99 Page 2

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said, “I can’t let you in until Mr. Gretzky calls. I might do it for some people, but Mr. Gretzky is the nicest person in this entire community and I wouldn’t want to do anything to upset him.”

  Throughout his career, Gretzky gave away approximately seven hundred sticks a year, which he paid for himself. He signed approximately two hundred autographs a day. His large dining-room table is usually covered with all kinds of memorabilia that fans, his personal assistant, his father, Walter, charities and so on have sent for him to sign. Every time he goes past the table, he’ll sign ten or so, then continue on to wherever he was going.

  “I don’t know what my dad does with all of them,” he told me once. “I think he must stand down on the street corner, asking if anybody wants one.” When we were chatting in 2013, I reminded him of that and he laughed.

  “Nothing has changed,” he said. “I just sent him a box of about a thousand that I signed over a two-week period and I stuck in a note saying, ‘Happy Father’s Day.’

  “He’ll call and he’ll say, ‘I don’t have any pictures,’ and I’ll say, ‘I just sent you five hundred or a thousand. What do you mean, you don’t have any?’

  “ ‘Well, they go fast,’ he says.”

  Even though Gretzky no longer plays, his father still loves hockey and Wayne makes sure he can see games in person.

  “I get him two season tickets to the Leafs,” Gretzky said, “and I think he goes to 90 per cent of the games. He goes down to the restaurant before the games and he says hello to everybody and then he goes to the game. He loves it. It keeps him young. It’s actually really good for him. He’s an interested NHL fan. He doesn’t really root for one team or another, but he still likes to see the players.”

  In an era when sports stars are known for their arrogance and their disdain for their fans, not to mention their criminal lifestyles in too many cases, Gretzky always exceeded every expectation—in a positive sense. For years, even though he was recognized as the greatest hockey player in the world, he did interviews in every city on the NHL circuit. Naturally enough, he was always the one the local TV rights-holder wanted to talk to between periods. He would stand patiently in front of microphones and cameras, answering questions and promoting hockey, often in areas where the game badly needed promoting. He never skipped a morning skate, even on those rare occasions when he didn’t go on the ice, because he knew that no matter what might be happening in hockey that day, the media would be looking for his perspective.

  He spent his entire professional career—two decades as an active player—in the harshest of spotlights, and there was never once a justified hint of impropriety on his part. There were no suspensions, no court cases, not even a temper tantrum. The so-called “scandal” regarding his involvement in a betting ring that came after his playing career had concluded was a 100-per-cent fabrication, 90 per cent of it created by the media, the other 10 per cent by NHL commissioner Gary Bettman.

  Instead, Gretzky’s magnificent career is studded with honours, awards and adulation—Hart Trophies, Art Ross Trophies, Lady Byng Trophies, Conn Smythe Trophies and Stanley Cups, followed by the inevitable Hall of Fame induction. He is the only player in NHL history to be so esteemed that the league retired his number. No NHL player will ever again wear the famous 99.

  In 1998, when he was thirty-seven and feeling his age a bit, he turned down an opportunity to play in the world championship, the annual tournament in which Canada competes using players whose NHL teams are out of the playoffs. But until then, on every single occasion for nineteen years, Gretzky answered every call to play for his country. He never was too busy to play for Canada in Canada Cups or the World Cup or the Olympics. He never was too tired to make the transatlantic trip to play in earlier editions of the world championships. He never developed mysterious back or groin ailments that prevented him from participating in all-star games.

  In 1994, the first of the three hockey seasons curtailed by a Bettman-imposed lockout, he organized a European barnstorming tour that caused mob scenes wherever it went in Scandinavia and Germany, raising the NHL’s profile accordingly.

  He even had a hand in the Stanley Cup triumphs of the Dallas Stars, Carolina Hurricanes, Anaheim Mighty Ducks and Tampa Bay Lightning. Were it not for Gretzky, it is almost certain that the NHL would not be established throughout the American Sunbelt.

  Even the Los Angeles Kings, Stanley Cup winners in 2012, might not exist. Before Gretzky arrived in L.A. in 1988 and made the Kings the darlings of the southern California sporting scene, the team had filed for bankruptcy. There was considerable speculation that the Kings would either fold or move.

  But Los Angeles is the glitter capital of the world, and when Gretzky arrived on the scene and was embraced by all the beautiful people, he brought hockey the California acceptance it had long coveted. In turn, the Los Angeles media machine trumpeted the Kings’ success, thereby making NHL expansion into other locales in the southern United States a viable proposition. In a more direct example of Gretzky’s impact, Michael Eisner, the head of the Walt Disney Company, spurred by his son’s adulation of the Kings and Gretzky, had Walt Disney Studios make the movie The Mighty Ducks. Then Eisner bought an expansion franchise for Anaheim and named the team after the film.

  About the only criticism of Gretzky to surface regularly is that he is too revered by the media. It’s a strange criticism. Why is it wrong to consistently praise someone who rightly, and equally consistently, deserves it? It is easy to be negative, but if the critics were able to come up with one single serious flaw exhibited by Gretzky in his life, then their arguments might be taken seriously.

  Where has he gone wrong? He was not only an outstanding hockey player, he is also an outstanding Canadian. He was instrumental in getting the 2010 Olympics for Vancouver, partly because wherever he has gone, he has represented his country with grace, dignity and eloquence. If spreading the truth about a great man is somehow unacceptable, then there is something tragically wrong with the media business. If there has ever been a superstar who is as thoughtful, personable and humble, he has not come to the attention of people who cover sports today.

  Someday, far down the road, there may be another player who can match Wayne Gretzky’s achievements. But there almost certainly will never be another player who can match his achievements and do it with his class.

  CHAPTER TWO

  In North American sports, the great players sooner or later find their way to New York. Hollywood makes the movies, but New York makes the news. So it was only fitting that Wayne Gretzky would end his career with the Rangers.

  He had done Hollywood with the Los Angeles Kings and, in the process, changed the face of the National Hockey League.

  Now he would do New York.

  It was to be a three-year stint, the winding down of a glorious career, and even though this period wasn’t as productive as earlier stretches, it was perhaps the most eventful. He was embraced by the notoriously fickle New York fans; he was reunited with his buddy Mark Messier; he suffered an injury that appeared to be serious enough to put a premature end to his career; and finally, despite the pleas of family and friends, he decided that it was time to retire.

  When he arrived in New York in 1996, he was thirty-five, and indisputably no longer what he had been in his best days. He was still a dominant player and among the league’s top point-getters, but when you’ve been head and shoulders above everyone else in the world, merely being one of the best is cause for introspection.

  He was still the league’s reigning statesman, the ultimate authority on all things related to hockey. He was the one who was sought out for an opinion whenever a contentious issue surfaced—which it often did in the NHL. It was his presence in Los Angeles that had convinced entrepreneurs of the merits of hockey and had, as a result, spawned NHL franchises throughout the American Sunbelt.

  Gretzky’s idol had always been Gordie Howe, the man known as Mr. Hockey. But Howe had earned th
at title in an earlier era. Now, as the twentieth century neared its end, Wayne Gretzky had become Mr. Hockey to fans all over the world. He had set record after record, not merely edging past the previous mark but leaving it in the dust. He was a child prodigy who, unlike many such youngsters, had lived up to his billing as an adult. In fact, he had not only fulfilled all early expectations of him, he had surpassed them.

  Yet in 1996–97 incredible though it may seem, he started to lose confidence in his ability. Halfway through his first season with the Rangers, after having been laid low for a while with a particularly virulent strain of flu, he said, “I don’t think there’s an athlete in the world that plays at the top of their game who has not had a problem with their confidence level at some point. When I came here, I was nervous. If you hear it enough and see it enough, that people don’t think you can play, subconsciously, you may start to believe it.”

  The funk didn’t last long. A few chats with Messier restored his confidence, and his switch back to a wooden stick—a Hespeler—helped him regain his touch. Also, travel with the Rangers, whose divisional rivals were all nearby, was such a breeze that he was usually well rested.

  For most of his days with the Oilers, Gretzky had flown on commercial flights. To avoid being pestered, he would sit in the window seat in the last row and either sleep or pretend to do so. The Kings had their own plane, but because of their location in southwestern California, the players often felt that the only way to rack up more air miles was to be an astronaut.

  Once he settled in, Gretzky enjoyed New York. He lived in an apartment at Madison Avenue and 63rd Street, within easy reach of the best that Manhattan has to offer—the fine restaurants, the theatres, the museums and all the other attractions.

  The proprietor of a friendly nearby delicatessen reserved a booth for Gretzky, and most mornings he’d drop in for breakfast in relative anonymity. The booth was hidden from street view, and usually he was able to eat without being disturbed. Occasionally, a fan would engage him in a chat—which he didn’t mind—but he was never mobbed.

  “New Yorkers are great,” he said as we were having our deli breakfast not long after he had joined the Rangers. “Out on the street, they’ll recognize me and they’ll usually shout or say something, but then they just go on their way. There are lots of celebrities in New York, so they don’t get too excited.”

  Even so, the New York experience was never quite what Gretzky had hoped it would be. After the first year, Messier left for a windfall contract in Vancouver. The Canucks’ management tried to atone for the mistakes they’d made a year earlier when they failed to sign Gretzky by offering Messier a fantastic deal. It was so good that he collected his final payment—which was based on an appreciation in the team’s value—in 2012.

  Without Messier or a comparable replacement, the Rangers missed the playoffs the next year, which didn’t please Gretzky in the least. But it was in the third year that his hockey world started to crumble. The Rangers were playing some of the best hockey of his tenure, but for a full month, he was on the sidelines with a serious back injury.

  It was the second major back injury of his career. The other had been caused when Gary Suter ran him into the boards during a Canada Cup game, and he was out of action for half of the 1992–93 season.

  The latest back injury was unrelated. “The one in L.A. was a T6 [vertebra],” Gretzky explained. “This is a C5. This is more upper back, lower neck. It’s a different part of the back.”

  This one was also different in that it wasn’t the result of one specific check. It was the result of repeated abuse. Throughout Gretzky’s career, a goal scorer often received a cross-check in the back when he raised his arms in celebration. This was so much the norm that when one of Gretzky’s teammates, Craig Simpson, asked for a penalty to be assessed, the referee said, “What are you complaining about? You scored, didn’t you?”

  Gretzky’s back had been bothering him for a long time, but in typical hockey fashion, he had done his best to play through the pain. Finally, in late February 1999, he could do so no longer and had to come out of the lineup.

  “Yeah, that’s why I’m mad at myself,” he said after watching from the sidelines for three weeks. “I didn’t get it checked. I had it all year and I didn’t know it. I would have missed games then, and not now.”

  The Rangers had climbed back into the playoff hunt while Gretzky was out of action, and naturally enough, he would have loved to have been a part of it.

  “Depressing?” he said, repeating a question I had put to him. “It’s the worst—especially now our team is playing so well.

  “It hit me about once a month, for about a six- or seven-day cycle,” he said. “My neck and the right side of my body were really sore. I just thought it was one of those things. You know when you get a good night’s sleep but maybe sleep on it wrong and get a stiff neck? That’s what I thought I had. We played in Edmonton on a Sunday (February 21), and I got up Sunday morning and I couldn’t move the right side of my body. I almost didn’t play in Edmonton, but I said, ‘Jeez, I’ve got to play here.’ So we just heated it all day Sunday and Monday [before that night’s game in Calgary], but both games, I had to play with one arm because I couldn’t move the right side of my body.”

  Two days later, in New York the problem was worse than ever. Gretzky approached coach John Muckler and said, “John, I can’t even hold my stick. I had better get this checked.”

  The team doctors put him on a three-stage plan. “I was on an oral anti-inflammatory for two weeks,” he said. “That was the first step. That was the plan all along. The team went away, and I couldn’t do anything anyway, so I went to Florida.”

  But when he came back in mid-March, tests showed that there had been no improvement. At that point, the medical staff gave him a steroid injection. Despite the general bad name that steroids have in the sporting world, in this case they were administered by a team physician and certainly weren’t intended to be performance-enhancing, but rather, performance-enabling. They were meant to get Gretzky back in the lineup.

  “It’s a steroid that they hope will eat away at the inflammation,” said Gretzky after the first injection. “Now I have to wait until next Tuesday, and if I still have the same kind of symptoms, I get another shot. I guess you can do these shots three times over three weeks.”

  Despite being in constant pain, he hadn’t lost his sense of humour. “If it doesn’t take after three weeks,” he said, “then I guess we’re on to Plan C—and I don’t know what Plan C is.

  “Hopefully, these shots will work. The doctor says he has had worse cases that the shots have worked on, and he has had easier cases where it hasn’t taken, so we don’t know.”

  As it happened, two steroid injections did the job and Gretzky came back, but not before he had missed a month of action and twelve games.

  To Gretzky, it was clear that his career was coming to an end. First, there was no guarantee that the pain would not return. Second, the person he most trusted to evaluate his playing skills—his father, Walter—wasn’t saying much. He knew that his son was harbouring thoughts of retirement, and he wasn’t ready to push him in that direction. Wayne, however, was acutely aware that, although the great hockey mind was still there, his body could no longer be counted on to do what it was told.

  As the schedule wound down and the Rangers’ playoff hopes slipped further and further away, there was increased speculation that this season would be Gretzky’s last, even though he was still the Rangers’ leading scorer. And whenever he had a chance to play with top-flight talent, his own skills became even more visible. At the All-Star Game two months earlier, he had been named the most valuable player.

  With five days left in the season, the speculation ended. Larry Brooks and I—in the New York Post and Toronto Sun respectively—announced that Gretzky would retire after the final game, a Sunday afternoon affair in New York.

  Gretzky himself stopped just short of confirming the news because he
had promised the Rangers that the official announcement would be made in New York, and the team was on the road. But he did not deny the published stories.

  On the Thursday night, the Rangers played in Ottawa, Gretzky’s last road game and his last game in Canada. Earlier in the day, we had exchanged a few words, and as so many others had done, I told him I’d be sad to see him go.

  “Don’t you try to talk me out of it, too,” he said with a smile. “I spent two days fighting off Janet and Barney.” (Janet is his wife and Barney was his agent, Mike Barnett.)

  He said the decision was not based on any animosity toward the Rangers, who had offered him the opportunity to be traded to any team in the league if he preferred to continue his career elsewhere. The wear and tear, however, had become too great. He admitted he was still bothered by the injured C5 vertebra in his neck and was planning to have at least one more steroid injection in the summer because he still had trouble turning his head.

  Even so, the Ottawa fans clearly wanted him to reconsider.

  “Just one more year, Wayne,” read a banner hung on the wall outside the Rangers’ hotel.

  The Corel Centre staff working the visitors’ dressing room had used white tape to affix a simple message to the front of their shirts: “NO.”

  The rabid pro-Senators crowd recognized that they were witnessing a momentous event and applauded the announcement of Gretzky’s name in the starting lineup. They applauded again when he won the opening faceoff, although, as usual, it didn’t look as though his opponent, Alexei Yashin, was trying very hard. The fans also cheered when the scoreboard flashed an image of Gretzky sitting on the bench and a recording of Tina Turner’s “Simply the Best” was played.

  With a little less than five minutes remaining in the game, the fans broke into a chant of “One more year! One more year!” Then, with Carly Simon’s “Nobody Does It Better” booming from the speakers, the fans gave Gretzky a thunderous ovation.