Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  The NHL, she argued, did not own the Cup, as the league had long claimed. And after legal action by a group of Toronto recreational players, an out-of-court settlement backed her contention. Clarkson’s initial idea was to have women play for the Stanley Cup, but when that proved impossible—and women players, in fact, insisted that the Stanley Cup was a men’s trophy—she turned her attention to a new trophy suggested to her by people who wrote and e-mailed in support: the Clarkson Cup.

  “This, to me,” said Cassie Campbell, captain of the Olympic team, “completely legitimizes women’s hockey. This is our Stanley Cup—there’s no turning back now.”

  The obvious relief expressed by both Wickenheiser and Campbell, the two biggest stars of the women’s game, had to do with a growing sense that women’s hockey was beginning a downward turn. With elite competition boiling down to only two teams, Canada and the USA, the legitimacy of the sport had reached a point where, as Campbell said, “there was a real fear it might be dropped from the Olympic program.” In fact, this was precisely the talk at the Turin Winter Games up until Sweden stunned the Americans, and all women’s hockey, by reaching the finals against Canada. The emergence of a third force and the creation of a serious cup could not have come at a better time for the game.

  “This is big,” said Campbell. “It’s not just about Canada, it’s about the world.”

  “We needed something that the world of women’s hockey can focus on,” added Wickenheiser. “It’s something people can relate to. That’s going to be our Stanley Cup.”

  Initially, Clarkson’s intention was to have the trophy played for by the best women’s teams in the country, but negotiations between the east and west elite leagues faltered to a point where she decided, instead, to turn it over to Hockey Canada to administer. The first band will hold the names of the women who won Olympic gold, but future bands are expected to be for individual teams.

  The new silver trophy was built by Inuit artists working under Beth Biggs, who teaches art at Nunavut Arctic College in Iqaluit. Pootoogook Qiatsuk, who did the engraving, says he was “speechless” when asked to work on it. Clarkson, known for her love of the North, never thought of having it built anywhere else. “It’s out of the North that ice comes,” she said. “Get it?”

  Bob Nicholson thinks everyone will. “Young boys have their dreams of winning the Stanley Cup on the streets and ponds,” said the head of Hockey Canada. “Now young girls have their own dream.”

  Clarkson is acutely aware that, for the general public, only two governors general in Canada’s 139-year history have registered: Lord Stanley, who left his name on a hockey trophy, and Lord Grey, who attached his to the one for football. “You hope you do something that catches on,” she said. “But you just can’t know.”

  The Stanley Cup has been hoisted in American cities since 1994, and it’s just possible that if the Clarkson Cup is still being awarded when it too is 114 years old, the Swedish or Chinese woman raising it will not have a clue where it came from or who Clarkson was.

  If that happens, said Clarkson, the Cup will have accomplished her goal. In 1892, Lord Stanley spent ten guineas on the silver bowl that has been hoisted, dropped, kicked, bent and even lost for periods of time—only to survive as the most recognizable sports prize in North America. Yesterday afternoon during the photo shoot to honour the gold medal winners in junior hockey, sledge hockey and, of course, women’s hockey, a cry suddenly went up from the front row.

  “Where’s the Cup?”

  “Where did we put it?”

  Hopefully, in the history books.

  The Clarkson Cup did indeed become a major focus for women’s hockey. Montreal defeated Toronto 5–0 at the Barrie Molson Centre after a four-day tournament that also featured teams from Brampton and Minnesota. Several Canadian and American Olympians were on the teams, as well as players from Europe.

  IN PRAISE OF HOCKEY MOMS

  (The Globe and Mail, March 3, 2005)

  Not much is known about her … She always stayed in the background …

  They were, understandably, at a loss for words when it came to describing Phyllis Gretzky, when her family announced this week that this special woman—mother of Wayne, Canada’s greatest hockey hero, wife of Walter, Canada’s national hockey dad—is undergoing treatment for lung cancer.

  They don’t even know her age. And that, of course, would be just fine with Phyllis Gretzky. She’d just as soon have it that no one even knows she is ill. But when your last name is synonymous with the national game …

  “The funny thing is,” her son said in his 1990 autobiography, Gretzky, “my mom isn’t even that big a hockey fan. She only wanted the kids to be happy.”

  She raised four sons and a daughter, and insisted on equal treatment even if the media had eyes for only one. She drove the kids to their games, pinched budgets to pay for new equipment and stood up for her children as any other parent would. When the extraordinarily gifted Wayne shone so brightly that other jealous parents would boo him, she froze them out; there are still people in Brantford, Ontario, Walter once said with a chuckle, whom she refuses to speak to for things they yelled at her son thirty years ago. She once told hockey great Bobby Hull to mind his manners around her boy.

  Hockey mothers are an understudied group when compared to hockey fathers, who are forever being analyzed as the guiding light, the inspiration, at times the overbearing, even destructive force in a hockey star’s life. Even Wayne Gretzky is too often seen as the creation of the easygoing, decent Walter when common sense argues that Wayne Gretzky did not pop, fully dressed, from a hockey dressing room.

  “A lot of people know about my dad,” the younger Gretzky wrote back in 1990, “but the sacrifices my mom made to put me into the NHL never get talked about.”

  True, and there are a great many other stories of hockey mothers who should be better known:

  How Mike Modano, the captain of the Dallas Stars, developed one of the hardest shots in the game in the family basement back in Michigan, his mother, Karen, standing at the far end in goaltending equipment and holding up a battered garbage can lid for him to fire away at.

  How Pierrette Lemieux would shovel snow into her Montreal home, spread it over the floor and pound it down hard so that young Mario and his brothers could continue their street hockey under indoor lights.

  How Tatiana Yashin, who had once been a national volleyball player in Russia, would ask for a coach’s tape after each NHL game her son Alexei played for the Ottawa Senators, the two of them staying up into the early hours of the morning going over his positioning and plays.

  How Laurette Béliveau had industrial-strength linoleum installed in her Victoriaville, Quebec, kitchen so that her boys, Jean and Guy, could keep their skates on while eating and then head right back out to the backyard rink.

  How Katherine Howe gave her cripplingly shy son, Gordie, all the support and encouragement that her brusque husband (who thought the gawky child “backward”) could not.

  “It was through the kindness of my mother,” Gordie once told an interviewer, according to Roy MacSkimming’s fine Gordie: A Hockey Legend.

  She took a couple of hard-earned dollars, either one or two or whatever it was. There was a lady who was trying to feed her family during the Depression and she needed some milk money, so my mother gave it to her. She in return gave her a gunny sack, and when that was dropped out onto the linoleum, there was a pair of skates fell out. My sister grabbed one, I grabbed one, and we went outside. We skated around on the pond at the back of the house. She got cold and went in and took the skate off, and that was the last she ever saw of it. I fell in love with hockey that day.

  There is, today, a new breed of hockey mothers who play the game themselves and who, like Olympic champion Hayley Wickenheiser, bring their little boys out onto the ice to share moments of triumph.

  And yet there will always be something to celebrate in those parents who, like Phyllis Gretzky, merely offer unconditional supp
ort, usually quietly. She offered it to her five children; she gave it to Walter after he suffered an aneurysm in 1991. His remarkable recovery, he says, was only possible with the support and patience and, yes, prodding of Phyllis.

  Calgary poet Richard Harrison has a poem he calls “Hockey Moms” in which he speaks of those mothers who sit in the stands “with nothing but your breath to hold.”

  That situation has now been reversed. It is the ones Phyllis Gretzky watched who now hold their breath. And trust that, as has so often happened in the past, the game turns in their favour.

  Phyllis Gretzky died in December 2005.

  AMERICAN DEFENDER: ANGELA RUGGIERO

  (Ottawa Citizen, February 6, 1998)

  NAGANO, JAPAN

  They will still point to the $25 million that Canadian centre Joe Sakic will be paid this season alone by the Colorado Avalanche, and they can, if they have the adding machines capable of doing so, total the annual payroll of the Canadian men’s team until it reaches approximately $125.7 million.

  But the most important dollar of all at these, the twenty-eighth Winter Games, may turn out to be a soggy, sweat-stained bill that is taped to the inside of Angela Ruggiero’s helmet. It has been there for more than three years; it will stay there until the United States of America, not Canada, wins the Olympic gold medal in women’s hockey.

  There are two players instantly noticed on the ice any time the Americans and Canadians play—and they are expected to meet again here in Nagano for the all-important championship game in the first-ever women’s hockey final. Both players are remarkable for their youth, their size, their hard shots and their passion for extremely physical, passionate play.

  The Canadian, of course, is Hayley Wickenheiser, the big, nineteen-year-old forward from Calgary upon whose shoulders so much of the rising pressure to win is starting to fall. The American is Angela Ruggiero. Slightly larger and slightly younger, having just turned eighteen, the big American defender is the one player who most rattles the Canadians, the one the Americans look to to change the flow, to block momentum, to make the statement that this is not just another hockey game, it will be a battle for Olympic supremacy.

  Both young women know they are endlessly compared. Wickenheiser was asked this week which of the two is “tougher,” and she diplomatically sidestepped the issue. People debate their shots—both slapshots wildly beyond the weak flips of most of the other players—and referees pay particular attention to both for very good reason.

  In a game that is, so far, supposed to be non-contact, the two strongest teenage players in the world have spoken out this week in favour of playing full body contact, just like the men. “I wouldn’t mind seeing it,” says Ruggiero. “I have a size advantage—why not use it?”

  She already does, says Wickenheiser. “She’s physical,” the Canadian star says of her American alter ego, “and she definitely takes the body.”

  Ruggiero grew up in California, where her first hockey role model was, of all people, then Los Angeles Kings enforcer Marty McSorley. Unusually for women’s hockey, she calls herself a “role player.” She gives better than she gets, and if someone dares try and get her, she smiles and says, “I’ll get a number.”

  The smile is enchanting, slightly mischievous, and says nothing about Ruggiero being perhaps the only woman hockey player who has lost a tooth to the game—mind you, she did it running into a door last summer while filming a Visa commercial on the U.S. women’s team at Lake Placid. There is also a scar on her chin where she took three stitches after colliding full force with another player when she was the only girl playing in Conejo Valley, California.

  She began playing the game almost by accident. Her father, Bill, then a glass worker, had grown up in Connecticut and wanted his boy, Billy, to play the game, and when he took six-year-old Billy down to the local rink to sign him up, the organizer complained that there might not be enough kids interested to make a team.

  To help out, Bill Ruggiero also signed up Billy’s sisters, Angela, then seven, and Pamela, then eight. Pamela soon quit, but Angela liked the game and stayed with it. She was bigger than any of the boys. She eventually became the protector for the entire team.

  This is a truly remarkable athlete. She has starred in soccer, lacrosse and basketball, as well. She holds junior state records in javelin, discus and shot put. And she has her choice of Ivy League colleges offering her any number of athletic scholarships. “Lucky for us,” says U.S. coach Ben Smith, “somebody gave her a pair of skates.”

  She hated it when they made her switch over to play with women. “The first women’s game I ever saw,” she says, “I played in.” But gradually her size and skills began to pay off. At fifteen she received an invitation to try out for the women’s national junior team.

  Her father took a dollar bill out of his wallet—“a lucky dollar”—and taped it to the inside of her helmet. It will help you win, he told her. It is still there, she hopes still working.

  Only just turned eighteen, she feels a pioneer in something very, very special. “In Canada,” she says, “hockey already is their national sport. But if we could walk away with the gold here, the game would explode in the States.” Besides, she adds, “We’re the only team sport in these Olympics that America can really grab onto.”

  Her father now runs a small rink in Grosse Point, Michigan, just outside Detroit, and last June she went home for the first time, pulling into downtown Detroit on a train just as the parade was getting under way for the Stanley Cup champion Red Wings. She got a sense there of what winning can mean, and what it will feel like if the Americans can triumph over the powerful, and favourite, Canadians.

  But she also knows that such sweet victories are meant to be shared, and that her father cannot be here for the simple reason that he cannot afford to come. Unlike their NHL counterparts, the women players have no league, or players’ association, or personal wealth to take care of such matters. Which only makes Bill Ruggiero’s lucky dollar bill all the more valuable—and, perhaps, all the more powerful.

  Angela Ruggiero was only eighteen when she led her Team USA to an upset victory in the 1998 Winter Games. She is now thirty-one and still a fixture on the American defence as well as a member of the Boston Blades of the Canadian Women’s Hockey League. In 2003, the Hockey News named her the best women’s hockey player in the world. She graduated cum laude from Harvard University and has written a memoir of her incredible athletic career.

  THE WAYNE GRETZKY OF WOMEN’S HOCKEY: HAYLEY WICKENHEISER

  (Ottawa Citizen, April 7, 1997)

  It is a story that, in time, may enter the sacred mythology of the game. They will tell of Hayley Wickenheiser’s midnight skate as they tell the story of the neighbour dropping off a pair of old skates in the poor Floral, Saskatchewan, home where Gordie Howe was growing up.

  It will become women’s hockey equivalent of Pierrette Lemieux packing snow onto her living room carpet in Montreal so her child, Mario, could play indoors, of Walter Gretzky taking his son, Wayne, out onto the backyard rink in Brantford, Ontario, and teaching him to carry a puck around Javex bottles, of Réjean Lafleur going into his son’s bedroom in Thurso, Quebec, and finding ten-year-old Guy sleeping is his hockey gear, fully dressed for the weekend.

  Hayley Wickenheiser’s story takes place in Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, on a clear, cold December night in 1985. Tom and Marilyn Wickenheiser are lying in bed when they hear a mysterious noise. It is not the baby, Jane. They know it cannot be the four-year-old, Ross, nor seven-year-old Hayley, both of whom went to bed earlier, exhausted, from a long day of playing on the neighbour’s rink.

  Tom Wickenheiser hears the noise again. They have just had the kitchen redone, so perhaps it is just new wood settling. He gets up and goes downstairs: nothing. He goes to the sink for a drink and stands there, staring out at the night. A clear sky, probably twenty below and still only a little past midnight. The sound again. He leans into the window, staring, and across the yard and across the
alley, he sees something moving. A small shadow moving up and down the rink in the dark. And the sound again, of course: the sound of a puck on a stick.

  “I knew there would only be one person who’d be out there,” he laughs.

  His seven-year-old daughter had been out for more than an hour. She had slept, awakened and slipped out with her equipment after she knew her parents were asleep. “It didn’t matter about the light,” Hayley Wickenheiser remembers, “I could feel the puck.”

  Perhaps no one in women’s hockey feels it better these days. Only eighteen years old, Hayley Wickenheiser is referred to as “the franchise” by officials in Canadian hockey. She is the inspiration for tomorrow’s players; she is the hope for today.

  When this country emerged triumphant in the Women’s Hockey World Championship in Kitchener, Ontario, on Sunday much of it depended on the way the puck felt on the stick of Hayley Wickenheiser. “I’m very excited,” she says.

  And with good reason, for consider for a moment how Hayley’s comet has shone: most valuable player in the gold medal game, 1991 Canada Winter Games, named to the national team while still a fifteen-year-old bantam, gold medal winner in the 1994 world championships in Lake Placid, New York, and earlier this month chosen player of the game as she led the Edmonton Chimos to the national championship.

  In theory, she could be nineteen years old next year with two world championships and an Olympic gold medal to her credit and still with her best playing days ahead of her. The first-year general sciences student at the University of Alberta is one of the larger players (five foot eight, 163 pounds) in the game, but also one of the most skilled. A fine puck carrier with an excellent shot and extraordinary strength, she models herself on her childhood hero, NHL star Mark Messier, though she has often been referred to as “the Wayne Gretzky of women’s hockey.”