Wayne Gretzky's Ghost

by Roy MacGregor

  Messier, and to a lesser extent, Gretzky became her role models when she was that seven-year-old in Shaunavon, and it never occurred to her there was anything to prevent her from one day joining their team, the Edmonton Oilers, and playing alongside her male hockey heroes.

  “I hadn’t even heard of women’s hockey until I was about thirteen,” she says. “My aspirations were to make the NHL, just like any other kid. I was given that freedom to dream.”

  Since she was barely able to walk, she had pestered her father, a science teacher, to let her play the game he played for fun and the neighbourhood kids seemed to play obsessively. She was only four years old when, at the end of one of his recreational games, Tom Wickenheiser brought her out onto the ice and, for the first time, let her try skating with a stick and a puck. “I was pretty bad,” she says. But she also knew that she had found her calling.

  Shaunavon may have been a small town, but it was enlightened. Ken Billington and Jerry Mitchell were minor hockey coaches more than willing to welcome and encourage the youngster. Tom Wickenheiser also coached her, and her mother, Marilyn, became the team’s chief fundraiser. The other kids on the team, all boys, were glad to have her. “I don’t think they treated me any different,” she says. But, in fact, they did. She was, after all, the best player, the leader. “Really,” she says. “I had to be, being a girl. It was easier that way.”

  “They were very good about her being a girl,” says Tom Wickenheiser. “Actually, the parents gave us a harder time than the kids did.” The Wickenheisers are uncomfortable talking about it, but there were often scenes when the Shaunavon team travelled to other small towns. Parents would scream and swear from the stands; once three boys on an opposing team chased a frightened Hayley through the rink lobby. “Sometimes parents have a difficult time if a girl scores four or five goals and beats their team,” says Tom Wickenheiser.

  It is a parent’s tale Walter Gretzky would identify with. His own superstar child, Wayne, used to have to switch jackets with teammates before making the run from the visitors’ dressing room to the parking lot. “No one writes about how bitter parents are,” Walter Gretzky once said. “I have been on both sides of the fence and the saddest part is they don’t realize they have the best gift of all, a normal healthy boy. They are so busy resenting others who they think are better. They cannot accept that some boys are twice, three or four times as good as their son.”

  Or worse, that a girl could be twice, three or four times as good. “She’s very quick,” says Marilyn Wickenheiser of her daughter. “Her strong ability is to read the play so well, that’s helped her avoid any bad hits.”

  A few years ago the family moved to Calgary so Marilyn could return to teaching and Hayley could find more competitive teams. She has played both women’s and young men’s hockey, though the games are dramatically different. Women’s hockey, she believes, is far more “European” in its approach, with much more passing and far more emphasis on team play. Men’s hockey, with its hitting, is far more physical, far more concerned with scoring goals. Two years ago she was a late cut from a superior midget male AAA team, but she still likes to play the male game because of its high competitiveness.

  “It’s a different game,” she says of women’s hockey. “People are surprised at how fast it is. They can’t believe how much passing we do. There’s more to women’s hockey than scoring.

  “There’s respect out there.”

  Hayley Wickenheiser is now thirty-two. She is captain of the Canadian women’s team that won the Olympic gold in Salt Lake City (2002), Turin (2006) and Vancouver (2010). Twice she was named the tournament MVP. An accomplished softball player, she represented Canada in the 2000 Summer Olympics. She has played professional hockey against men in both Finland and Sweden. In search of competitive hockey, she returned to university in 2010 and played the 2010–11 season with the University of Calgary Dinos and was named Canada West Player of the Year.

  ELEVEN

  THE WORLD’S GAME

  O COME, ALL YE FAITHFUL

  (The Globe and Mail, December 31, 2009)

  Let the others put “In God We Trust” on their money—Canada puts its faith in different gods, with numbers on their backs.

  Abraham Lincoln is on the American five-dollar bill, pond hockey on the Canadian. The U.S. dollar coin depicts an eagle, symbol of liberty; the Canadian a loon, symbol of Olympic gold since it was secretly buried at centre ice at Salt Lake City to bring the men’s and women’s hockey teams luck—which the “Lucky Loonie” did.

  It is impossible to know this country without deep consideration of its national game and what that game will mean—for players and fans of both sexes—once the 2010 Winter Games get under way in Vancouver.

  This, after all, is a country where more people sing Stompin’ Tom Connors’s “Hockey Song” than the national anthem, a country where the “second national anthem” is a television theme song for the game, a place where the nightly news must wait each spring until the final scores are in, a culture where the most significant national event for Canadians of a certain age is not the end of war or the first step on the moon, but a puck going into a net on the other side of the world at 19:26 of the third period on September 28, 1972.

  It seems only right that Christmas is followed immediately by Boxing Day, when the country begins what has become an annual two-week celebration of a tournament played by teenage hockey players from around the world—whereas the rest of the world barely even notices. The World Juniors, however, pale considerably when compared with the Winter Games, which come along only every four years and have featured the best National Hockey League players only since Nagano in 1998—when Canada suffered collective heart failure during a lost shootout against the Czech Republic.

  Four years later, in Salt Lake City, six million Canadians tuned in to watch a great Canadian women’s team defeat their American archrivals for the gold medal. Three days later, a record 10.6 million Canadians—the northern equivalent of the American audience for Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moon walk—watched the Canadian men defeat the American men’s team for a second gold in the national game.

  This year, with the Paralympics immediately following the Vancouver Games, the goal is three golds in the national game—those gold medals unfairly, but accurately, mattering in a way that no other victory in any other sport can match. It is not just the national game, but the national sense of self. If Canada truly owns the game it invented, gold is a required confirmation. As the late poet and avid fan of the game, Al Purdy, once put it, hockey is “a Canadian specific to salve the anguish of inferiority by being good at something the Americans aren’t.”

  The Olympics, in fact, have arguably come to matter more than the Stanley Cup. No Canadian team has won the Cup since 1993 and the likelihood of this year producing both Olympic gold and a Canadian city staging a Stanley Cup parade is unlikely indeed. The Olympic gold—let slip away in 1998, won in 2002, blown in 2006—is within reach, while the Stanley Cup is increasingly out of reach.

  Little wonder, then, that such obsessive attention was paid over the preceding months on the naming of the final men’s roster, which took place yesterday. So breathless had the country become about this otherwise rather routine moment that one national media organization actually broke news that it had learned, from sources, when the team would be named. Such over-the-top attention puts enormous pressure on the players. But then, Canada is surely the only hockey nation to call a press conference, broadcast live across the country, to announce that no decision had yet been made on who would be the third goaltender on the team—a player who would not even be dressing for the actual games.

  At times, the pressure is so intense it explodes even off the ice. No one watching Canada’s 5–3 loss to the Soviet Union in Vancouver back in 1972 will ever forget Phil Esposito’s impassioned plea: “To the people across Canada—we gave it our best. To the people that booed us, geez, all of us guys are really disheartened. We’re disillusioned
and disappointed. We cannot believe the bad press we’ve got, the booing we’ve got in our own building. I’m completely disappointed. I cannot believe it. Every one of us guys—thirty-five guys—we came out because we love our country. Not for any other reason. We came because we love Canada.”

  Thirty years later, in Salt Lake City, the outburst came from Team Canada executive director Wayne Gretzky. “Nobody understands the pressure these guys are under,” a livid Gretzky told a post-game press conference after a lacklustre start by the Canadians. “The whole world wants us to lose!” Not quite. A more accurate claim would be “The whole country demands that we win.”

  Such expectations are hardly new. When the very first Winter Games were held in Chamonix, France, in 1924, Harry (Moose) Watson of the Toronto Granites sent a telegram from London to a Toronto newspaper, saying it had been a fine sail across the ocean but “our only hope now is that we can get to Chamonix at the earliest opportunity, so that we may start heavy training again and justify the confidence that has been placed in us and retain for Canada supremacy in the hockey world.”

  There was nothing to worry about. Canada won gold and big Moose set an Olympic scoring record—36 goals, including 13 in a 33–0 drubbing of the Swiss—that neither Alexander Ovechkin nor Sidney Crosby is likely to challenge.

  Sixty-two years later, however, little Switzerland shut out Canada 2–0 in Turin, Italy, sending Canada to its worst showing ever in Olympic hockey, a seventh-place finish that stunned, embarrassed and angered both players and fans. It has only served to ramp up the pressure heading into Vancouver, home ice advantage, home pressure disadvantage.

  The expectations, despite the disaster of Turin, will be nothing less than gold. Gold for men, gold for women, gold for sledge hockey. The one medal Canadian fans insist on.

  “That’s what you expect,” Cassie Campbell said in Salt Lake City when she captained the women’s team to victory. “And that’s what you want.”

  The Canadian men and women both won Olympic gold in Vancouver. Peak television ratings had more than 80 percent of Canadians tuning in.

  THE DOMINATOR: HASEK AT NAGANO

  (Ottawa Citizen, February 23, 1998)

  NAGANO, JAPAN

  “I think I hurt one of my teammates,” he said after. “I was so happy.”

  A half-hour later, the man Wayne Gretzky calls “the greatest player in the game today” sat at a press table and talked about what it meant to beat the Russians in the final of the first Olympic Games to feature the very best players of the National Hockey League. He didn’t know if there was any money involved. “There might be a bowl,” he said. “I don’t even care.”

  Sitting beside him, Robert Reichel picked up the glittering gold medal that hung from his neck and held it out to remind Hasek of what his country had just accomplished. “We care about this!” Reichel said.

  So too did anyone who had seen how the Olympic gold medal for hockey came to be placed around the necks of a team with the ugliest jerseys in the competition, a team where half the players aren’t even in the National Hockey League, a team where the greatest hero, Hasek, hides his face behind a wire cage.

  “A strange tournament,” Czech defenceman Jiri Slegr had called it. Strange indeed—and riveting, emotional and wonderful, as well. The Czechs had beaten a team, a fine team, of Russian superstars. Using a defensive system that had proved impenetrable to, in order, the best NHLers the USA could ice, the best NHLers Canada could dress and, finally, the best NHLers from Russia, the Czechs had taken their first Olympic gold medal in hockey.

  Russian head coach Vladimir Yurzinov had called it “a brilliant victory,” and it was. Russia’s Pavel Bure, the Olympics’ most exciting player, had staged rush after rush, but never once was he able to get in on Hasek. Hasek had, in fact, been required to make only two good stops in the game, one off Valeri Kamensky early on, and one off Andrei Kovalenko, who was left alone with the puck in front of the Czech netminder.

  “My job is to stop the puck,” Hasek said. As usual, he did his job to perfection.

  The moment of victory had come on a third-period point shot from Petr Svoboda that went in past the glove of Russian goaltender Mikhail Shtalenkov—giving Shtalenkov his first Olympic loss in thirteen matches—but the hero of the victory was Hasek. Perhaps he wasn’t much needed this final day, but without him, they never would have been in the final.

  Czech co-coach Slava Lener tried to downplay the significance of Hasek, but to little avail. “Maybe for the media and spectators,” he said, “they were stars like Dominik Hasek and Jaromir Jagr and Robert Reichel … but seeing them as coaches in the dressing rooms, there were no stars on this team.” It was, for the starless Czech players, a magnificent moment. They tossed their bouquets of flowers into the crowd and blew kisses at the singing, ecstatic Czech fans. Immediately after they left for Prague, where the party was already under way.

  Those who were left behind were left with two weeks of hockey from which many of them might never recover. The most significant point being made this final day of play was that the three medals had gone to three European teams, the Czechs, the Russians and the Finns, and that both the Czech team and Finn team were laden with unfamiliar names playing in leagues that have nothing to do with North America. “I am very happy,” said Yurzinov, “with the way European hockey was played at these Games.”

  Yurzinov, who did a masterful job of turning such Russian superstars as Bure and Kamensky and Sergei Fedorov into a surprisingly disciplined, effective team, took the opportunity to slap the NHL for treating European hockey as if it were nothing more than “a fun club”—not to be taken seriously. The time has come, he suggested, for a little “mutual respect.”

  “We’re not all supposed to pray to just one god,” he said.

  Whatever the various hockey gods were up to, in Nagano they produced what many are calling the greatest hockey tournament ever played. There was not a bad game played. There was not a bad team in the tournament. The Canadian team may have missed out on the medals, but nothing has been said here about shame or mistakes or bad luck.

  The Canadian team—well constructed, well behaved and well coached—missed going into the gold medal game by a single shootout goal that ticked in off both posts before it beat Patrick Roy. They missed a bronze medal by another goal, in a game against the feisty Finns where it cannot, and must not, be said that the Canadians did not try. They lost, fair and square—this time—to better players and better teams. There will be other chances, for it is also certain that the Olympic tournament, with NHLers, is here to stay.

  To those who might criticize Eric Lindros for failing to come through, let them know that he threw so much of himself into the game against Sweden—on one unforgettable shift taking three tough Swedes out before heading back to the bench—that he threw up before reaching the dressing room at the end of the game.

  Many Canadians had fine tournaments, particularly Rob Blake, who was named top defenceman in the tournament, even if popular opinion had Slegr tagged for that spot. Hasek, of course, was named top goaltender, but Roy was a close second. Bure, to no surprise, was the choice for top forward. Wayne Gretzky, at thirty-seven, might not have been a candidate for that honour, but it was an honour to watch him put everything he had into the Canadian effort.

  There is much to reflect on what was on display here in Japan. The hockey was fabulous—as Canadian head coach Marc Crawford put it, “remarkably entertaining.” Puck movement was the story—and, it must be said, where Canada came up short—and speed and skill were allowed to show themselves. There was plenty of hitting, often the equal of Stanley Cup playoffs, and the officiating—predominantly NHL—was awful.

  Players were ecstatic about the pace of the games. How quickly they were played and, with no time outs for commercials, how much momentum can count for, whether a team be in full assault or full panic. It should give the NHL pause to rethink its packaging of games.

  The key factor turned out
to be, as expected, the size of the ice surface. That extra fifteen feet of width, the deeper corners and the extra space behind the net creates an invigorating added dimension to the game, opening up matters just enough to remind fans how creative, how quick, and how thrilling this game can be. Sadly, the National Hockey League, while either building or renovating virtually every rink in its twenty-six-city loop this decade, failed to take the hint when it was suggested that they shift to the larger ice surface.

  “It becomes a different game,” Sweden’s Mats Sundin said after he had led his country to victory over the USA. “I didn’t think it was going to become a big issue, but I guess it is.”

  “Big ice is a big advantage, for sure,” said Slegr. “It’s the ice we grew up on.”

  “Definitely the bigger ice surface was an advantage to the Europeans,” said Czech co-coach Lener. The Americans and Canadians tried to adjust, but “they kind of get lost too often.”

  Some openly admitted they were lost, and most of them were the pure NHL snipers: Brett Hull of the United States, Brendan Shanahan of Canada. The Americans, however, fared far worse than the Canadians when it came to adapting. “That ice is so big you can get lost out there,” said Mike Modano of Team USA. “We’re a little bit out of our element,” admitted United States head coach Ron Wilson.

  By tournament’s end, there had been a profound shift in thinking about European hockey, and mostly due to what the ice surface had done. With no more “excuses” to fall back on, as had always been the case before, the North Americans could only accept, finally, that the European players are every bit as good—and in this case, better.