Gretzky’s Return Home Gets Mixed Reviews

He left in tears, and he came with fears, and leaves again with a suitcase full of doubts.

Nearly 10 weeks after hockey’s version of “Let’s Make A Deal,” the man who banished Wayne Gretzky from this sports-mad town on the edge of a cold, wind-swept prairie is happy, and so is the man who welcomed him, arms and wallet open, to the tropics of Los Angeles.

But Gretzky, pulled on one side by old loyalties and pushed on the other by new, ever-higher expectations, is still having a hard time sorting things out.

That much, at least, was apparent after the Great One struggled to explain the pressures and his own lackluster performance in an 8-6 loss Wednesday at the Northlands Coliseum, marking the first time in 10 years he stepped on the spacious iced surface in colors other than the orange, blue and white of the Oilers.

“I don’t know if it’s something that’s going to end overnight,” Gretzky said in a rare moment of self doubt afterwards.

“This may go on for a long time.”

Almost anyone else but Gretzky would have written this off as one bad game and let it go at that. Lord knows, there were more than enough alibis for Gretzky to have availed himself of. Maybe, he could have said, it was the front page articles in almost every newspaper across Canada trumpeting his homecoming. Maybe it was because everything seemed at once so familiar and yet so foreign.

For openers, he was playing against the best team in the National Hockey League, against teammates who knew his every move, close friends who had been in his wedding party and with whom he drank from four Stanley Cups.

“I thought he played well, given the way they played against him,” said Kings teammate Bernie Nicholls. “They picked him up as soon as he got the puck. They know how he plays.”

Or maybe, Gretzky should have excused, as another of his new teammates did, just plain bad luck.

“Passes that usually go through,” said Kings’ Bobby Carpenter, “didn’t. They hit this guy, they hit that guy.

“I think we were all a little bit tense,” he added, “and it hurt us.”

Even Kings owner Bruce McNall had a theory. So ferocious was the buildup for this game, that the day before, McNall said he planned to sit with Oilers owner Peter Pocklington only if the latter had bulletproof glass installed across the front of his private booth.

As it turned out, the only alteration to the Coliseum Wednesday night was the addition of a single seat on the concourse level that made the crowd 17,503 strong -- enabling Pocklington to cash in on the largest crowd in franchise history.

But McNall sat with his colleague anyway, perhaps admiring his entrepreneurial abilities or simply because he was comfortable in the company of another man who had accumulated so may things.

“We did talk about the deal,” McNall said afterwards, “and we just said it seemed like one of those things that worked for both sides.

“We got off to our best start ever and we’ve been able to generate a lot of interest in the game in Los Angeles and probably in the rest of the United States by the time the season’s finished.

“And probably,” he added, “when the craziness of this game dies down a little bit, the people on our team will settle down and start playing the game the way they know how.”