Wayne Gretzky's Ghost Read online

  It’s a long way to come, and he’s still not used to the change. Crossing Yonge Street, on his way to a favourite plate of chips and gravy in Toronto’s stuffiest hotel, the Royal York, he finds himself looking up in awe after all those years of Prairie flatlands. “Geez, you got a lot of tall buildings here, too,” he says, meaning that New York City, next door to Long Island where he’s playing hockey now, doesn’t yet sit well with him, though he’s been there since September last.

  Sometimes there’s a temptation to reach out and knock the straw hat off, except he hasn’t one, or at least pinch him to see if he’s real, though you already know he is, having seen him interviewed during the January NHL All-Star Game when he begged to say a “hello to my Mom and Dad,” which he did. The proof that it was no stunt could be seen in the remodelled farmhouse in Val Marie, Saskatchewan—about seventy-five miles directly south of Swift Current—where his father broke down and cried when he saw his son wave home from the television set, and his mother and sister threw their arms about each other and bawled.

  A month later, Bryan still talks about that all-star contest, remembering who sat where in the dressing room and who said what, and how he concentrated very hard not to talk too much or be too loud, or come on “as an intellectual” or anything, and how finally the pleasures rose too high and he just sat there chuckling and shaking his head.

  “The dream has not come true,” he says. “I am living the dream. And that’s better.”

  He came into the National Hockey League last fall with virtually no advance publicity, picked a low twenty-second in the 1974 amateur draft when he was only seventeen and one of many underaged players (seventeen- and eighteen-year-olds) taken in the league’s “secret draft” of that year (this was held to fight back against the World Hockey Association teams who were already signing the best of the young junior players, such as Mark Howe). Fully nine underaged kids were selected before him, so it was not as if he was anything that special in 1974; in fact, the team that selected him, the New York Islanders, advised him to stay another year in junior hockey, and he agreed to—thereby becoming the only one of the secret draft picks who did not immediately turn pro—and last year, while captaining the Lethbridge Broncos of the Western Hockey League, he was named the league’s most valuable player.

  Even so, no one anticipated what impact he would have on the NHL when he finally did arrive. Halfway through this current season he was already touted as a shoe-in for the rookie-of-the-year award in what has proven to be a bumper crop of first-year players. As the season began to wind down, Trottier was seriously closing in on Marcel Dionne’s rookie record of seventy-seven points, and he was somehow hanging in with the league’s top ten scorers—something NHL statistician Ron Andrews says has not been done since 1951–52, the season Bernie Geoffrion came to the Montreal Canadiens.

  But there was much more to Trottier’s arrival than the mere coming of yet another great talent. He is, as his former junior coach Earl Ingarfield puts it, “a throwback.” He has come out of the Prairies like a spring wind, and the feeling is something the long winters of expansion hockey had suppressed. With rare exception, the image of the post-1967 player has been one of an instantly rich, cocky, arrogant and conceited child, far more interested in his European cars, hair, clothes, women and fur coats than in doing anything for those less fortunate citizens who grew up listening to and watching hockey, treating it like a national heirloom.

  And then, while hockey limps through its worst year yet of diluted talent and embarrassing franchises, along comes a boy from Val Marie who offers some small hope for the way hockey once was, before the Hollywood era. First of all he has a different look to him: while so many of them seem like assorted covers of Gentleman’s Quarterly magazine, Trottier is like a kid whose mother has just sent him to the drugstore for Tampax. Painfully shy. A kid of French, Cree, Chippewa and Irish heritage who took the windfall of his contract and gave his parents all they’d ever hoped for. And for himself, when his 1966 Chevrolet half-ton blew up last fall he went out and replaced it with another ’66 Chevy half-ton.

  This is a kid the way Frank Boucher was a kid a half-century before Trottier. He has never smoked, has tried rye and Coke but once and didn’t like it, and seldom swears. He was even living in New York a full month before he forced himself into a good clothes store and traded his Prairies fare for some very conservative big city finery. He seems too good to be true, obviously, and it is somewhat gratifying to learn he does have a flaw, however small, in that he tells white lies about his salary. What he admits to is a mere (for hockey) $55,000 a year, which is about $20,000 below the NHL average. What he really gets is in excess of $100,000 a year, and that doesn’t even include the earnings from a $100,000-plus signing contract that was money up front before he ever even left the farm. He’s forgiven on this point only because a lot of players like to lie about their money—but they usually go the other way. Trottier lies because it seems to genuinely embarrass him to make so much.

  Actually, he was a pro of a type in his last year of junior hockey. He’d been drafted the previous spring from the Swift Current Broncos, and all that summer of 1974 he figured he’d be headed for New York come the fall. The Islanders, though, took a strange stand for a club still in the process of building a team. They told him he could have a guarantee on the contract they’d already discussed, the huge signing bonus would be put in trust, and the usual car bonus would be available, but they wanted Trottier to play one more year of junior in Lethbridge, Alberta, where the Broncos’ franchise had been moved.

  “Nobody needed players worse than us,” says the Islanders’ general manager Bill Torrey, “but he was only seventeen. We wanted to give him a chance to grow naturally. Had he come with us he might have made the team or he might have been sent down to Fort Worth. And we felt he’d be better off playing for Earl Ingarfield in Lethbridge. I think that shocked his family—Bryan was the most disappointed of all.”

  The agent for the contract deal was Montreal’s Dave Schatia, who set new records that very year with million-dollar contracts for Greg Joly in the NHL and Pat Price in the WHA. Schatia, despite his great experience, had never met anyone quite like Trottier, whom he still calls “the apple pie, ice cream kid.”

  “I’ve handled a lot of contracts,” says Schatia, “and when it came time for the car part of the deal they’ve wanted Maseratis, Lamborghinis, Jaguars and Mercedes. He’s the only one who ever came to me and asked for a Chrysler New Yorker.”

  Actually, it wasn’t Trottier’s choice. He’d gone first to his father and asked him what kind of car he’d always fancied, and when his father mentioned a Chrysler New Yorker Bryan made sure he got it. For himself he bought nothing. The big Chrysler became just one part of a continual effort by Trottier to pay back his father, Buzz. Growing up on his grandfather’s farm, as his father did, the family ties have developed into steel girders.

  Buzz Trottier taught his first son, Bryan (there are four other children), to skate on the same river he learned on, a river that spills out of a nearby reservoir and runs through the Trottier section-and-a-half, not thirty feet from the farmhouse. Bryan, as this verifiable myth goes, would be out even at forty below in the Saskatchewan winters, playing long into the night with the only two opponents he could recruit, his father and the family’s black-and-white border collie, Rowdy. True to a real-life juvenile novel, Bryan even taught Rowdy how to play goal, so Bryan could practise scoring. And Rowdy proved to be a determined competitor: when he died, at age eleven in Bryan’s last year of junior hockey, Rowdy hadn’t a tooth left.

  All along, his father tried to keep the youngster in the best equipment and with sharpened skates. To cover the costs of Bryan’s hockey equipment—and also to help the floundering farm and ease the $77-a-month rent on the house he took for three winters in Swift Current so the family could be near Bryan when he played—Buzz formed his offspring into a country and western band. Bryan played bass and sang, Buzz played rhyt
hm guitar and sister Cathy sang. They learned the latest Merle Haggard, Charley Pride and Buck Owens, and they hit the road every weekend, picking up from $6 to $40 a night in little Saskatchewan and Alberta towns, sometimes dipping down into Montana, where there was less trouble over the kids being underage.

  This unusual closeness created a boy who actually listened to every word his father said. When morning hockey practices made school virtually impossible, Bryan, who was a good to very good student in grade eleven, went to his father and told him he was quitting. “My Dad really scared me. ‘Well kid,’ Dad says, ‘now you’ve got to make it in hockey.’ And I knew right then and there that I had to make it if I quit.”

  Other fathers naturally began coming to Buzz Trottier with tales of teenage debauchery, asking for the production secrets on Bryan Trottier, but Buzz maintained he had no clear answers: “He has never ceased amazing me. He never talked back to us, never gave us an ounce of trouble. When he joined the band they started kidding him in the bars. ‘C’mon, Bryan,’ they’d say, ‘join us for a drink, have a double on us.’ And Bryan would say, ‘Sure, I’ll have a double—waiter! Would you bring me two glasses of milk?’ ”

  The way Bryan Trottier tells it, in Val Marie it was a quiet way, a sensible approach to life, and no one thought much about it. You did as you wished, and people generally knew you for what you had always been. “Out there,” says Bryan, “whatever happens in the family stays in the family.” But those times are over forever. Bryan Trottier has already set the media windmills in motion.

  When he hit New York last fall it was a little like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, updated, in a different locale, and with a game other than politics. People then saw Bryan Trottier’s way as a different way, a naive approach to life. He’s not religious, and it puzzles people that anyone would turn out this way without some holy commitment.

  Trottier’s freshness will be measured and assessed each season he remains at the top, and there are those who say he is already there to stay. It was not just the recognition in playing in the NHL All-Star Game before putting in a complete season as a professional. It was also being awarded the Calder Trophy for rookie of the year in all but actual ceremony. The natural question is: How long before the milk sours? How much attention and temptation can he stand?

  “I honestly don’t think pressure’s a factor in his case,” says the Islanders’ Denis Potvin, himself a much-celebrated rookie and winner of the Calder Trophy for 1973–74. “But if it is, he’s the guy to handle it.”

  Some people have already moved to protect him from the perils of fame getting to him too quickly. Warren Amendola, the president of Koho hockey equipment, heard in September that Trottier was still living in a hotel room, and so invited him to come and stay with him, his wife and three boys for a couple of weeks or a month, whatever it took for the young hockey player to get settled. Trottier is still there, with no thoughts of leaving, and though he likely makes at least as much as the president of a hockey equipment firm, he has yet to pay a penny in rent.

  “He’s a guest,” says Amendola, “and he’s here for as long as he wants to stay. I see myself as his American father, and I don’t like to see talents like his ruined. Lots of these kids are just thrown to the wolves. The clubs can’t exert the influence they used to. We treat him just like our own kids. He gets yelled at for not cleaning up his room, whatever. And Bryan’s head is as big today as the day he came in with us. He has no conceit whatsoever.”

  As for Trottier himself, he can and will speak out in assurance that it is not an act, that the unspoiled flavour runs through to the core, and that he is not going to change despite what the cynics say. “People keep asking me about the pressure, the rookie award and things like that, but I’ve never fully understood the meaning of pressure. The only thing you can do is go out and do your best at everything, whether it’s eating habits, hockey or just watching the way you dress.”

  Two-thirds of the way through this season he was still trying his best and abiding true to the outdated ideals he developed on the farm in Val Marie. After a very strong game in Toronto, during which he scored an unassisted goal by stealing the puck at centre ice and putting a hard shot through goaltender Gord McRae’s glove, he was sitting shyly and totally without pretension in the dressing room.

  “You played well tonight, Bryan,” said a sportswriter as he walked by.

  “No,” replied Trottier. “The team played well tonight.”

  Later, one of the Islanders came around with his little nephew, chasing autographs, which is often a difficult task with hockey players who have other things, like getting dressed and out of there, on their minds. When the youngster came around to Trottier, however, the farm boy from Val Marie stood up and shook his hand.

  Bryan Trottier went on to play eighteen seasons for the Islanders and the Pittsburgh Penguins. He won the Calder Trophy that season as the top rookie, then went on to win four Stanley Cups with the Islanders, two more with Pittsburgh and a seventh as an assistant coach with the Colorado Avalanche. In 1978–79, he won both the Art Ross Trophy as the league’s top scorer and the Hart as its most valuable player. The following year he was awarded the Conn Smythe as the top player in the playoffs. He had one disastrous year as coach of the New York Rangers (2002) and has not been involved in coaching since.

  JEAN BÉLIVEAU AT SEVENTY-FIVE

  (The Globe and Mail, April 7, 2007)

  If, as is often said, the late Robert Stanfield was the best prime minister Canada never had, then Jean Béliveau must stand as the best governor general the country missed out on.

  In fact, he is late to meet me on this cold April morning not because of rain falling in needles, but because of fans stopping him as he enters the hockey rink where his retired Montreal Canadiens No. 4 hangs proudly from the rafters. Even Canadien Chris Higgins—born long after Mr. Béliveau raised a tenth Stanley Cup over his head—wants visiting family members to meet his childhood hero.

  No matter where this tall, white-haired seventy-five-year-old goes, there are well-wishers. His wife, Elise, has driven him to the interview, waiting patiently, as she has since they married in 1953, while he wades through those who want to touch the hem of the hockey legend whose most lasting legacy may well be class. “I don’t mind the wait,” she says.

  “I’m very fortunate,” he adds. “Just signing my name makes people happy.”

  Just being Jean Béliveau seems to have the same effect. Last week, he let his name stand for a dinner that brought out a thousand of Montreal’s business elite—as well as Guy Lafleur, Gordie Howe, Jean Chrétien and Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The event raised more than a million dollars for children’s hospitals in the province.

  All the money, he had instructed, had to go to children, just as he had insisted thirty-six years earlier when the Canadiens decided to give him a special “night” in what would be his final season. “If there’s money involved,” he told them, “I don’t want a penny of it for myself.”

  That exceptional night in 1971 saw the Jean Béliveau Foundation launched with a cheque for $155,855. And every post-retirement dollar Béliveau has made from appearances and golf tournaments has gone into the fund, raising millions for a camp for disabled children near Joliette.

  That summer, when he took his family to Europe, he wrote ahead and asked if they might attend the weekly public audience of Pope Paul VI. When they arrived, they were told it would be a private audience. The Pope, it turned out, wanted to meet the athlete who gave everything to needy children.

  When Béliveau finally retired completely from the Canadiens in 1993, he also received an invitation to 24 Sussex Drive. The new prime minister Jean Chrétien wished to see him. Jean and Elise Béliveau drove to Ottawa knowing what was likely to happen. There had been rumours about him serving as governor general. It seemed a perfect fit. Béliveau had already led an impeccable life in the spotlight. Elise—with her French and Irish background and what granddaughter Mylène calls “an ex
plosive personality”—would make an ideal partner. And the two were sociable, energetic and fluently bilingual. But they could not take it.

  The reason was simple, but private—and it involved children.

  Less than five years earlier, Jean Béliveau had arrived for work at the old Montreal Forum to find two police officers and a chaplain waiting. Montreal police officer Serge Roy—husband to the Béliveaus’ daughter, Hélène, and father to their two girls, then five and three—had taken his own life at nearby Station 25. The marriage had been going through a rough stretch, but there had been no indication of the depths of the policeman’s despair.

  Nearly twenty years later, Elise Béliveau still has trouble speaking of that time. She waits for Jean to leave the room to accept a telephone call before even attempting. “I couldn’t talk about it for a long time,” she says. “I couldn’t talk about it all in front of Jean. I couldn’t talk about it in front of Hélène.”

  She had been close to her son-in-law. He had, she says, such a “beautiful smile” and always seemed happy. Jean believes it was the stress of police work that was a contributing factor, but Elise says they did not know then and do not know today why he committed suicide.

  “I was mad,” she says. “It never dawned on me that he would do a thing like that, and when it happened, oh my goodness … Nobody knows why. And you blame yourself, you say, ‘How come I didn’t see it?’ But when you think of it, it’s nobody’s fault. Because the one who does it, that’s what he wants. And that’s it.”