by Al Strachan
But Mark Messier (who else?) told the team that he did not expect to lose the second game, and sure enough, on a goal by Brett Hull, Canada won 4–3. No one was churlish enough to point out that in every international game he ever played, Hull was on Team USA, not Team Canada.
“I always wanted to play in Russia,” Gretzky said, “and I wish I could have done it twenty years ago. But for our age, I think the level of play was pretty good and everyone was trying, so that made it fun.”
Even so, Gretzky later said that no one should expect to see him on the old-timers’ tour. Events like the Russian series will be a rarity, if they happen at all.
“I work for the TD Bank [doing promotional work] ten days a year,” he said in 2013. “I’ve got my restaurant [in downtown Toronto] and my wine company. Other than that, it’s pretty quiet. I don’t do a whole lot.”
And he tries to be a good father to five kids—three boys and two girls. “You can only do so much,” he said. “All you can do is try your best, and then the rest is up to them.”
As California kids in 2013, they’re heavily into the social media. Gretzky, of course, is not. With a laugh and a shake of his head, he says, “I always tell my kids, ‘I spent thirty years trying not to let people know what I was doing, and you guys spend every day telling everybody exactly what I’m doing.’ ”
For the most part, Gretzky skates only at his annual fantasy camp. The first was held in Los Angeles beginning in 2003, but when Gretzky went to Phoenix, so did the camp. Once Gretzky left the Coyotes, the camp moved to Las Vegas. What better place to stage a fantasy?
It’s not cheap—$11,999 per person—but it gives well-heeled fans a chance to experience an NHL training camp and is so highly regarded that there is no need for advertising. For Gretzky, it’s an opportunity to raise money for the Wayne Gretzky Foundation, the charitable organization he founded in 2002, which provides less fortunate youth with a chance to experience hockey. The foundation has donated more than a million dollars towards equipment and ice time on the premise that playing hockey instills positive values in young people.
The fantasy camp not only helps the charity but gives Gretzky an opportunity to do something he loves. “I really enjoy being around people, especially people who love hockey,” he said. “When people come to the camp, they’re excited about it, so I’m excited as well.”
Other players of Gretzky’s era take part, and the coach of the 2013 version was Mike Keenan. As would be the case in the pro ranks, equipment, meals and lodging are all provided. But there are also a couple of Las Vegas evenings that would never get the approval of Gary Bettman.
Even with the camp, Gretzky’s life today is a far cry from the hectic lifestyle he had when he was playing hockey for nine or more months a year and trying to satisfy a demanding fan base the rest of the time.
“I look back at that and there are some days when I miss it and there are days when I don’t,” he said in 2013. “But I’ve got no plans to get back into hockey at the moment. I think it’s time to take a break.”
Then he laughed and said, “The Kings wanted me to get involved with their team the summer before last, and I didn’t. Maybe I should have. I could have got my name on another Stanley Cup.”
I told him that when I retired, I didn’t miss the travel or the job, but I do miss the camaraderie, especially the part that comes after the job is over for the day.
“That’s the part you can’t replace,” agreed Gretzky. “Being with the guys. Even when I was coaching in Phoenix, one of the best parts was having dinners with the trainers or assistant coaches. That’s the part I miss. Just sitting around with guys I played with and guys I worked with and guys like you, and sitting around and hearing the stories of hockey and all the players over the years.”
Gretzky still watches a lot of games. Over the course of an extended conversation, he makes references to specific players, and it’s clear that he’s every bit as conversant with the league now as he was when he played and coached.
“I love the game now,” he said. “I think the game is a good game. I think the players are better than we were. I think the equipment is better. I like the refereeing. I think the hooking and holding are pretty much out of the game. If you can’t skate, you can’t play.”
Even so, there must be changes that he would like to see.
“I think the biggest thing is the sticks,” he said. “I think the graphite sticks have taken out a little bit of the feel. I know the shots are harder, and it’s rougher on the goalies. But I think that these players are so good, if they went back to wood sticks, they’d have more feel of the stick. Consequently, there would be way more plays. They don’t have the same feel we had.”
When asked if he would ban those sticks if it were within his power, his answer was quick and unequivocal. “I would,” he said.
He’s not critical of today’s players, just some of their equipment. “From an overall aspect, these guys are so much better than we were,” he said. “That’s not a knock, because when I grew up, we put the chubby kid in net. Now, these goaltenders are the best athletes on the team. Grant Fuhr kind of started that, then Patrick Roy and Martin Brodeur. The goalies now are all such good athletes. That’s the biggest difference in the game. You don’t score from centre ice any more.”
I suggested to him that if today’s rules were in place when he was in his prime, he would have left his existing single-season records of 96 goals and 215 points in the dust. It’s not unreasonable to assume that he could have had something in the neighbourhood of 130 goals and perhaps even 300 points.
He didn’t argue. After all, brilliant though he was when the teams were at full strength, he was devastating when the Oilers had a power play. If they got a five-on-three, you didn’t wonder if they’d score, you wondered how long it would take them.
“We used to get a five-on-three every ten games,” he said. “You can get two five-on-threes a game now. When I played, you’d have to brutalize a guy to get that second penalty.
“Now, you get six to ten power plays a game. Your power play has to be so good now because you can really capitalize on power plays. Sometimes we’d go three games with just one power play a game. That’s the biggest difference.”
He didn’t have to do the arithmetic, but it was there. In his prime, he played an eighty-game season. Surely if all today’s extra power plays were awarded, he would be involved in an average of one extra power-play goal a game. Assume that he scored one-third of those goals and got an assist on the others. Add those numbers to his best season and you get 123 goals and 295 points. And that’s just allowing for power-play increases. It does not take into account how many more points he’d have by virtue of not being hooked and grabbed all night long as he was in the 1980s.
As for today’s rules, he’s fairly satisfied. While many hockey people, especially those who are offensively oriented, would like to see a reduction in the size of goaltenders’ equipment, Gretzky concedes that a modification wouldn’t be easy to implement.
“It’s hard to do that because every goalie is a different size,” he said. “You can’t say that a guy who’s six foot six has to wear the same equipment as a guy who’s five foot eleven. That’s hard to enforce or monitor.”
And when it comes to making the nets larger, he’s totally opposed. “No chance,” he says vehemently. “That would be criminal.”
But there is one rule today that bothers him.
“I think it’s a real art to carry the puck up the ice and into the zone on a power play,” he said. “Guys like Ray Bourque and Paul Coffey and Brian Leetch and Denis Potvin all could do that. Now, when you get a power play, the rule says you start it in their end. I’m not a big believer in that rule.
“Carrying the puck is a skill. Guys like Brian Campbell in Florida, that’s what they do. But you don’t get to see it as much any more because you start every power play now in the offensive zone. That’s the other thing I’d change.”
&nbs
p; When he makes these observations, he’s talking about professional hockey. For the youngsters, he has a different plan, one he has formulated over the years. We often talked about it in his playing days and we did so again in 2013.
“I’ll tell you this, and I’ve been telling Bob Nicholson for years,” he said. “When kids play, they should have a smaller net. It doesn’t make sense to me that a ten-year-old goalie should have to defend the same goal as Marty Brodeur. If they made the nets smaller for the kids, it would teach the shooters more accuracy.
“In baseball, my twelve-year-old son doesn’t play with the same bases as my nineteen-year-old son. In little-league football, they use a smaller ball. The younger kids are smaller people. I think the nets for those kids should be smaller, because the way it is now, the goalies are so small compared to the nets that some shots, they have no chance on. I’d put in a lighter puck for kids and smaller nets.”
He feels that, instead of four feet by six, kids’ nets should be three feet by five. The puck should be an ounce or two lighter. “With the smaller nets,” he said, “the kids would have more fun, and the puck would be smaller so they could shoot it harder.”
He would also like to see less structure—more opportunity for the kids to just go out there and play without adult involvement. “Bobby Orr and Guy Lafleur and Gordie Howe and Jean Beliveau, these guys all grew up on outdoor rinks and ponds,” he said. (And, for that matter, so did Wayne Gretzky.)
“They all got together with other kids and played pond hockey. We’ve sort of lost the imagination in the game a little bit. Everything is so structured now at a young age that we’ve lost a little bit of that creativity. That’s where their imagination all came from, but now everything is so structured and not just in hockey.
“I see it in baseball too. We used to go down and play baseball with just eight people, just barely enough for a game. But now, if the kids don’t have nine players on each team and a coach, they’re a little bit lost.”
He once told me he was watching a kids’ hockey practice near his California home one day and was amazed. “I was sitting there with my brother-in-law (the late Mike Brown) and said, ‘Wow, these kids are ten years old.’ I was really impressed. These are ten-year-olds in L.A. and they were flying around and around, backward and forward. I thought, ‘There’s something wrong here. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something wrong.’
“Then they threw a puck out, and the pace dropped by 50 per cent. The Europeans, every drill they do, they do with the puck,” Gretzky says. “With the majority of our kids, as soon as the coaches come on the ice, they put the pucks away. When it comes time to handle the puck at full speed, the kids can’t do it.
“When we were kids, we’d go out to the pond or the river or the rink, and the first thing we did was get out a puck. Everybody wanted to carry a puck.
“Nowadays, if you get fifteen or twenty kids and say, ‘Okay, we’re going to play five-a-side pond hockey; change when you’re tired,’ I’ll bet you 90 per cent of the kids would say, ‘What position do you want me to play?’
“They don’t just go. We used to just go. Now, everything has to be so organized for these kids, they don’t know what to do.”
If there is something happening in hockey at any level that Wayne Gretzky doesn’t know about, it isn’t worth knowing. Hockey has been his life, and the game has been well rewarded for his involvement. As the game’s best player, always subjected to the scrutiny of a relentless spotlight, he did nothing more controversial during his career than call the New Jersey Devils a Mickey Mouse team.
The fact that he was right didn’t seem to matter to anybody. The Oilers were so much better than the Devils that the score would have been one-sided no matter who was in the nets for New Jersey. But Gretzky was upset that a close friend had to suffer the embarrassment of being the goaltender.
“The silly thing about it is that I was protecting my old friend and teammate Ron Low that we beat 13–3 that night,” he explained. “Had he not been in net, it would never have happened.”
With today’s media being what they are, Gretzky couldn’t get through life unscathed. He took some underserved hits during the so-called gambling scandal, and he came in for criticism for the job he did with the 2006 Olympic team, much of it from the same people who had been disparaging of his job with the 2002 team until it came together in the final week and won the gold medal.
Oddly enough, a large proportion of his criticism has come from Edmonton, even though he did more than anyone to put the city on the map. Not long before Gretzky retired, his longtime teammate Craig MacTavish became embroiled in a heated discussion with some members of the Edmonton media who had been critical of Gretzky.
It’s an exchange that bears repeating because MacTavish is representative of almost everyone who has ever met or played with Gretzky—even most members of the Edmonton media.
When MacTavish, an assistant coach with the New York Rangers at that point, confronted them about their stance, one asked, “Do you think that Gretzky should never be criticized?”
“I do,” replied MacTavish. “What has he ever done that he deserves criticism? He has never put money ahead of the game. He never missed a training camp or a practice. He was always there to play for Team Canada. You get other players kicking and screaming that they want this guaranteed and that guaranteed before they’ll play. Some of them won’t play under any circumstances. Gretz has never shirked his responsibility. He just shows up and plays for his country every time.
“Don’t you think he would have liked a summer off like everybody else? He is the greatest ambassador the game has ever seen. In hockey, we’re in competition with all the other sports, and until he came along, hockey was almost unnoticed. Then he was so remarkable that he got all kinds of publicity for hockey.
“The guy almost transcends the game itself. The things he has done for the game of hockey—and all the players who have played the game of hockey in his era—speak for themselves.”
To this day, Gretzky has the highest Q Score of any hockey player. That means that, worldwide, no hockey name is more recognizable than his. There will be other great players in the game, and some of his records will be broken. But most likely, so many of his records will prove unassailable that a new set of benchmarks—those established in the post-Gretzky era—will be established.
Gretzky didn’t merely break records, he shattered them. At the time, it was assumed that Gretzky was just the latest step in hockey’s evolution and that, before long, others would surpass his marks. But as of this writing he has been gone from the game for fourteen years, and there is no indication whatsoever that his important records are in any danger. The NHL norm has slipped back to the levels that existed prior to Gretzky. In some cases, it has even slipped well below levels that preceded Gretzky.
And at the risk of belabouring the point, even though it was mentioned earlier, it is so important that it deserves mentioning again. No matter how great a hockey player he might have been, he is every bit as great a human being.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A book like this can’t be written without a lot of assistance, and the amount given by Wayne Gretzky was virtually limitless.
Over the years, he has been unfailingly helpful, and I feel tremendously fortunate to have been able to count him as a friend.
This is the section that allows an author to thank those who helped him write his book, but in this case, the acknowledgement goes much further than that. Without Wayne’s help, there would have been no book.
There were also many others who contributed to the cause. Marian Strachan once again applied her eagle eye and sharp pen – or whatever the computer equivalent of the latter might be – to the raw product and got it to the point that we could turn it over to Lloyd Davis at Random House.
I’ve never quite understood people who can meticulously question every statement they read, but I am absolutely delighted that Lloyd is such a person. He saved me
from tremendous embarrassment on a number of occasions by catching a lot more errors than I would like to admit I made. But I made them and Lloyd caught them.
Steve Ludzik and Mike Keenan provided some superb reminiscences of their interaction with Wayne. Scott Morrison, a friend for many years, also played an important role when we talked to Wayne about his last game.
Another friend, Bob Goodenow, supplied not only some memories but also a number of ideas and a fair amount of guidance. All of it was valuable and appreciated.
Lucie Leduc was kind enough to put aside whatever was going on in her life to give priority to the book, almost all of which was written in Florida when more pleasant pastimes were beckoning. Gail MacDonald and Dave Carter were also in Florida, and, as usual, they helped keep me on course.
Roy MacGregor, who has writing skills I can only covet, once again generously contributed a wonderful foreword and shared some memories of our time with Wayne in Europe.
Jenny Bradshaw is the kind of editor that every author longs for: intelligent, supportive and understanding, even in the face of incessant whining.
On the business side, Brian Wood generated the concept and made sure those who made commitments lived up to them – including me. And if, despite all this help, the book still contains errors, don’t blame any of these people. The fault is mine.
PHOTOGRAPHIC CREDITS
FIRST INSERT:
loi1.1: © Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
loi1.2: © Lane Stewart/Sports Illustrated Classic/Getty Images
loi1.3: © Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
loi1.4: © Bruce Bennett/Getty Images
loi1.5: © Bruce Edwards/The Canadian Press
loi1.6: © Bruce Bennett/Getty Images; loi1.6a © Focus on Sport/Getty Images
loi1.7: © Focus on Sport/Getty Images