton.

  The doctor was impressed. “Religion must be very important to you,” he said. “All your important memories involve church in some way or another.”

  Here in Brantford on this rainy late-fall day, no clapping is required. Gretzky remembers every possible detail of the backyard rink, the other place of worship for his family. A precious memory, as clear and solid as that “glass ice” that is, sadly, becoming mostly memory for the country itself.

  Jack Falla died of a heart attack in September 2008. He was sixty-two years old. Walter Gretzky, at seventy-two, remains as active as ever, though he still misses that backyard rink.

  NINE

  ANGUISH

  THE HOLE IN BOB GAINEY’S HEART

  (The Globe and Mail, May 3, 2007)

  It was a Friday night, sure, but he was early to bed, as usual. There was a game to think about—the Buffalo Sabres, the National Hockey League’s best team, in town to play his Montreal Canadiens—and Bob Gainey wanted to get an early start on Saturday.

  At almost the same time that the Canadiens general manager turned out the lights in his downtown condominium, his daughter Laura stepped out on the deck of the Picton Castle as the ship hit heavy waters about a thousand kilometres off the coast of Cape Cod.

  She shouldn’t have been there. She should have been down below, in her own bed. But she was twenty-five years old, she was living her dream and, as her father often said, she liked to “live on the edge.” Where this sailing gene came from, no one knew. She had been born in Montreal and grown up in Minnesota and Texas, but now she was so in love with sailing she had a tall ship tattooed on her left shoulder and liked nothing in the world better than climbing eight storeys up the mast, unfurling the royal and watching it catch the wind. The royal is a small sail that puffs out majestically, triumphantly, and is used only in light, favourable winds.

  This was no night for such a sail. The gale-force wind was at fifty-five knots, the waves slamming into the fifty-five-metre-long barque and the ship tossing heavily. She’d been told to stay below, like most of the other young and less-experienced sailors. She went out on deck without a life jacket. She did not use a safety tether. Perhaps she simply wanted to see the ship battle the storm for herself. We will never know. One wave, some say a “rogue” wave, seemed to reach up and simply slap her off the deck.

  Gone, in an instant, with reports of one quick, small cry for help.

  No one could see anything, not with the early December dark, not with the sheered water flying in the wind, not for the exploding crashes against the hull. Those who saw her vanish could only throw flotation devices after her and pray that Laura, a fine swimmer, would be able to find one of them in time.

  Bob Gainey awoke at 4:30 a.m. A fastidious, meticulous man, he busied himself with some paperwork and then, nearing 6 a.m., he checked his BlackBerry. “I had three messages,” he remembers. “Three consecutive messages that came in around 11:30, 11:35, 11:45 and said ‘Please call.’ I didn’t need to make the call to know there was a problem. I knew there was a problem. I just didn’t know how bad the problem was.”

  Life was never supposed to be like this for a hockey hero. As West Coast humorist Eric Nicol once so charmingly put it, “For any God-fearing young Canadian, the ultimate reward is to be chosen for the NHL All-Star Game. If he later goes to Heaven, that is so much gravy.”

  Bob Gainey played in four National Hockey League All-Star games. He once told his road hockey and rink-rat buddies back in Peterborough, Ontario, that he was going to grow up to become captain of the Montreal Canadiens, and he did, for half of the sixteen years he played in Montreal. He won five Stanl
ey Cups. He won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player in the playoffs. He was so brilliant defensively that his abilities inspired the league to create a new trophy, the Frank Selke, to honour the checking forward—and he promptly won it the first four years. When he retired, he was elected to the Hockey Hall of Fame. He had been a lock for years.

  Now fifty-two, Bob Gainey had a work ethic as a player so strong that former Montreal goaltender Ken Dryden, himself a Hall-of-Famer, called his old teammate and still-close friend “the playing conscience of the team.” When Gainey became captain, he thought the captain of the Montreal Canadiens should be able to speak the language of the team’s fans, so he taught himself French, practising with his francophone teammates and reading grammar books on team flights while others played hearts and slept.

  He came by such extreme dedication honestly. George Gainey had served in the war and, for four decades, walked daily to his factory job at Quaker Oats. When Bob Gainey became captain of the Canadiens, he insisted on living close enough to the old Montreal Forum that he could walk. When he became general manager many years later, he moved close enough to the Bell Centre that he can still walk to work. George Gainey shovelled his own driveway; Bob Gainey shovelled his, and when Montreal city crews came along trying to do the local captain a favour, he would shoo them away. George Gainey was a humble man who never talked about himself or his war. Bob Gainey does not hang his career on the walls, nor is he comfortable talking about it. “My father,” says twenty-nine-year-old Anna Gainey, Laura’s older sister, “is a very private man.”

  George and Anne Gainey had five children and Bob, the youngest, was the hockey star. He was also an altar boy in a very Catholic family. His mother once told the Dallas Morning News that her son, then working for the Dallas Stars hockey club, had once come down with a mysterious limp that was cured through nine days of prayer and devotion. She wondered if perhaps it was a “miracle.”

  Whatever it was, he returned to play and went on to star for the Peterborough Petes, the local junior hockey club. Bright—some say one of hockey’s brightest minds—he showed no head for school, failed once and struggled to finish high school. He was also so painfully shy it took ages for the local hockey star to ask out Cathy Collins, a pretty usherette at the hockey rink. Cathy was the fifteenth of nineteen children in another Catholic family, as outgoing as he was reserved, and soon they were together forever. Only Bob Gainey had no idea then how short forever can sometimes be.

  “Life,” former NHL coach Fred Shero used to say, “is just a place where we spend time between games. Hockey is where we live, where we can best meet and overcome pain and wrong and death.”

  It is, unfortunately, just a little more complicated than that. Life between games meant four children coming along in fairly quick succession—Anna, Stephen, Laura and Colleen, the baby. Life meant retirement and then a happy year in France, where he played and coached and worked on his French and the children all became fluent themselves. Life meant coming back to the NHL to take a job with the Minnesota North Stars and moving the family to the United States. And life meant the first of two telephone calls that no one—whether starring on the ice or faceless in the crowd—should ever have to go through.

  The North Stars were in Winnipeg playing the Jets when, after the morning skate, Gainey received a message to call home. He did and five-year-old Colleen answered. “Daddy! Daddy!” she cried. “Mommy’s on the floor in the bathroom—she’s not moving!”

  It was a brain tumour. Cathy Gainey had massive surgery and, over the coming months and years, gruelling radiation, chemotherapy, good news, bad news, more surgery and, ultimately, impossible news. She fought it for five years; she moved her family when the North Stars left Minnesota for Dallas. She was ever optimistic even when she knew. She was only thirty-nine years old when the cancer won.

  The two older children were off at school and, of course, dramatically affected, but the two younger, Laura and Colleen, were traumatized. It is too simple to say they felt anger and abandonment, but that is what is said because no one can possibly know and the young often cannot say. Little Colleen fell into depression and spent time in a clinic. Laura, ten when her mother died, also fought depression and, early into her teens, fell into drugs and bad company in Dallas.

  It was a tough, almost impossible time to be a single father with a public and demanding job. On this warm spring day in 2007, less than five months after Laura’s own death, Bob Gainey permits himself a small, sad smile: “It wasn’t the first time I’d had a phone call about Laura at four o’clock in the morning.” He intervened. At one point, he and two of his assistant coaches physically removed Laura from a house. Finally, she was put in a rehabilitation clinic in Topeka, Kansas, stayed nine months—“most kids stay just thirty days,” he says—and came out clean and ready to try, at least, a new start.

  Ed Arnold, managing editor of the Peterborough Examiner and a long-time family friend, learned that Laura was showing interest in photography and had her come to this small city in Central Ontario and cover briefly for a vacationing photographer. First day on the job, she learned of a hostage-taking situation and, somehow, walked through the police lines to take a dramatic photograph of the incident. Her father laughs to remember her first day’s work ending up on the front page. “She was a tough, kind of no-fear, straight-ahead young woman,” he says.

  Laura moved back to Canada and tried her hand at art, at working with children, at environmental studies and then, on sister Anna’s suggestion, signed up to train on one of the tall ships. She instantly fell in love with sailing. She found her legs at sea.

  She seemed to want so much out of life so quickly that her father often wondered what was driving her. Cathy’s death from brain cancer was not the first in her large family, and the concern is that there might be some genetic connection. “Laura was kind of a risk-taker,” Bob Gainey says, “thinking that she might not have all that much time. I don’t know how big of a play it had in how much she wanted to grab out of life and how quickly, but it had some.”

  After that first voyage, she returned home, dropped her bags at the front door and announced, “I want to go back.” She finally did, joining the Picton Castle for what would turn out to be such a fateful voyage. “She kind of reached a point,” says her father, “where she decided if she was going to scratch that itch, she had to get back on the ship.”

  There was no smooth sailing from the rehab centre in Kansas to the dark and windy night of December 8 off Cape Cod, but she was getting there. “She went through different stages,” he says, “and she was still in a growth stage at twenty-five.” What she was, her siblings knew, was happy at last. They could read it in her e-mails. They heard it from the friends she made in the crew. She was also good at sailing, so good that the accident should never have happened. But for whatever reason, she had to see for herself that night and paid a price youthful curiosity should never pay.

  They began to search the following day. At this point, all that was known in Canada was that a crew member had been washed overboard. A woman, and Canadian. The story didn’t even make the front pages. It was only as the weekend closed that word came that the young woman was the daughter of a Canadian hockey legend. And suddenly it was front-page.

  They were hopeful at first, of course. “You grasp onto whatever amount of hope there is for a period of time,” Bob Gainey remembers, “and then you expand it.”

  “You instantly think the worst,” says Anna Gainey. “There were twenty-two-foot seas that night and gale-force winds. You like to think it was quick, and peaceful. But then you start to backtrack. You think twenty-four hours, thirty-six hours, forty-eight hours, always hoping for something.”

  The United States Coast Guard searched and Canada also got involved. A friendly congressman from Texas got the Coast Guard to extend the search for a day, but finally the young captain in charge of search and rescue, a man who had not once previously let pessimism seep into his announcements
, said they could only “send out one more plane—and when that’s done we have to pull our resources.”

  By now, they knew. There would be no miracle. This was not some mysterious limp that went away while the family prayed. This was hard fact: no Laura, no body, no hope.

  Bob Gainey says he likes to think he has some spirituality in him, but not the sort of faith that helps others get through such tragedy. “Some people,” he says, “can find enormous strength in that area, but I don’t. You don’t turn away from the possibility, but …”

  Coming from Central Ontario and working in Montreal, Minneapolis and Dallas, Gainey had no sense of the sea and did not even comprehend the sheer vastness of it—and the impossibility of finding anything—until he flew over the site himself on a clear day. “It wasn’t in my wheelhouse that there was danger involved here,” he says, shaking his head. But when he thought about the conditions that night—wind howling, waves sheering off, salt water blinding—he understood how instantly disaster could strike.

  But what did it mean? It was only in talking to close friends from the Maritimes that he began to understand. “They all know someone who has been lost at sea,” he says. “They know what it means.” The best answer came from Anna, who told her father: “If Laura’s wishes had been known, and if her body had been found, she probably would have been put back into the sea.”

  But still he had to deal with it. Somehow. His inclination might be to go it alone, but his friends and the Canadiens organization weren’t about to let him. It had no sooner happened than the Gaineys were swamped with support. Even in the weeks when, he freely admits, he became “disengaged” from his work with the hockey club, others moved in to fill the space he left.

  He considered briefly that he should step aside, that he had been rendered useless, but he couldn’t see how that would accomplish anything. Besides, none of his trusted friends or colleagues had even raised the possibility. Instead, they thought he should get busy and keep busy. And, given his background, he agreed with them. He would carry on.