Wayne Gretzky's Ghost Read online

  Halfway through my year of working with Wayne Gretzky, the American Journalism Review even took notice and published a short piece entitled “Ghostwriting for The Great One.” The National Post column had been picked up by United Feature Syndicate and was appearing increasingly around the United States. When I first heard about the piece, I figured it would be another attack. But it was nothing.

  Writer Sean Mussenden fingered the ghostwriter by name but rather surprisingly added that The Washington Post had also tagged me “the closest thing there is to a poet laureate of Canadian hockey.” The article quoted one journalism professor saying he believed any ghostwritten article should “disclose” the ghostwriter with a credit at the end, but National Post sports editor Graham Parley said this was hardly necessary, as it was quite well known that I was the ghost. In fact, Gretzky himself often joked about it and would call me his “ghost” on the few occasions we bumped into each other that 1999–2000 season in which the column ran. “The Great One,” Mussenden concluded in his very mild piece, “whom National Post columnist Cam Cole recently described as being harder ‘to get an audience with [than] the Dalai Lama,’ could not be reached for comment.”

  —

  At the end of the 2000 Stanley Cup finals—New Jersey Devils defeating the Dallas Stars in six games—the Wayne Gretzky column “retired” for the summer, never to appear again.

  He was getting increasingly involved in the game again—first as executive director of Team Canada heading into the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games, where Canada won its first gold medal in men’s hockey in half a century, then as coach of the Phoenix Coyotes.

  I still have that last column. He was talking about the devastating check laid on Eric Lindros by Scott Stevens during an earlier playoff round between Stevens’ Devils and Lindros’s Philadelphia Flyers. Lindros was left with a concussion that, ultimately, would play a role in his early retirement from the game he had, for a very short while, dominated.

  He argued that “clean” hits or “dirty” hits were not the issue here, that all that matters is the health of the players. He advised changes in equipment and called for better testing and evaluation to understand just how severe the concussion threat is to the game. “My fear, my real concern,” Gretzky wrote, “is that we are just scratching the surface. We’re still a long way from getting a good handle on what concussion is and how it can be prevented, and yet we also have to be moving as quickly as possible to find a remedy for this very real threat to the game.”

  Sounds like a strong stance to me.

  Just think, if the NHL and NHL Players’ Association had only moved on this issue “as quickly as possible to find a remedy,” perhaps today’s concerns over headhunting and the threat to the careers of the likes of Sidney Crosby would not be an issue.

  Rather prescient and powerful, Columnist Gretzky, if I do say so myself.

  TWO

  THE NATIONAL GAME

  “THE DANCE OF LIFE”—

  THE OPENING OF A NEW SEASON

  (The Globe and Mail, October 7, 2010)

  Hockey has no founding father or mother or identifiable moment of birth. It was invented in the imagination and is reinvented every day from early fall on in the backyards and—where still permitted—side streets of this hockey-mad country.

  As the National Hockey League returns to the ice on Thursday, this much is undeniable: Hockey is Canada’s game. There is nothing to be gained by pointing out that a Mesopotamian tablet dating from the third millennium BC makes reference to men using wickedly curved sticks—apparently not illegal in those days—to propel a wooden ring over the dirt. There is no ear here for the argument that Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, painted in 1565, appears to contain a game of shinny in the background. Nor do we really much care about the more localized claims that the game was first played in the Far North by the men on the Franklin expedition, and if not there then on a pond near Windsor, Nova Scotia, or if not there then at Kingston, Ontario, or even that there are newspaper clips to prove that the first organized game took place in Montreal.

  Soccer might claim more numbers, but hockey leads, as it always has, in nightly dreams and daily conversation. The grip this “national drama”—Morley Callaghan’s phrase—has on people is difficult to explain to those who did not grow up in its grasp or, as happens increasingly these days, came to embrace the game as they and, in particular, their children came to terms with a new climate.

  Lester Pearson tried to convey this sense in 1939 when the future prime minister of Canada told an audience in London, England: “It is perhaps fitting that this fastest of all games has become almost as much of a national symbol as the maple leaf or the beaver. Most young Canadians, in fact, are born with skates on their feet rather than with silver spoons in their mouths.”

  Hockey had to be Canada’s game. Had Canada invented baseball instead, players would have frozen to death between pitches. “In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold,” Bruce Kidd and John Macfarlane wrote many years ago, “hockey is the dance of life, an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.”

  Very soon after Kidd and Macfarlane published their book on hockey, however, something happened to the national game. It was called the 1972 Summit Series.

  The famous series is generally hailed as Canada’s greatest victory on ice—Paul Henderson’s dramatic goal surely the “singular moment in time” for generations of Canadians who can recall not only where they were but what they were wearing. The remarkable comeback in Moscow by the spunky Canadians launched a celebration that had as much, if not more, to do with relief as it did with triumph. Heading into the eight-game series—supposedly a friendly exhibition—the Soviets had not been given a chance. They had no goaltending. They had no shots. They had no coaching. Canada would probably sweep the series because hockey is Canada’s game. When Henderson scored that final goal, it meant that Canada had won by the narrowest of margins imaginable—a single goal scored with only thirty-four seconds left in the final game.

  “When the country’s celebration ended,” Ken Dryden and I wrote in Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada back in 1989, “the new day looked different. A lot had happened in the twenty-seven days since the first game in Montreal. A symbol, something about us, that we had always taken as self-evident, had been rocked. Our innocence, our confidence and enthusiasm, our urge to jump into the world’s deep water—we had changed.”

  This lack of confidence, so often buried under bravado, would rise and fall for decades following the 1972 series. The 3–3 tie between the Soviet Red Army and the Montreal Canadiens on New Year’s Eve, 1975, would be spoken of as “the greatest game ever played,” yet if that were true—and many still believe it was—then it meant that the Russian robots had risen to a level equal with the very best of Canadian hockey. And if the Russians were coming, how soon the Americans?

  Outsiders could still be beaten by Canadian players in Canada Cups or in NHL exhibitions, but too often the difference maker would be brawn (as when the Philadelphia Flyers pummelled the Red Army back into the dressing room in early 1976) or, as it was so often said, heart—despite medical proof that Russians, Swedes, Finns and Czechs all got their blood from a similar pump.

  Canada had entered an uneasy time with its own game. Every loss, no matter how close it might be—the 1981 Canada Cup, Rendez-Vous ’87, various world championships and junior championships—seemed to cause another jolt of identity angst. Having wished for a century or more that the world would appreciate the game that Canada had given it, many Canadians seemed unable to accept that the game had indeed been taken up by others and that others could play it.

  This anxiety came to a crisis point as the game entered its second century. Canadians had always believed that if only NHLers were allowed to participate in the Olympics, world dominance would be automatic. When it happened in 1998, and the Canadian men’s team failed even to win a medal, the blow to national pride was devastating. That
year also saw the beginning of seven consecutive world junior championships in which the best hockey country in the world could not prove itself best.

  By 2002, in Salt Lake City, this growing national anguish was expressed perfectly by the country’s greatest player, Wayne Gretzky, when he told a startled media gathering that “the whole world wants us to lose.”

  A few days later, however, the whole world (at least the small world that gives a damn about hockey) saw Canada win, and not only the men’s gold medal but the women’s as well.

  In retrospect, the self-doubt and anxiety played an important role. Canada began questioning its own sense of superiority in the 1990s—never so much as at the 1999 Open Ice Summit, which could basically be summed up in three words: What went wrong?

  To the great credit of those who have a say in shaping the way the game is played as well as those who play the game—from Hockey Canada down to the smallest local minor hockey organization—everything from coaching to skill level was re-examined and, often, reconsidered. You would have to be naive and foolish to call it perfect, but there can be no doubt that the game is in better shape in Canada today than it has been for decades. The 2010 hockey summit held in Toronto this last summer seemed oddly unpressing, almost unnecessary.

  Canada is once again comfortable in its hockey skin.

  The men and women won gold in Vancouver. If the juniors don’t win gold, they at least play for it. Young Canadians such as Sidney Crosby (captain of the 2009 Stanley Cup champion Pittsburgh Penguins), Jonathan Toews (captain of the 2010 Stanley Cup–winning Chicago Blackhawks) and the two top draft picks of the 2010 draft, Taylor Hall of the Edmonton Oilers and Tyler Seguin of the Boston Bruins, are all … Canadian.

  There remains, however, one itch still to be scratched. One that has grown increasingly irritating since 1993, when the Montreal Canadiens last accomplished the feat.

  And that is to bring the Stanley Cup home. Where it began—and where a great many Canadians believe it belongs.

  THE HEART OF HOCKEY

  (Legion Magazine, January/February 1999)

  Long after I had stopped asking about Santa Claus, I still believed that hockey in this country was a creation of The Royal Canadian Legion.

  In the fall of 1956, the year I turned eight, my mother gave me the two dollars necessary to sign up for town league hockey. With the two-dollar bill and my birth certificate in pocket, I walked with Brent and Eric, then and still the very best friends in the world, down the hill and along the leaf-splattered Muskoka River to the Memorial Arena in Huntsville, a small town on the edge of Ontario’s famous Algonquin Park. It was a typical rink of its day, large and bulky, erected in honour of those who had fought for their country, and the women of Branch 232 ran the snack bar. I was placed on the Legion Auxiliary team, which naturally meant we would be called the “Legion Ladies.” We were, as I recall, proud to be called this, for the simple sweater—blue, with a white maple leaf—not only made us feel like miniatures of the real Leafs, but it guaranteed quick service at the hot chocolate counter.

  The Legion itself, further up the hill from the river, was also where the minor hockey organization held the year-end banquet and would one day, a few years later, be the site of the one moment for which Brent and Eric and I are forever remembered in Huntsville minor hockey lore. Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with what we could do on the ice. One of us—history has conveniently forgotten which—passed wind so loudly during Mayor Frank Hubbell’s opening remarks that it brought the awards ceremony to a dead halt. The three of us, giggling and red-faced, crawled and crouched beneath the drooping white cloths of the long table assigned to the bantams—and we stayed there, the room silent, the mayor clearing his throat, until Mrs. Kelly, resplendent in Legion uniform, stuck her stately head under the cloth and informed us, in no uncertain terms, that we would all be given one chance to smarten up or else. It was, and remains, the best piece of advice the three of us ever received.

  Forty-three years after I laid down that first two-dollar bill, I am still a hockey player. There have been small glories and large disappointments. I have made teams and been cut from teams, played in front of crowds and, today, play in front of no one. As an old-timer, I have passed recently from teams that worried about the goaltender showing up to a team that worries whether or not the doctor on left wing will be out tonight, and yet the love of the game remains as intense, if not as simple, as it was that very first season of 1956–57, when I was fortunate enough to wear the blue and white colours of the Legion Auxiliary.

  The “highlight” of that season was the day the Toronto Daily Star and Toronto Telegram and the Globe & Mail all came to town to see the wonders that had been created by a few townsfolk who had cared enough to build a rink and organize the kids. The following Wednesday the local Forester ran a photograph that shows me with two teammates and the coach of the town’s all-star teams, the cutline reading:

  Last minute adjustments to the goalkeeper’s pads are made by Huntsville’s top notch hockey coach Mye Sedore before Roy MacGregor, Terry Stinson and Donny Strano of the Legion Ladies’ Auxiliary team took the ice to perform before Maple Leaf scouts Bob Davidson and Pep Kelly and Toronto newspapermen at the Arena last Saturday morning when 270 Huntsville kids showed the visitors how the Town Hockey League functions. They put on a grand show and the three Toronto daily newspapers told the story in big pictures and lots of type in their Monday and Tuesday editions, attracting countrywide attention to this Muskoka town and its surrounding district.

  Perhaps the cutline ran on a bit, but so too did our imaginations back then. Having been scouted, at age eight, by the Leafs’ very own Bob Davidson, who had even come into our dressing room, it would only be a matter of time, surely, before I was in the National Hockey League.

  Time, however, doesn’t always co-operate. It is now 1999, racing toward 2000. No one pays two dollars to play the game anymore. It costs me about $500 a year just for ice time, to say nothing of the sticks and tape and the endless sharpening that never seems to have me skating as I stubbornly believe I once could. Hockey, I must now concede, has played as much a part of my life as family, school and work. In fact, it has at times been both family and work, for I treasure the years when I coached first Christine and then Gordon, two of our four children who also played the game, and for the past six years my full-time job has been to cover the Ottawa Senators and the National Hockey League as a sports columnist. There have also, along the way, been four books on the game and a sprawling, now up to ten, series of hockey-based children’s mysteries.

  This is not to suggest there is no ambivalence in such a confession. Like everyone else in this country who has become caught up with the national game, I have my moments when I shudder over what it has become. I cannot abide the corporate suites and multi-million-dollar salaries of today’s NHL. I grow easily bored at the style of the game at the professional level. I find the violence unnecessary, the clutching and grabbing unnatural. I consider Don Cherry’s commentaries as destructive to today’s game as Howie Meeker’s once were instructive.

  As coach and hockey writer, I have seen more than my fair share of boorish parents, men who bait referees not much older than their own children, women who sit in stands with stopwatches, insecure men and women so determined that they are able to say their child plays “competitive” that they have allowed house leagues to be ransacked in order to create levels of intercommunity play where the youngsters can barely skate. As a coach, I have fielded the incessant calls from fathers who want practice hours turned into exhibition games so that the parents have something to watch, and measure, even if it means our children now practise so little that it is no wonder we are losing out to those who believe there is a magic to hockey that cannot be learned in game conditions where every experiment earns a reprimand.

  There are times when I sit in cold Canadian rinks, shivering lips blowing over a cup of coffee that tastes like boiled pucks, and agree with the long-time offi
cial of the Canadian Amateur Hockey Association who admitted to me one day that the one great regret in his career was that 1960s campaign to get parents to “take, don’t send” their children to the local rink. Once some of those parents began to see their involvement in minor hockey as an investment, both in time and in money, they began to look for a return on that investment. And that is when hockey in Canada became more career than recreation.

  Rising above all these unfortunate points, however, is the game itself, and the happy majority of parents and coaches who remain, today, not all that much different from Mrs. Kelly and Mye Sedore of so many years ago. For every hideous story of minor league politics that is passed on to me, I come across two or three incidents that give hope. The kids up the street playing road hockey in the dead end. The teacher who turns an hour of gym class over to an old-fashioned game of shinny. The coach who takes his team out on an open-air rink so that they will know what it is to play, and feel, this extraordinary game when sweat rolls down your spine and a January wind finds its way through your collar. When people talk to me of Triple-A hockey and summer hockey schools and power-skating clinics, I am reminded of a quiet conversation I had with Wayne Gretzky one slow afternoon during the 1996 World Cup. In the words of the greatest player the game has ever seen, he didn’t get that way through fifty-minute ice slots, but “in my backyard and basement.” Where he could try things and, when they didn’t work out, try them again and again and again until they did. Where he could experiment without being criticized.