Wayne Gretzky's Ghost Read online

  ALSO BY ROY MACGREGOR

  NON-FICTION

  Northern Light: The Enduring Mystery of Tom Thomson and the Woman Who Loved Him

  Canadians: A Portrait of a Country and Its People

  The Dog and I: Confessions of a Best Friend

  The Weekender: A Cottage Journal

  Escape: In Search of the Natural Soul of Canada

  A Loonie for Luck

  A Life in the Bush

  The Road Home: Images of the Ottawa Valley

  The Home Team: Fathers, Sons & Hockey

  The Seven A.M. Practice: Stories of Family Life

  Quantity Time: Words of Comfort for Imperfect Parents

  Road Games: A Year in the Life of the NHL

  Chief: The Fearless Vision of Billy Diamond

  Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada (with Ken Dryden)

  FICTION

  Canoe Lake

  The Last Season

  The Screech Owls Series (for young readers)

  Forever: The Annual Hockey Classic (for young readers)

  PUBLISHED BY RANDOM HOUSE CANADA

  COPYRIGHT © 2011 ROY MACGREGOR

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2011 by Random House Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited.

  www.randomhouse.ca

  Random House Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  this page is a continuation of this copyright page.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  MacGregor, Roy, 1948–

  Wayne Gretzky’s ghost : and other tales from a lifetime in hockey /

  Roy MacGregor.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-37605-3

  1. Hockey players—Canada—Biography. 2. Hockey—Canada.

  3. Sportswriters—Canada—Biography. 4. MacGregor, Roy, 1948– . I. Title.

  GV848.5.A1M297 2011 796.962′092271 C2011-901975-2

  Cover image: © ANDY CLARK/Reuters/Corbis

  v3.1

  For my older brother Jim, in appreciation of his hand-me-down skates, his table-top game, a million first-one-to-ten shinny matches and his own great passion for the national game.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface: A Game for Life

  1. WAYNE GRETZKY’S GHOST

  2. THE NATIONAL GAME The Dance of Life—The Opening of a New Season

  The Heart of Hockey

  3. LEGENDS OF THE GAME Mario Lemieux’s Long Journey

  Going it Alone: Mats Sundin

  No “Ordinary Joe”

  Steve Yzerman: the Long Journey from Doubt to Belief

  Saint Patrick of the Nets

  Within Arm’s Reach: Ray Bourque

  The Quiet Perfection of Paul Kariya

  A Flower for All Seasons: Guy Lafleur

  King of the Kings: Marcel Dionne

  Captain Marvel: Bobby Clarke

  Skating to a Different Drummer: Borje Salming

  The Throwback: Bryan Trottier

  Jean Beliveau at Seventy-Five

  Playing Against Bobby Orr

  4. STARS The Absurdity of “Sid the Kid”

  OVIE OVIE OVIE!

  The Third Eye: Daniel and Henrik Sedin

  Quick Coming of Age: Drew Doughty

  The Evolution of Kris Letang

  Marc Savard’s Long Journey

  The Price Is Right

  Kesler’s the Total Package

  5. THE CHARACTERS The Prime Minister of Saturday Night: Don Cherry

  Gratoony: The Irrepressible Gilles Gratton

  No Middle Ground: The Strange Career of the Gifted Alexei Kovalev

  The Dreamer: Alexandre Daigle

  The Power of the Pest: Brad Marchand

  6. BAR DEBATES The Lightning-rod Commissioner

  A Man’s Game

  Lost at Sea: Hockey Night In Canada

  Death to the Fourth Line

  Penalties that Mean Something—Now There’s a Concept

  How Wayne Gretzky Ruined Hockey

  Riddle Within an Enigma: Just How Good is Martin Brodeur?

  Nicknames

  Net Analysis: Eccentricity or Genius?

  The Monotonous Safety of Clichés

  Superstition: The Ultimate Intangible

  The Case Against December Babies

  Photo Insert

  7. BEHIND THE BENCH The Courage of Roger Neilson

  Coach of the Year; Firings of the Year: Ted Nolan

  The Not-So-Glory Days

  Coach Gretzky

  8. THE ELEMENTS Good, Warm, Fuzzy Memories

  Joy of Road Hockey

  Wally’s Coliseum: The Melting of the Gretzky Backyard

  9. ANGUISH The Hole in Bob Gainey’s Heart

  Lessons from Swift Current

  Guy Lafleur’s Nightmare

  The Cloud Over Viking

  10. IT’S NOT JUST “A MAN’S GAME” A Scandal of Minuscule Proportions

  Women’s Gold a Record

  The Triumph of the Clarkson Cup

  In Praise of Hockey Moms

  American Defender: Angela Ruggiero

  The Wayne Gretzky of Women’s Hockey: Hayley Wickenheiser

  11. THE WORLD’S GAME O Come, All Ye Faithful

  The Dominator: Hasek at Nagano

  Ryan Smyth: Captain Canada

  The Whole World Wants Us to Lose

  Salt Lake City Gold

  Debacle in Turin

  The Golden Goal

  International Tournaments vs. Stanley Cup

  Canada’s Little Big Man: Ryan Ellis

  Déjà vu, 1972?

  Mark Visentin and the Third Period from Hell

  Acknowledgments

  Photo permissions

  About the Author

  PREFACE: A GAME FOR LIFE

  My mother, bless her heart, kept things that otherwise would have been tossed years ago. My grade twelve report card, for example—where the principal has written, in red pen, “Going! Going! ____ !!” along the bottom of a long list of marks in the thirties and forties, leaving me to fill in the blank he thoughtfully provided—“gone!!”—the following term when I flunked every subject but English and phys-ed. I keep that report as a lesson that comebacks are possible in life, as well as in hockey.

  She also kept a red Empire scrapbook. It is little more than a cheap manila folder with the price—fifteen cents—still pencilled on the cover. The first page opens on me, eight years old, smiling out from a newspaper photograph that was taken on a day when our little northern town put on a special display for one of the Toronto dailies to show that life goes on in summer cottage country in the winter as well. Below that picture is a clipping from the weekly Huntsville Forester: “Goals by MacGregor Gives Auxiliary Tie With Hay & Co. 2–2.” The story begins:

  The Legion Auxiliary’s Roy MacGregor turned two spectacular solo rushes into a 2–2 tie with Hay & Co. Saturday morning.

  A highlight of a Huntsville Hockey League Squirt playoff game, MacGregor’s goals marked the second time Auxiliary had battled from behind a one-goal deficit.

  Young defenseman Michael Allemano was especially good for the Hookmen, breaking up many Auxiliary rushes. Both of the Hay & Company goals by Brent Munroe and John Newell, were scored on power plays.

  It is important to know
here that this is squirt hockey, age seven and eight, that the full name of the team is the Legion Ladies’ Auxiliary, and that the game was played on only one-half of the ice, a line of boards being temporarily erected so two games could go on at once. But no matter. This is what small-town hockey was all about in Canada in the 1950s and 1960s. So what if there were no “spectacular solo rushes.” I remember both goals vividly, one on a scramble, one on a slow shot the length of the ice that the goaltender fanned on. But the local paper knew what it was doing. Creating local heroes. And the day the paper came out there were grown-ups on Main Street who had noticed. An old relative even stopped me and said I’d soon be in the NHL. Damn right I would.

  Today the glue has dried and some of the clippings fall out when the fifty-five-year-old scrapbook is opened. “Pee Wee’s Cut Down Orillia,” “Pee Wee’s Batter Burks Falls.” The day we won the prestigious Wardell & Company trophy, the story began: “Anglo Canadian’s one-two punch of Harry Snowden and Roy MacGregor continued to spark the Hidemen at the Arena on Tuesday night …”

  This was pure glory. The teams had nicknames—the Hidemen meant you were sponsored by the local tannery, the Hookmen meant the local lumberyard—and the tiny goal scorers were transformed magically in the local paper into somebodies.

  I see on one page of the scrapbook where I have practised writing my autograph. I see with the grace of time how totally absurd the notion was that I would one day be signing programs and team jerseys thrust at me by adoring fans. But I smile at the small-town myth for the harmless, happy days it gave me and God knows how many thousands of others. Hockey, for many of us, was the first time—and often the only time—we felt we truly mattered.

  Dreams fade, but there is no reason for fun to follow. I may have peaked at age twelve or so, but so be it. I kept playing long after it was obvious there would be no BeeHive Corn Syrup picture of me in a Chicago Blackhawks uniform. I played house league every year, on Huntsville all-star teams several seasons and one winter played juvenile hockey for another town, which involved driving yourself to and from games around the District of Muskoka. Not much of a “career” in competitive hockey, but enough to instill in me a love of this game that is as strong today as it was the first time I looped a ridiculously vain “R” in that red scrapbook.

  I do, however, have one great regret in hockey, and that is that, like so many other average players, I stopped playing once there was no more competitive hockey available. For almost a dozen years I never played, only to be drawn back to the game in the late 1970s by the rise of recreational hockey. And once back, I returned with a vengeance, playing several times a week, coaching minor hockey for a dozen years in three different centres and even coaching one of our daughters, Christine, and our son, Gordon. My greatest achievement in the game today is to be on the same ice as Gord and his pals each Monday evening for an hour, where for a brief fantasy hour no one points out the obvious thirty-five-year-gap between the players still sticking fast to wooden sticks and the players with the two-hundred-dollar composite sticks. In part, that is because there is no one there to point out anything—no fan ever showing up to watch a game far better seen from the bench than from the stands.

  My father played hockey. There is a picture on the wall of him—dark hair parted like a centre line—posing with the 1927–28 Eganville Senior Hockey Team. He “retired” at twenty-two when he headed into the Algonquin Park bush, where he would stay for the rest of his working life. In his eighties, retired, he came a couple of times to old-timer tournaments I played in with the Rusty Blades of Ottawa. “You have no idea how lucky you are,” he once said. “We had no opportunity to keep playing.”

  I do know. And I plan to keep on playing for as long as it makes sense. Or doesn’t—who really cares?

  It is somewhat ironic that I would dream as a child of a life in hockey and end up with a life in hockey far removed from that original dream. At age eight, I could never have imagined how this would happen. But long after the NHL career dream broke, I chased another in journalism and eventually found my way back to hockey.

  Even that was not planned. Though I often wrote profiles of NHL players while working in magazines during the mid- and late ’70s, my journalism ambition was to write about politics. For more than a dozen years I covered Parliament Hill, beginning with Today magazine and gradually working through the Toronto Star, Maclean’s magazine and the Ottawa Citizen. Though I handled sports for Maclean’s and, while with the newspapers, periodically would be assigned to hockey stories—world championships and Canada Cups—I never figured to work full-time in hockey.

  All that changed in 1992. The Citizen was going through a policy change, wanting Hill reporters to pay for their own parking rather than accept the free parking made available to all Hill workers. There was some thought, however silly, that by accepting the parking spot—a heavy hike down a steep hill to the side of the river—we were somehow compromised. Fine, I said in a memo to the editor, Jim Travers, but the paper will have to pay for at least a good portion of a downtown parking spot. One summer day, I got a call from Travers, who sadly would pass away in 2011, asking me to join him for lunch.

  “I have a solution for your parking concerns,” he said.

  “Excellent,” I gloated.

  “You’re covering the Ottawa Senators from now on.”

  I was stunned. I thought I was a political columnist. I thought I had the pulse of the nation, as we like to say, but I didn’t even have a finger on my own pulse, it seemed. I never saw this coming, though perhaps if I had thought about it I might have. A couple of years earlier Ken Dryden and I had written Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada, and the book had been a huge success.

  The Ottawa Senators were just starting up and Travers wanted to reorganize the sports department, installing me as the hockey columnist and the national editor, Graham Parley, as sports editor. Both of us were given a day to think about it. Neither of us required a day: we jumped at the opportunity.

  And so began my return to the life that had first been imagined in that old frayed scrapbook. I wrote a book, Road Games, about that first year covering the Senators—easily the funniest and most enjoyable assignment I ever had—and then The Home Team: Fathers, Sons & Hockey. In 1995, publisher Douglas Gibson of McClelland & Stewart approached me with an idea: to produce a series of hockey books aimed at the young “reluctant reader,” a.k.a. boys. I had never written a children’s book but agreed to try one, thinking that would be it. Soon there would be twenty-four books in the series, now also published in Sweden, Finland, the Czech Republic and China.

  Once the National Post started up in 1998, the chain took me from the Citizen and gave me a general column, though each spring I would move into sports to join fellow columnist Cam Cole on the hockey beat. In 2002 I left for the Globe and Mail and a general five-days-a-week column that touched so regularly on the national game that in 2010 they asked me to turn full-time again to hockey.

  The NHL—with all its growth, excitement and undeniable flaws—had obviously changed since my great heroes were Gordie Howe and Bobby Hull, wingers stayed to their sides and games were broadcast once a week, usually beginning in the second period; but so too had I.

  The one important thing that had never changed since that red Empire scrapbook first opened was a complete love of this magical sport that has, somewhat to my own great surprise, and totally to my great delight, become a game for life.

  Kanata, March 2011

  ONE

  WAYNE GRETZKY’S GHOST

  “One more year!” the 18,500 gathered at Ottawa’s Corel Centre began to chant with 4:43 left in regulation time.

  “One more year! One more year! One more year!”

  He heard them—he even raised his stick in salute—but he wasn’t listening. Wayne Gretzky was finished. This would be his final National Hockey League game ever played in Canada, his home country, a 2–2 tie on April 15, 1999, back when the NHL still had ties, between the Ottawa Sena
tors and his New York Rangers. It seems a silly thing to say so many years on—“his New York Rangers”—as in Canadian eyes and hearts, and even imaginations, he is an Edmonton Oiler forever.

  Wayne Gretzky was thirty-eight years old that early spring day in Ottawa. He was, by his own measure, merely a shadow of what he had once been as a player. He had 61 points for his final season—“99” retiring in 1999—whereas he had once scored 215. He was, however, still the Rangers’ leading scorer, and had several of his lesser teammates only been able to finish on the perfect tape-to-tape passes from the corners, from the back of the net, that he had delivered all this game, not only would the Rangers have easily won but his point total would have been in familiar Gretzky territory.

  Still, he had missed a dozen games due to a sore disc in his back. He knew it was time. He had once said he would be gone by thirty, but his great hero, Gordie Howe, who had retired early and then returned to play till age fifty-two, had warned him to “be careful not to leave the thing you love too soon.” He had continued on past thirty but would not, he swore, be hanging on at forty.

  It had been a magnificent lifetime of hockey. Six teams—Indianapolis Racers and Edmonton Oilers of the World Hockey Association, the Oilers, Los Angeles Kings, St. Louis Blues and Rangers of the NHL—and he had won four Stanley Cups, all with the Oilers, while establishing a stunning sixty-one scoring records, many of which will never be broken. He had scored more goals than anyone who had ever played the game, and just to put that into context, he was never even really considered a goal scorer but a playmaker.

  He had been hearing the accolades since he was ten years of age and scored 378 goals for the Nadrofsky Steelers in his hometown of Brantford. “You are a very special person,” his father, Walter, had told him around that time. “Wherever you go, probably all your life, people are going to make a fuss over you. You’ve got to remember that, and you’ve got to behave right. They’re going to be watching for every mistake. Remember that. You’re very special and you’re on display.”