Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (38 page)

Shortly after this article appeared, Wayne Gretzky left the coach's bench on a leave of absence to spend time with his ill mother, Phyllis, who died of lung cancer shortly before Christmas. He returned to coach a team finding little success on the ice and financial horrors off of it. The franchise struggled and in the spring of 2009 filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. With ownership in turmoil—Research In Motion's Jim Balsillie failing in his bid to buy the team and move it, the NHL ultimately
taking ownership while searching for an owner who would keep the team there—Gretzky found himself a creditor. He stepped down as coach before the 2009–10 season began. In his four-year coaching career, his team failed to make the playoffs
.

THE ELEMENTS

EDMONTON, ALBERTA

I
t was supposed to be, as Mark Messier said, a weekend of getting “back to the roots of hockey.”

In a way it was; in a way it wasn't. I certainly do not remember any of us running naked but for a T-shirt and single sock down on the old beaver pond and then sliding like a pink-skinned otter over the McDonald's sponsor sign. Come to think of it, I don't recall any sponsors. Nor, for that matter, anyone ever stopping to watch—let alone 57,167 spectators who arrived Saturday afternoon at Commonwealth Stadium looking more like they were a Michelin Man convention than a hockey crowd.

I do, however, remember playing shinny at –16.8°C. And bad ice that was more unpredictable than a penalty shot.

The old-timers played and they shovelled their own snow off—“Losers have to do the ice,” Messier joked as his old Oilers took a 1–0 lead at the half—and they wore toques and balaclavas
and, after a while, as much steam was coming off their heads as out of their mouths.

“I don't know if you can ever duplicate it,” Wayne Gretzky said after the old Oilers had defeated the old Montreal Canadiens 2–0 in thirty minutes of pond hockey. “It's kind of like the '72 series—you can never go back and try and do it again.”

Such comparison requires a bit of a stretch. The country did not go into a state of apoplexy when it was half over, as they did in 1972; here at the half they lined up for the washrooms. There was no Phil Esposito rant to rally the home side as there was in '72. There were no-last minute dramatics by Paul Henderson. In fact, few dramatics at all apart from the introductions, as is usually the case in old-timers' games. Neither Gretzky nor Messier got a shot on net. Guy Lafleur got one shot, but didn't score. The winning goal was scored by Ken Linseman, a hall-of-fame pest, the insurance goal by Marty McSorley, a hall-of-fame enforcer.

And yet, just as strong emotion was the overriding memory of '72, it was here, as well, even if the feelings were quite, quite different. There was a remarkable charm to the Heritage Classic—“good, warm, fuzzy memories,” said former Edmonton star Paul Coffey—and it could not have come at a better time for the league that pulled off this risky extravaganza.

It has not been a good season for the NHL. When the story isn't labour gloom, it has been product gloom, professional hockey caught in a dual crisis of finance and entertainment. Star players who have not been dumping on the game (Joe Thornton, Brett Hull) have been so down in the dumps themselves (Jaromir Jagr) that it has become a game without star quality. What the old-timers—who most assuredly have kept much of their star quality—and the Heritage Classic reminded people of is that the original purpose of the Canadian game was always fun, something that Thornton, for example, feels is rather sadly absent from today's trapping and dumping, clutching and holding.

The old players may have lacked speed, but they carried pucks
rather than dumped them. They tried plays rather than avoid them. They played real shifts that left them tired rather than miniature shifts that, in today's hockey, are intended only to leave them blameless. “Guys who played the game,” said Montreal coach Jacques Demers, “the way it's supposed to be played.”

They also smiled and laughed on the ice the way youngsters have for as long as there has been ice and a way to slide on it faster than even an intrepid streaker. “We really felt like we were ten years old,” laughed Lafleur, “with the legs of a fifty-year-old!”

There were a few lovely moments in the game—a flashing glove save by Edmonton goaltender Grant Fuhr, a lovely rush by the still smooth skating Coffey—but the moments to treasure were the Aurèle Joliat toques on the heads, the introductions and the undeniable first star of the game: the 57,167 fans with their puffed-out coats and their hot chocolate and Baileys.

Whether it was the bitter cold or the inspiration of the old-timers, the players in the second game, the real game, played increasingly more efficiently than usual. The colder it got, the quicker it got and the better it got—until a game broke out that has rarely been seen indoors this year, including a winning goal in Montreal's 4–3 victory by Richard Zednik of a type we had come to believe was played out only in children's imaginations and outdoor rinks.

The NHL should consider not heating its northern rinks if this is the result. But since that isn't likely to happen, let us hope that the lesson learned here is that the time has come to invite the fun back indoors.

What began in Edmonton is now a fixture in the NHL, with New Year's Day Winter Classic games having been held in Buffalo, Chicago, Boston and Pittsburgh and a second Heritage Classic game held in 2011 in Calgary. The Winter Classic has been a marketing and publicity bonanza for the league, though it is also the event at which Sidney Crosby suffered the concussion that led to hockey's great debate of the 2010–11 season
.

I
have heard all the arguments.

I have listened to the claims that the Greeks were playing something much like it as far back as 500
BC
. I have stood on an upper floor of Vienna's Kunsthistorisches art museum and stared hard at
Hunters in the Snow
, which Pieter Bruegel painted in 1565, and I have seen, beyond any doubt, that there are two youngsters in the background playing a game any Canadian would instantly recognize. I have seen the literary evidence that Thomas Chandler Haliburton was writing as far back as 1810 about kids “hollerin' and whoopin' like mad with pleasure” as they cuffed something back and forth with sticks on a frozen pond near Windsor, Nova Scotia, and I have even argued with a farmer and a doctor who live there over precisely which pond it was. I have listened to the claims of Montreal that the first game was played there in on March 3, 1875, listened as well to the claims that the game originated in the small Ontario city of Kingston sometime in 1886—and I have only one response to all of these claims on the Cradle of Hockey.

Not even close.

You want to see where hockey was invented, let me take you to Huntsville, Ontario, on a late February afternoon in the deep winter of 1957–58, and let us head for Dufferin Street high on the reservoir hill where the town ploughs have left a wide, flattened surface and high banks, where the light from the single street lamp at the corner of Dufferin and Mary is enough, and let us listen to the one call that is as much a part of Canadian winter as the call of the loon is to summer: “
Caaaarrr!”

With luck, it will be Mulhern—or, as we all know him, “Uncle Danny,” though he has no known relatives—and he will guide his brown Buick so the tires straddle the goalposts that we have chopped out of the hard snow and carefully placed in the centre
of the road, two at one end, two at the other, each pair separated by the measure of a handy Hespeler Green Flash.

“Caaaarrr!”

The teams endlessly vary, the sides made up by various techniques including tossing all the sticks in the centre and having one kid, eyes shut, disperse them one at a time in opposite directions, or merely letting two big guys, or two of the little guys, stand as captains and let them choose up—everyone perfectly aware of who will be chosen first, and who, unfortunately, will go last. It is, more often than not, big guys versus little guys, the big guys—older brother Jim, Eric Wilston, Stew Wieler, Don Cockram—more skilled but fewer in number than the troop that makes up the little guys: me, Don Wilston, Brent and Ron Munroe, Ted Harman and, of course, Eric Ruby, the only person on reservoir hill who actually
wants
to play net. The road is on a slight decline, so ends are switched when the first team reaches five goals. Games are over at ten goals, with new teams instantly reassembled with the shout
“Game on!”
starting the match that will carry on until mothers grow cranky calling us in for supper.

There are few rules to this game. No slashing. No crosschecking. No “golf” shots. No sticks so worn down—“toothpicks,” we call them—that they become a danger to the eyes. Wilston's big German shepherd, Rick, can watch but not play. And whoever shoots the ball down past Mary Street, chases it.

There is one other rule particular only to Dufferin Street and not likely found on any of the thousands of similar road hockey shrines across this country: No chasing the tennis balls into Mrs. Wieler's raspberry patch. In return for this sacred regulation, she agrees to tap an extra sugar maple each March and grants the road hockey player exclusive rights to the sap—God's Gatorade—as spring brings a sad end to one more glorious season of Dufferin Street glory.

I am in my fifties now and will still play at the drop of a snowflake. For decades, our large extended family would gather each
year back in that same Central Canadian small town and play the Christmas Classic—a road hockey game featuring as many cousins as there were sticks to go around. There is no record of the scores, but an annual documentation by photograph: new players growing, several of them young women, old players' hairlines receding and bellies widening. Some players eventually retired and a couple, sadly, were lost forever. A few years ago, the Christmas Classic came to an unwanted end when the wonderful old woman who put on the Christmas dinner passed away; but both classics, grandmother and game, will live forever in the hearts of those who were privileged to know them.

A back street in Huntsville in the 1950s, a side street in Brandon in the 1930s, a dead-end street in Dartmouth in the 1960s—all have an equal claim to the game that has likely meant more to young Canadians than any other, in any form. I remember one spring day in New York when Wayne Gretzky, watching the Zamboni flood the ice before a Rangers practice, idly chatted with a couple of long-time sportswriters about the curse of over-organized hockey. He did not become a player, he told us, through highly structured fifty-minute ice times, but “in my own backyard, in the driveway—even in the basement” of the Gretzky home on Varadi Avenue in Brantford, Ontario.

He was speaking of the unrecognized beauty of the many variations on pickup hockey: the opportunity to dream, to seek magic, to fail and fail again until, one time, the impossible works. “Every time we teach a child something,” the renowned Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget once said, “we keep him from inventing it himself.”

In recent years, Canada has been plagued with stories of adults seeking to outlaw this activity one court complainant in Hamilton called “totally uncivilized.” It has happened in Miramichi, New Brunswick, in Nepean, Ontario, in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, and will happen again, elsewhere, before this coming winter is out. Neighbours will complain, the
police will be called and, all too often, the issue will be settled in court—usually, mercifully, tossed out by a judge with enough common sense to realize there are better uses for the law than putting a damper on modern-day children “hollerin' and whoopin' like mad with pleasure.”

“The way children are interrupted in their play by adults is brutal,” Margaret Flinsch, the great American pioneer in early childhood studies, said in an interview a few years ago. “Play is trying out—experimenting. It's not a joke. Children don't play for fun. They play for real, and adults don't understand that; they laugh at what children do. To children, play is very serious.”

Many would agree. Some would even argue that there are hidden values in such games. “Road hockey is part of Canada,” says a man who successfully led a citizens' revolt to strike down a bylaw in Listowel, Ontario. “If anything, I think it teaches the kids to be even more
aware
of traffic.”

“Like fishing or golf,”
Globe and Mail
sports columnist Stephen Brunt has written, “it is a game ordered not so much by officials enforcing a code of conduct, but by self-imposed etiquette. To keep playing, rather than taking your stick and going home at the first slight, requires learning how to function cooperatively with others and acknowledge a few simple rights and wrongs.”