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Georgia Bird is tingling over a surprise telephone call from the Detroit Pistons' Kelly Tripucka, an old Notre Damer who happened to hear he was her second favorite player. "My sister was for Purdue, I was for Kelly," she says, a delightful illustration of basketball's hold on Hoosiers. It is not unlike the spell hockey has over Canadians. "Here he called me. I couldn't hardly get over it. That's my hero. You meet so many nice people through Larry, and then when you go to see them it's almost like they're one of your own. Who's that nice-looking boy from Boston? He plays quarterback." (How could she know of Doug Flutie and not know his name?)
"All my kids have been good, but to have a superstar, really. Well, I usually don't brag on him." Though she once said, "He always played as though he had to be perfect. A lot of people say that's how it turned out."
From the age of ten in the frozen village of Brantford, Ont., an hour's drive out of Toronto, Gretzky was given no choice in the matter of perfection. The facts of life were revealed to him in the family car returning from an unexpected loss at nearby Brampton, where the arena was so swollen it could not have accommodated three more curious onlookers if a star had risen in the East. The object of this attention stood 4 ft. 4 in. and weighed 70 lbs. Wayne's father addressed him good-humoredly, which is still Walter Gretzky's style, but there was an ingredient of sorrow that has not left his voice completely yet. "You can't be like everybody else any more," he told the great little Gretzky. "You can't be normal. For you there can never, ever be a bad game again. Every game now, everyone will expect a miracle."
Their home is the cheery one with the apple-red goals on the backyard rink, which Walter first installed by the spray of a garden hose when Wayne was four --two years into his hockey career. A telephone technician, Walter played five seasons of amateur hockey, and Phyllis came to the games. "My mother and father are tremendous family people," Gretzky says. "They dedicated their whole lives to their kids: moral support, financial support, whether for hockey, baseball or piano." There are five children, one girl, and it tells something of the father that he steps over a bundle of Wayne's milestone sticks to begin the paneled-basement tour by showing off Daughter Kim's high school track medals.
At 14, Wayne left home to compete against young men in Toronto. "I didn't leave to play hockey really. I wasn't enjoying the atmosphere in Brantford, the peer pressure. It was so difficult for me just to go to school, such a big thing to knock off Gretzky. I had been a lot of places by the time I was 14, everywhere basically. Lying in bed the first night in Toronto, I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. Three days later it came to me, 'Oh, no, what am I doing here?' I was homesick for a year." His most vivid snapshot of childhood longing is a mental picture of five fishing poles tied to the car. "If I had it to do over, I wouldn't go."