Wayne Gretzky's Ghost Read online

  On display constantly—whether scoring 92 goals one season for Edmonton, getting married to Janet Jones in Canada’s “Wedding of the Century,” getting traded to the Kings in a deal that will be debated as long as Confederation, becoming the country’s most recognizable pitchman for corporate sponsors—and measured endlessly. They called him “Whiner” Gretzky for a while. They once said he skated like a man carrying a piano on his back when he went through his first back troubles. They blamed his wife for the trade to Hollywood, where she was an actress. Yet if there were minor stumbles there was never a fall, almost impossible to imagine in this era of over-the-top sports celebrity, temptation and gotcha journalism. He never forgot Walter Gretzky’s good advice.

  They tried, but could never quite describe the magic he brought to the ice. Gordie Howe jokingly suggested that if they parted the hair at the back of his head, they would find another eye. Broadcaster Peter Gzowski said he had the ability to move about the ice like a whisper. It was said he could pass through opponents like an X-ray. He himself liked to say he didn’t skate to where the puck was, but to where it was going to be. During the 1987 Canada Cup—when he so brilliantly set up the Mario Lemieux goal that won the tournament—Igor Dmitriev, a coach with the Soviet team, said: “Gretzky is like an invisible man. He appears out of nowhere, passes to nowhere, and a goal is scored.” No one has ever said it better.

  But here in Ottawa on April 15, 1999, the invisible man seemed like the only man on the ice by the end. Walter Gretzky and his buddies from Brantford were on their feet, Janet and their three children, Paulina, Trevor and Ty, were on their feet. The NHL commissioner was on his feet. There is no possible count of the millions watching on television who were on their feet, but it is a fair bet that a great many were.

  “Gret-zky!” the crowd chanted as the final minute came around.

  “Gret-zky!”

  “Gret-zky!”

  “Gret-zky! Gret-zky! Gret-zky!”

  The horn blew to signal the end of overtime, still a tie, and both teams remained on the ice while the cheers poured down. Then, with a gentle shrug of his shoulders, Ottawa defenceman Igor Kravchuk broke with the usual protocol and led his teammates over to shake Gretzky’s hand and thank him.

  It was over.

  Months passed between Wayne Gretzky’s retirement from hockey and a meeting that took place later that summer at the National Post’s main offices on Don Mills Road in Toronto. The newspaper’s publisher, Gordon Fisher, said he had something important to discuss with me. I was invited to a meeting with him, editor Ken Whyte and sports editor Graham Parley. It was all to be kept top secret. I had no idea when I entered the room what was up.

  “We’re bringing on a new sports columnist,” Ken said with his enigmatic smile. A new sports columnist? I wondered. They already had Cam Cole, the best in the business—snatched from the Edmonton Journal—and I was pitching in regularly as well as doing some political work. What did we need with another sports columnist?

  “He’ll be writing hockey,” Ken said. I blanched. But … but … but I write hockey. And Cam writes hockey.

  “It’s Wayne Gretzky,” Gordon finally said.

  I remember giving my head a shake. Wayne Gretzky? As a hockey columnist? How did they even know he could type, let alone write?

  “It’s a huge coup for us,” said Gordon. “This will get us a lot of publicity and bring in a lot of readers. He has one condition, though.”

  “What’s that?” I asked, half expecting to be told to back off and stay out of the rinks.

  Gordon smiled. “He wants to work with you.”

  “We want you to be his ghostwriter,” added Ken.

  Gretzky’s agent, Mike Barnett, had done the negotiations for the column and this request had been part of the deal. No one but the senior executives knew what the financial part of the deal was to be—rumours went as high as $200,000, as low as for free in order to keep the recently retired player in the public eye—but soon everyone at the paper, and many beyond, would know that I was also part of the agreement.

  This quite surprised me. We hardly knew each other. Unlike Cam, I had never covered the Oilers in their glory years. I had even, long, long ago, written one column, tongue rather in check, suggesting Wayne Gretzky was the worst thing that ever happened to hockey—his brilliance and popularity causing NHL expansion to places that made no sense, his high ability raising fans’ expectations for skill level that would sag once he retired—and I had even gone on the CBC’s As It Happens back in the summer of 1988 to predict, with uncanny foresight, that Gretzky would be swallowed up in Hollywood and never heard of again. Instead, of course, he became even more famous in the years that followed.

  In the late fall of 1994, however, I joined a handful of other journalists to accompany the “99 All-Stars” on a barnstorming trip to Europe during the NHL’s first owners’ lockout. It was mostly a lark: Gretzky and pals like Brett Hull, Paul Coffey, Marty McSorley and Mark Messier heading off on a tour of Europe with their hockey bags, wives and girlfriends and even, in the case of Gretzky, McSorley, Messier and Coffey, their dads. They played in Finland, including one game in Helsinki where Jari Kurri joined the fun, Sweden, including matches against teams featuring the likes of Kent (Magic) Nilsson and Mats Naslund, Norway and Germany. It was a wonderful experience, the stories filed back to Canada given wonderful play by newspapers starving for hockey and the stories, many untold, of the trip itself something to be treasured forever.

  In the intervening years, we’d become casually friendly as Gretzky moved to St. Louis and then on to New York to round out his career. His kids, along with the children of Mike Barnett, were even reading the Screech Owls hockey mystery series. Gordon Fisher asked if I would agree to help out the paper by dropping one of my four weekly columns and using that time to help out. Of course, I agreed. He was, after all, the publisher.

  And besides, it sounded like fun.

  His first column appeared on September 18, 1999. “No regrets,” it began. “I still feel good about my decision.”

  It was a long first column, sixteen hundred words, and it covered everything from his feelings about retirement to his plans to keep busy to his thoughts on Alexei Yashin’s contract holdout with the Ottawa Senators. “There’s a lot of talk now about players refusing to play out their contracts,” he wrote. “I never refused to honour mine.”

  He said he had no “pangs of regret” when training camps started up and he wasn’t going anywhere. His Los Angeles neighbour and friend Claude Lemieux, then with the Colorado Avalanche, had pestered him all summer about getting fit and ready but he had held to his promise to call an end to it after twenty-one seasons. He had visited with the New York Rangers and coach John Muckler had tried to talk him into coming back, saying he needed someone who could get the puck to newly signed Theoren Fleury, but he had not been tempted. “Somebody asked me the other day if I’m going to be involved in hockey,” he wrote. “I don’t have any time. I really don’t.”

  It seemed like a casual chat from one of the few players in the game identifiable solely by his number, 99, but the work that went into it far, far surpassed what would have gone into the one column a week I had given up in order to help out. First I had interviewed him at length over the telephone, then I had written a draft and faxed it to Mike Barnett, his agent. (This was in the early days of e-mail, and fax machines still dominated.) Mike had faxed back suggestions and changes, and then he had run it all past his main client and Wayne had suggestions and changes. I changed and rewrote and recast and refaxed, and finally they faxed back a version that they were okay with.

  The first column had gone to print.

  I was beginning to think I had made a horrible mistake, that a single column looked as if it might take up a full week’s work—and the column wouldn’t even be appearing under my byline. I would disappear from the paper.

  But gradually we worked it all out. From initially dealing with one telephone number, Mike B
arnett’s, I soon had a half-dozen numbers including his and Janet’s cell phones. I even struck up a relationship with the housekeeper to let me know where he was and how he could be reached. Calls took place on the road, on golf courses (I could hear the click of ball on metal in the background), by the pool, in his office and, increasingly, on the run. As he became more familiar with my style and I became more familiar with his thoughts, the columns became easier and easier.

  He wrote columns about overtime, shootouts, playoff heroes, various teams, individual players from Mark Messier to Jaromir Jagr, about junior hockey, minor hockey pressure and the value of playing sports other than hockey in the summer. He wrote about how he came to wear No. 99—not his idea but that of his junior coach in Sault Ste. Marie, as an older player already had 9—and how at first people laughed at the number that is today retired throughout the NHL. He left hockey from time to time to talk about the Grey Cup, the Super Bowl, Tiger Woods’ domination in golf, his grandmother and her rocking chair.

  Here are some of the highlights from that year of weekly columns:

  He said if he were starting his career again, he would wear a visor to protect his eyes. That week, during a match between the Ottawa Senators and Toronto Maple Leafs, an accidental high stick had struck the eye of young Toronto defenceman Bryan Berard, threatening to destroy a promising career. If he had grown up playing with one, Gretzky said, he would have continued to wear it, not thrown it away as so many juniors were doing when they reached the NHL, where such protection was not obligatory. “Without question,” he wrote, “in my opinion, the National Hockey League now needs to grandfather a rule that would require all players who have come up through the system wearing a visor to continue to do so in the NHL.” In what now seems an eerie exchange, he talked about how the year before, when he was still playing in New York, he had talked to young Manny Malhotra about keeping the visor on. “He was just a rookie and he wanted to keep it off. ‘You’re crazy,’ I’d tell him. ‘Keep it on.’ ” A dozen years later, while playing for the Vancouver Canucks, a visorless Malhotra would be hit in the eye by a deflected puck and require extensive surgery to save his vision.

  Following a devastating hit on Dallas Stars forward Mike Modano by Anaheim Mighty Duck Ruslan Salei, he called for the league to take a strong stand on hits from behind. He also suggested that something be done about modern equipment, though he was fully aware that “I’m in no position to preach.” But he said that today’s game was so fast and the players so big and strong that “I would never let anyone get on the ice with the helmet I wore.”

  With Canadian teams struggling to survive in a time of escalating salaries and a low Canadian dollar, and with the Calgary Flames rumoured to be on the brink of failure, he said it would be a “tragedy” if hockey failed to support “small-market” franchises. Calgary, he said, had won a Stanley Cup and had been “a hockey hotbed” throughout its history. “Sometimes it makes you wonder. If hockey can’t make a go of it in places like this, there must be something wrong.”

  He wrote about Dominik Hasek, then starring for the Buffalo Sabres, and he argued that in the 1998 Nagano Olympics “Canada played as well as—and I’d say better than—any team in the tournament, but we couldn’t score against him. It took a lucky deflection to put our game against the Czech Republic into overtime, and we knew they were just going to play for the tie. We spent the entire overtime in their end, but we still couldn’t score. We knew it wouldn’t be on a two-on-one and we knew it would never be on a shot from the blueline. It would have to be on a scramble. We’d have to crash the net and we’d have to distract him somehow. When we couldn’t do that, that was it. I always say we didn’t lose in the Olympics, we lost in a skills competition. But that doesn’t mean Dominik Hasek wasn’t brilliant. He was.”

  He was forced to comment, no matter how uncomfortable it was, on another incident that caused national outrage in Canada: Marty McSorley’s stick attack on Donald Brashear that led to McSorley being charged with assault with a weapon and subsequently found guilty. McSorley, a former teammate of Gretzky’s and long one of his closest friends, was suspended for the remainder of the season. “It’s no secret that Marty’s one of my best friends,” Gretzky began, detailing their years together in Edmonton and in Los Angeles. But, he added, “nobody, absolutely nobody, is going to stand up and say it was right to do or that it wasn’t Marty’s fault. He’s a grown man. And he’d be the first to agree that he has to take full responsibility for what happened. I deplore what happened, but I can still admire the fact that Marty didn’t take the easy way out. He didn’t slip out the back door. He stood up front and centre and immediately apologized to Donald Brashear, to both teams and all hockey fans. No excuses. Full responsibility.” He hoped both players would eventually return to play in the NHL. Brashear did; McSorley never played another game.

  He talked about his minor hockey days and tournaments, remembering how his Brantford team insisted on billeting the players in order to save the parents money. He talked about fund-raising through draws and candy sales. He spoke fondly of the famous Quebec International Pee-Wee Hockey Tournament, where more than ten thousand people packed the Colisée to see them beat a team from Dallas 25–0. Best of all, though, was when a knock came at the dressing room door and in walked Jean Béliveau, who shook every child’s hand as if he were already in the NHL.

  He wrote about the death of golfer Payne Stewart, killed in a plane crash. He admitted to his own legendary fear of flying and how he had once been afraid even to board airplanes, how he had tried hypnotherapy to cure him and how he only grew more comfortable after Air Canada pilots let him sit in the cockpit to watch the takeoffs and landings and he saw how confident and sure they were even under tough weather conditions. In speaking of Stewart, whom he knew, he confessed to his own deeply religious side. “I believe—I’m not at all ashamed to say so—and I also believe in life after death.”

  He allowed himself, at one point, to gaze into hockey’s future, and saw expansion into Europe, the levelling off of salaries (though not for the top players), the survival of the then-struggling Canadian teams and improved equipment to cut down on collision injuries. He predicted three rule changes—dropping the red line and “touch-up” offsides that would allow the defence to fire the puck back into the offensive zone without waiting, and opening up the game by having officials call obstruction penalties—all of which eventually came to pass.

  He addressed the rumours of his own return to hockey as a potential investor in Steve Ellman’s purchase of the Phoenix Coyotes. “I never made any bones about my intent of one day returning to what is, essentially, the only thing I’ve ever known. Hockey has been a large part of my life, it’s given me and my family a great deal, and I still love the game and all the crazy, wonderful people involved in it. There were a few chances early on, but I knew immediately that the timing wasn’t right. Nor, for that matter, was the location.” Location, it turned out, was of extreme import, as he then said what had long been believed. “What living here most gives us,” he said about the family’s home in California, “is the opportunity to live a fairly normal family life.” Phoenix, he said, would also give the family that chance. Phoenix, he said, was “a natural fit. Tougher to ignore. It was made clear right from the start of discussions that I wouldn’t be expected to move. I wouldn’t be the coach. I wouldn’t be the general manager. I wouldn’t be the team president.… One thing I am certain on is it couldn’t possibly be coaching …”

  Naturally, there was criticism over his column. Those who wanted him to slam the league over whatever was the issue du jour were disappointed, but slamming had never been his personality. He has always been a team player when it came to the overall league, as well as when it came to whatever team he was on, and while he might prod and suggest, he was loath to condemn.

  The criticism came my way, too, one journalist charging I was somehow in a conflict of interest in doing the column. It seemed a strange charge, gi
ven that virtually all newspapers have from time to time featured columns written by staff members that appear under the byline of a well-known athlete. Even the paper that threw up this charge had been doing it with a well-known Canadian golfer, the column ghostwritten by staff. I was a staff writer assigned by my editor and publisher to help out on the column. And not only did I not receive a single extra penny for doing so, I actually lost on the deal, given that for a year I had to give up a column of my own each week in order to produce Gretzky’s.

  It was, in fact, my second experience at ghostwriting, the first coming way back in 1973 when I was just beginning my journalism career at Maclean’s magazine. In the months following the 1972 Summit Series, the young goaltender in that epic battle, Ken Dryden of the Montreal Canadiens, was approached to put his name to an article on his experiences, and as I was the only staffer with a keen interest in the game, I was assigned to be Ken’s “ghost.” The Cornell graduate and law student had kept copious notes, some dictated, some scribbled, and his thoughts filled a couple of red binders that he passed on to me to see what might be made of the musings. I was impressed. I took the notes, wrote one version of an article, and he took my version and returned it to me, rewritten. I went to the editor, Peter C. Newman, and suggested that Ken was a strong enough writer that he didn’t really need a ghost, but rather an editor who might guide him. Newman agreed, and Ken and I set to work on what would become his first-ever published work.

  We became great friends during the experience and, once it was done with, I talked to Ken about one day turning his attention to a book on hockey. We spoke on and off about the idea for years, and Ken kept up his note taking as he and his Montreal team seemed to win Stanley Cup after Stanley Cup. I was eventually able to connect him and Douglas Gibson, the young publisher of Macmillan, with whom I was discussing a work of fiction. More years and many more discussions passed until 1983, when Doug simultaneously published my work of hockey fiction, The Last Season, and Ken’s non-fiction epic, The Game, possibly the best book on sport ever written by an athlete. Ken’s book absolutely swamped mine in sales and attention, but I was proud then, and remain so, to have been a small contributor to what stands as a major work in sports literature. The ghost who wasn’t required.