No. 99 gets No. 77 and No. 78 and No. 79 and.
He would be the Great Something if not Gretzky. So even the soaring alliterative quality of his name is inspired, like his number, 99, an amalgam of Bobby Hull’s 9 and Gordie Howe’s 9 or perhaps Howe’s and Maurice Richard’s 9. If Wayne Gretzky is not twice the hockey player anyone has ever seen, how is he doubling all the numbers in his sport?
Good question, eh? Not even rapturous Canadians have a quick answer to what is so great about Gretzky. Including those in Edmonton, Alta., where oil has slipped to No. 2 among natural resources. The way baseball is the simplest or most complicated game, depending on what you would have it be, hockey is very simple or very complicated, depending on where you were born. And it is tough trying to explain Gretzky to people still working on figuring out the blue line—meaning, most Americans.
In the U.S., no sport is truly major league until the television networks and bookies say so, and neither at the moment acknowledges the National Hockey League. The New York Islanders recently won a record 15 games in a row without noticeably speeding up the nation’s heartbeat. To Americans, hockey can appear an unfathomable melee of white, toothless Canadians padded like moonwalkers and armed to the gums with crooked sticks. Lately the perception of hockey as iced-over roller derby is more prevalent than ever, what with retired Philadelphia Flyer Dave Schultz (most penalty minutes alltime) regretting the hockey “enforcer’s” life in his new memoirs, and the Los Angeles Kings’ Paul Mulvey refusing to answer his coach’s call to fight. Onto this thin ice skates Gretzky.
The Great Gretzky (“It’s embarrassing. If I had my choice, I wouldn’t use it”) is a straw-haired, blotchy-skinned kid, barely 5 ft. 11 in., barely 165 Ibs., barely 21 years old. He blushes and scuffs his toe a lot. In 65 years only two players had ever scored 50 goals in a season’s first 50 games; this year Gretzky scored his 50th goal in the 39th game, and last week he reached the alltime record 77th goal (and the 78th, and the 79th) with 16 games to go. It is more than just embarrassing.
With six minutes left in a tie game at Buffalo, Gretzky scooped up a loose puck, zigged and zagged his way through two defenders, and broke free. He sailed across the mouth of the goal and daintily flicked his left wrist. Before Goaltender Don Edwards knew it, he had become a trivia question. Later, after being dug out from under a pile-up of his teammates, Gretzky was presented the puck by Phil Esposito, who held the old record. “It’s a tremendous relief,” Gretzky told him.
Esposito scored 76 goals for the Boston Bruins in 1970-71 with the considerable assistance of Teammate Bobby Orr, who set the N.H.L. assist mark at the same time. Gretzky broke Orr’s record last year (109) while establishing a total points standard (combined goals and assists, 164) that he shattered last week as well. He has been in the league three seasons, and the Most Valuable Player trophy awaiting him will be his third.
Even more offended by these numbers than the goalies are the stalwart fans of the old six-team league; they feel that the gradual expansion to 21 teams has watered down modern accomplishments. “The caliber of hockey is not the same as it was in my day,” says Maurice Richard, whose career with the Montreal Canadiens ended in 1960. “The last couple of years, with all this scoring, every team that falls behind by two or three goals seems to be quitting. That’s why they get so many high-scoring games.”
Yet, of Gretzky, the Rocket gushes:
“He’s a born, natural scorer—just like I was. He’s moving all the time, and it seems the players trying to check him can’t catch him.” Richard contends that Gretzky would not have scored as much in the ’50s, but adds that “he would have been the best scorer in the league.”
Like Pete Rose, Gretzky may have overshot his true generation. “He plays more like the old days—the way he handles the puck, the way he handles himself,” says Howe, who played in more than one era, from 1946 to 1980. “When he has to hurry, he hurries; otherwise, he thinks it through. He would have been just as great in any day.”
By the age of eleven, Gretzky had already come to Howe’s attention as a talent to watch. “Yes, I presented him a trophy,” Howe recalls. “He used to score eight, nine, ten goals, for gosh sakes” (378 in 68 Peewee games, actually). By 14, he had left his Brantford, Ont, home for good to play serious hockey and be about his father’s dream. Walter Gretzky, a telephone technician, was an unaccomplished player but a formidable tutor. By 15, Wayne had an agent. By 17, the boy literally wrote his own million-dollar contract on a blank paper aboard a private jet. By 20, he had renegotiated it to $20 million for 20 years.
“He grew up fast,” Howe says. “But you could see it in the Peewees: brains, instinct, desire, love of the game. Gosh, I wish I’d had that talent. I was more … forceful. He’s … smart.” Is he the greatest thing Howe has ever seen? “I still think Bobby Orr going full tilt is. Wayne doesn’t go 90 miles an hour in a straight line. That’s why I don’t think he’ll ever get hurt. It looks as if he has been playing 100 years already. But he’s going to get better, though I don’t know how.”
It is natural to measure Gretzky in terms of hockey’s past and his own future, but the present is telling enough. Watered-down league or not, the Islanders’ Mike Bossy and Bryan Trottier, or the Kings’ Marcel Dionne—the other eminent players today—have the same opportunity to show up the league, and Gretzky is spread-eagling them. “I think the best athletes now are better than ever in all sports,” he says without swaggering. “When I’m compared with the greats of the past, it’s an honor and a pleasure. But nobody will ever duplicate Howe, Orr, Hull, ‘Espo,’ Richard, Jean Beliveau—any of them. Nobody can play like those guys played. I am me.”
As he is saying this, lounging in a room off Oiler Coach Glen Sather’s office, showing game films of favorite goals, his teammates are out on the rink having their shots timed by a radar gun. Since scoring last in team strength tests, Gretzky has shied from such gauges. “My shot wouldn’t be close to the fastest,” he laughs. So if he is not the strongest and his shot is not the hardest, is he the best skater? “No way.” Then what is it about him?
“The thinking part of my game is the main thing,” Gretzky figures, “partly instinctive, mostly from having done it so often.” Orr possessed a sixth sense: he knew where everyone was on the ice. “Yeah,” says Teddy Green, Orr’s former teammate and the Oilers’ assistant coach, “but Gretzky has a seventh sense too.” He knows where everyone will be.
On the wall of the film room are several action photographs, most featuring Gretzky. “I missed that shot,” he points to one and grins. “I put it right in the goalie’s glove.” So he remembers even the misses. “Do you recall where everyone was on all these plays?” he is asked. And he starts placing those out of the picture here and there around the walls, all of it frozen in his mind.
His ease with interviewers is also partly instinct and mostly practice. Edmonton has been under media siege for a year and a half. Wayne shrugs. “I’ve had publicity since I was seven. I remember the resentment then, not from other kids, but from parents. The TV camera would come into the locker room and all the kids would get in on it. I got used to it, got to like it.”
Orr regards it as a pitfall. “I know I upset a lot of the writers when I was playing,” says Bobby, who had been known to hide in the trainer’s room after games. “But I put my time and energies elsewhere. And I was never besieged like he “is. That’s the thing that could stop him.”
Gretzky is so cordial, one gets the impression he wants to be better than the sometimes fractious Orr even off the ice, to handle it all as well as the always placid Howe. Gordie is to Gretzky what Brooklyn Dodger Gil Hodges was to Los Angeles Dodger Steve Garvey, a giant he happened upon as a child and who never disappointed either the boy or the man. “Sometimes,” Gretzky says, “I think it would be nice just to play the game, take off the equipment and go home. It’s embarrassing to talk about records. But then I think of it as just part of the whole hockey life. It’s a fun life, eh? You can’t beat it.”
He enjoys being the Canadian Brooke Shields and modeling his own line of jeans. He likes having his name on the lips of the President of the U.S. (“Rumor has it, Wayne, that Washington has been trying to trade to get you,” Reagan quipped at an All-Stars luncheon at the White House. “I asked what Edmonton is getting in return, and they told me two first-round picks and the state of Texas.”) Gretzky doesn’t even mind jumping up on Canadian talk shows and joining his girlfriend, Singer Vickie Moss, 20, in a squeaky rendition of Mama, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Play Hockey. Still, it’s embarrassing.
The main thing is the game. Gretzky knows he is the only guaranteed sellout in half the rinks in the N.H.L., and it troubles him. “I’m not trying to tell the people in the U.S. what to do,” he says, “but I mind that they don’t know hockey better. I’ve heard some say it’s boring. I wish I could sit them down and show them.” Maybe he is.
The wantonness of the sport does not disturb him. “I don’t think fighting is the important part of hockey, but I don’t think it should be banned.” He sides against the reluctant warrior Mulvey. “Whether a coach is right or wrong, you do what he asks in any sport.”
Nonetheless, Gretzky is a pacifist of a kind and a former recipient of the dreaded Lady Byng Award for gentlemanliness. “One fight in four years,” he reports sheepishly, counting his first season in the World Hockey Association, “not much of one at that. I get criticized for not fighting my own battles [an on-the-ice bodyguard is assigned to him, Winger Dave Semenko, nicknamed “Cement Head”], but I can’t do my job from the penalty box.”
If you can’t fight him, you can try to check him. The trouble is, he knows where you’re going, and you don’t know where he’s going. The result can be embarrassing. —By Tom Callahan
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