Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (39 page)

And to acknowledge as well, this Dufferin Street alumnus would suggest, that there is something pure and sweet about road hockey that is worth preserving by action if not by law. A game that is forever being invented is one that should go on as long as there are players wanting to play.

Road hockey continues to survive, even to the point of serving as a photo opportunity during the 2011 federal election for Prime Minister Stephen Harper
.

BRANTFORD, ONTARIO

L
ate fall, and tears are falling on the most famous backyard in all of Canada. Great, fat, warm raindrops plunk onto the cover of the swimming pool that sits where, in other Novembers in another century, a father would be laying down the first ice and a small, blond boy would be sitting, fully dressed in his hockey equipment, waiting for the signal to begin the season that once so defined this country.

Wally's Coliseum is no more.

The backyard rink that Walter Gretzky so lovingly built here in Brantford—using a lawn sprinkler for the base ice, then painstakingly building the “glass” skating surface with a slow-flowing hose—is now a fenced-in swimming pool.

It was here where three-year-old Wayne Gretzky took his first turns and first falls. It was on Wally's Coliseum that the ten-year-old who scored 378 goals for the Brantford Nadrofsky Steelers—who was a national figure by the age of eleven, who went on to hold or share sixty-one National Hockey League records—learned the game he would eventually transform.

Wayne Gretzky became that sensation not through structured fifty-minute practice sessions, but, as he has said, “right in my own backyard,” doing whatever he felt like doing. Out here, there was only one rule to the game: Get your homework done first. Walter Gretzky, standing in the light rain with a hand on the pool fence, shakes his head at the memory of his first son's dedication. “He would be out here hour after hour,” Gretzky remembers, “twisting in and out between pylons we made from Javex bottles. He used to tie a can off a string and hang it in the net and see how many times he could hit it. He
used to pay kids a nickel or a dime to play goalie for him.”

And he kept at it. Gretzky laughs his crinkly, eyes-closed chuckle as he recalls the night he got so caught up watching television that he forgot all about the little boy in the backyard. And how Phyllis Gretzky came storming downstairs in her nightgown screaming that it was five minutes to midnight on a school night and the boy was still out there twisting among the makeshift pylons: “What are the neighbours going to think?”

But things change. Gretzky is sixty-nine now, so remarkably recovered from a 1991 aneurysm that a movie,
Waking Up Wally
, was made of his story. The five Gretzky kids who learned to skate on this rink—Wayne, Keith, Glen, Brent and sister Kim—are all grown up now. And the “long, long seasons” of Roch Carrier's childhood are all but gone. “You can't make a rink like this anymore because the winters aren't cold enough,” Gretzky says. “If you're lucky, you might have two weeks, maybe three weeks. But you can't get three or four weeks in a row of cold. You get one day cold, next day warm. You can't get a rink going.”

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the family skated in the backyard of the home where Walter Gretzky still lives—sadly, Phyllis lost her long battle against lung cancer two years ago—and skated, as well, at the old Gretzky family farm at nearby Canning, where Kim and her young family live today. It was at that farm, at a 1957 wiener roast, that eighteen-year-old Walter first met fifteen-year-old Phyllis. Gretzky recalls that, as a boy, he could skate for miles on the Nith River, which flows by that old farm—“skate until you hit rapids,” he laughs—but lately the river rarely freezes over. And even when it does, you wouldn't dare risk stepping out on it.

“Winters are warmer now,” he says. “There's no ice.”

There is, of course, still ice—and still backyard rinks in many regions of Canada—but winter is not what it once was, with rare exceptions. And most assuredly, in Southwestern Ontario, not what it was back in 1932 when not only was the ice thick on the
Nith, but Niagara Falls froze solid. In many parts of this vast country these days, Quebec songwriter Gilles Vigneault's famous line,
“Mon pays … c'est l'hiver,”
seems increasingly out of line. My country is not winter—at least not winter as it used to be.

The new Dominion that British prime minister William Gladstone once dismissed as the land “of perpetual ice and snow” was at one time so sensitive about its bitterly cold winters that the federal government banned the words “frost” and “cold” from brochures aimed at prospective immigrants—allowing only the word “buoyant” to be used when describing the Canadian off-season. Today,
buoyant
rather accurately describes the weather in many of the more populated parts of the country.

Besides Wally's Coliseum, Canada has produced several backyard rinks that are frozen forever in the imagination: Roch Carrier's churchyard rink from “The Hockey Sweater”; the little rink in Floral, Saskatchewan, where Gordie Howe took his first turns in an old pair of skates a neighbour had dropped off; the rink by the barn in Viking, Alberta, that turned six Sutter brothers into NHLers; the big rink on the sod farm in Thunder Bay that produced the four promising Staal brothers …

It is difficult to find a Canadian hockey player who does not wax nostalgically about what those little rinks meant to them as youngsters. “The rink was my getaway, my little bit of heaven,” Eric Lindros wrote in his autobiography of the backyard rink his father, Carl, built each winter in London, Ontario. “If ever I had a problem in school I would get out onto the rink and blow it off. Being on the rink was the best time of day.”

The most famous natural-ice surfaces in Canada produced NHL players. The most famous one in the United States produced a collection of essays—Jack Falla's
Home Ice: Reflections on Backyard Rinks and Frozen Ponds
. Falla, who has written for
Sports Illustrated
, has kept a rink going behind his Natick, Massachusetts, home every winter since 1982. He put up plywood boards and lined the rink—about a third the size of an NHL ice
surface—with clear plastic sheeting, then waited for the first cold front before heading out with the hose.

It was, he says, an education by trial and error—too much water created ice that wasn't strong enough to support an adult skater—but eventually he became a local ice master. The Falla rink, which he calls the Bacon Street Omni, became a fixture in Natick and in an increasing number of publications where Falla would wax poetic about its glories. When he put those essays into a collection, Bobby Orr offered to write the foreword, saying the backyard rink was, in his opinion, “the heart and soul of hockey.”

Now, Falla, at sixty-four, finds himself at the cusp of his twenty-fifth consecutive season as icemaker and Omni manager. The kids have grown up and started their own families. He has debated “retirement,” but each fall some bug grabs him, the way a spring bug grabs golfers the moment they first see grass. “For me,” he says, “it really is part of the rhythm of the year.”

He knows, however, that it is not the same. For most of the 1980s and 1990s, the rink was in place by the third week of December and ran, with slight thaw setbacks, through the rest of winter. Since the turn of the century, he has had ice before Christmas only twice. Last year, the first skate of the season, the latest ever, was January 21. He shut things down on February 10, his earliest closing date ever.

In the best years, sixty or more people would be on the Bacon Street Omni. Last year, only sixteen people went for a skate. “I know from twenty-four years' experience that we have fewer skateable days now than we did when I started the rink,” Falla says. “But even if I knew we'd have skateable ice for only one weekend, I'd still put up the rink. Bottom line on a backyard rink—or at least on my backyard rink—is that it connects me with the people I love.”

Despite the constant talk of global warming, he once again had his boards up in early November, waiting for the first cold front to announce the start of the 2007–08 skating season. No fancy
refrigeration units and imbedded piping for Falla, who frowns on what he sees as little more than an artificial-ice indoor arena without the roof and walls. “Maintaining and building it is half the fun,” he says. As for those elaborate ice surfaces, he wonders aloud: “Aren't you getting awfully close to tennis?”

Falla's motivation has never been to produce future hockey stars—though the game is regularly played on the Omni—but to provide some alternative activity for an already active family. “Some people see their rinks as a springboard for getting ahead in the game,” he says, “but my rink was never just for that. It was to give my overscheduled kids some time on their own.”

His reward, he says, came only this past year when he happened to overhear his son, Brian, now thirty-six, talking about the Omni to a visitor. “It's my father's legacy,” Brian said. It was, Jack Falla says, the only thanks he ever needed to hear.

With the warm autumn rain still falling outside, two of Walter Gretzky's less-famous sons—Keith, forty, and Glen, thirty-eight—sit around talking about their father's legacy and their own recollections of Wally's Coliseum. They talk about the floodlights their dad would string above the ice, how he would so carefully mould the banks so they froze hard and could serve as boards. They laugh about the wood-framed nets he built. But mostly they talk about the ice.

“Great ice,” Glen says. “Absolutely great.”

“Glass ice,” Walter adds. “Not bumpy at all.”

“I remember the shovelling,” Keith laughs. “We were the ones who had to shovel it off. We used to have snowbanks higher than the fences.”

But no longer. The snow comes and goes these days, banks rise and fall. It is, of course, still possible to build outdoor rinks and, in deepest winter, even possible to hold outdoor shinny tournaments in various parts of North America. But all bets are off when it comes to sustaining an outdoor rink from first cold snap
to final thaw in a country where, for the most part, the mercury in outdoor thermometers now dances as much as it shrinks.

Walter Gretzky's own memories include the precise point in the yard, pool included, where he established his rink each winter. He recalls the best years and the funny moments, like the time he asked Phyllis to drop in to Canadian Tire to pick up a new lawn sprinkler in ten-below weather and they treated her like “she was crazy.”

The clarity of Gretzky's recollection here is significant, as his memory was largely deleted the fall day in 1991 when he was painting out at the farm and suddenly went dizzy. In one of fate's more cruel moments, the most famous hockey father in the world lost his entire remembrance of his famous son's hockey life. He lost each one of the four Stanley Cups in Edmonton; he lost the NHL records, the all-star games, the Canada Cups; he even lost the infamous 1988 trade to Los Angeles.

“It's like I was asleep for ten years,” he once told me. “It's all kind of like a dream.”

The neurosurgeon who saved him after the aneurysm, Dr. Rocco de Villiers, told him that he would one day come to remember those things “that really mattered” to him. At one point, purely as an experiment, the doctor played a small game to demonstrate how Gretzky's memory could suddenly jump back without him having to wander aimlessly inside his own head in search of it.

Dr. de Villiers told Gretzky that each time he clapped his hands, Gretzky had to tell him the first memory that came to mind.

Clap!
He remembered being in church the day of his mother's funeral.

Clap!
He remembered one of the hymns sung at his father's funeral.

Clap!
He remembered the length of the train—“about three and a half miles long,” he giggled—on Janet Jones's wedding dress the summer day in 1988 she and Wayne married in Edmonton.

The doctor was impressed. “Religion must be very important to you,” he said. “All your important memories involve church in some way or another.”

Here in Brantford on this rainy late-fall day, no clapping is required. Gretzky remembers every possible detail of the backyard rink, the other place of worship for his family. A precious memory, as clear and solid as that “glass ice” that is, sadly, becoming mostly memory for the country itself.

Jack Falla died of a heart attack in September 2008. He was sixty-two years old. Walter Gretzky, at seventy-two, remains as active as ever, though he still misses that backyard rink
.

ANGUISH