Anyone even casually aware of professional hockey and basketball knows Wayne Gretzky and Larry Bird as shades of no one else, except maybe each other: two unexpectedly alike and amazingly unlikely straw-haired farm boys who are not only reigning at the top of their games but raising the ceilings of their sports. Confounding normal description, confusing standard measurement, Gretzky is not the slickest skater or hardest shooter, just as Bird is not the swiftest runner or highest jumper. One is frankly too frail for the business, the other simply too agile for his size.
Though neither is highly educated, in the study of their games they were prodigies as children, and are intellectuals now. By some similar force of instinct and understanding--maybe Chess Grand Master Bobby Fischer would know about this--they see and play the game several moves ahead of the moment, comprehending not only where everything is but also where everything will be. Shown a photograph of a nondescript instant on the ice, Gretzky can replace the unpictured performers here and there about the periphery and usually recall what became of them the next second. Glancing at the basketball photo in the morning paper, Bird's automatic thought, essentially a reflex, is to note approximately what time the photographer had to snap his picture to make the deadline.
Their eminence in current terms is obvious, since they are the incumbent Most Valuable Players of the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association, and their teams, the Edmonton Oilers and the Boston Celtics, are each the sport's defending champion. But increasingly Gretzky and Bird are referred to as the best hockey and basketball players of all time. Both resist the idea. "It's silly to argue that," Gretzky says. "In my mind Gordie Howe is the best player who ever played hockey and the best man who ever played sports. Then others say Bobby Orr was better than Howe. There'll never be another Howe. There'll never be another Orr. But there'll be another kid to compare them to."
Gretzky was a six-year-old on a team for ten-year-olds, and at eleven made Howe's acquaintance. The great man inquired gently, "Do you practice your shots, son?" "Yes, sir, I do," he replied. "Your backhand too?" "Yes, sir." "Good. Make sure you keep practicing that backhand." Of all the remarkable entries in Gretzky's log--most goals by far in a season (92), most assists by far (125), most points (212), most records (35 in the N.H.L. alone)--the least told is the most telling. The first goal he ever scored in Junior B league play, the first he scored in Junior A, the first in the World Hockey Association and the first in the N.H.L.--all were on backhand shots.