McNall Blasts Rumor : Hockey: King owner says Gretzky is unhappy, but he isn’t being traded anywhere.

Bruce McNall looked disgusted as he glanced out at a sea of faces and cameras Friday, wondering how he had landed at this news conference.

“If this is what we get for a false rumor,” McNall said as 80 media types began recording his every word, “I wonder what we’d get for something real .”

The Montreal Forum news conference was actually a no-news conference, hastily arranged by NHL officials to debunk an out-of-control rumor that threatened to devour Montreal before the city could put on the NHL’s 44th All-Star game:

Wayne Gretzky, deeply unhappy as a King, had requested a trade to the Toronto Maple Leafs.

All this fuss supposedly emanated from a quick mention of the rumor Thursday night on The Sports Network, Canada’s version of ESPN. By the time Gretzky arrived at the Forum for a brief workout for today’s All-Star game, the story reached outlandish proportions.

The rumor in a nutshell:

Gretzky and McNall were at odds, so much so that Wayne told Bruce not to come to his birthday party. Or his Super Bowl party. (This part of the rumor varied, according to who was doing the telling.) Wayne and Bruce hadn’t talked in three weeks. Wayne was upset over last week’s trade of close friend Paul Coffey to Detroit. Wayne wanted out--and Toronto was close to his hometown of Brantford, where his father Walter continues to recuperate from a brain aneurysm that he suffered in 1991.

Not helping the situation was Gretzky’s soft, almost coy denial of the trade request.

“It’s the first I’ve heard of it,” he said. “Maybe someone’s trying to stir the pot.

“I’m not happy that we’re not doing well, but it (a trade) is out of my hands. You don’t worry about that stuff.”

And, what exactly is the state of his friendship with McNall?

“My relationship with Mr. McNall is good, but I don’t have any say in this. It’s up to the L.A. Kings. I can’t worry about it, but in sports nothing is shocking. It’s up to the Kings and (General Manager) Nick Beverley. All I can do is play hard.”

McNall, contacted a couple of hours later in his downtown Montreal hotel room, sounded angered over the phone about the non-story, throwing in an expletive or two.

“My answer to the question is this is irresponsible journalism at its height,” McNall told The Times. “It’s people who, when things are not going well, they try to find things like this that are titillating.

“Wayne Gretzky is going nowhere except back and forth to his house and the Forum.”

Before anyone gets the idea that Gretzky would want to play for the Canadiens, McNall meant the Forum in Inglewood. Furthermore, McNall said that if Gretzky ever wanted to play for another team, he would not let him be traded, but would release him for no compensation. “I would never put him in that position,” McNall said.

Said Toronto President and General Manager Cliff Fletcher: “Someone told me it was on TV and I started to laugh. And I said, ‘Is he coming as president and GM?’ ”

Perhaps the rumor received such wide circulation because almost anything seems possible in the NHL, which saw two teams trade for Eric Lindros on the same day last summer. And Gretzky, of course, was traded to the Kings in 1988 from the Edmonton Oilers.

Coffey, who has been traded three times, wasn’t dismissing the rumor as ridiculous. “Sometimes, where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” he said.

McNall, however, extinguished the fire on Friday.

“It’s absolutely . . .,” he said.

Both Coffey and McNall confirmed that Gretzky is very unhappy these days.

“He’s just a great player,” Coffey said. “He deserves to be happy. He was like this a couple of times in Edmonton when things weren’t going so good. But I haven’t ever seen him this down.

“He’s a strong individual, he’ll regroup. He just wants to play hockey.”

By mid-afternoon, with the rumor taking on a life of its own, the league scheduled a 6:30 p.m. news conference with McNall at the Forum, just before the Heroes of Hockey old-timers’ game.

There, McNall called the report “the most absurd, ridiculous thing I have heard in my life” and addressed Gretzky’s alleged unhappiness.

“Obviously,” McNall said, “our team has not exactly been playing well over the last month, month and a half, and Wayne Gretzky is the most frustrated person around. He always blames himself, he always takes things personally.

“We all forget--he most of all--that he sustained a serious injury. It takes time to get your timing back, it takes time to get you conditioning back. (Gretzky) refuses to make those excuses for himself . . . he’s the hardest on himself. From that frustration comes a bit of unhappiness and I think people see this and try to create something that never existed.”

McNall said he and Gretzky joked about the rumor Friday morning.

“We had dinner the night before last,” McNall said, “and, you know, nothing happened. I call him and say, ‘What is this? I’m getting calls from all my buddies in the press. Have we done something I don’t know about?’

“And he laughed and said, ‘Not to my knowledge.’ . . . He said, ‘Geez, you want me to go back and handle the Argonauts or something?’ That was about it. A joke. I don’t know what else to say about it.”

The second-best rumor in Montreal on Friday: Isn’t there going to be an all-star game of some sort this weekend?

This much can be substantiated. Today at noon, Gretzky will join fellow Kings Jari Kurri and Luc Robitaille as the Campbell Conference faces the Wales Conference.

Starters for the Campbell Conference: Detroit’s Steve Yzerman at center, St. Louis’s Brett Hull and Vancouver’s Pavel Bure at the wings, Chicago’s Chris Chelios and Coffey as defensemen and Chicago’s Ed Belfour in goal.

Wales starters: Pittsburgh’s Kevin Stevens and Jaromir Jagr at the wings, the New York Rangers’ Brian Leetch and Boston’s Ray Bourque as defensemen and Montreal’s Patrick Roy in goal. Pittsburgh’s Mario Lemieux was voted by the fans as the starting center but is sidelined indefinitely after being diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease.

The Wales Conference leads the series, 11-5.

All-Star Notes

The Campbell Conference won Friday’s skills competition, defeating the Wales, 25-15. Washington’s Al Iafrate had the hardest shot with a speed of 105.2 m.p.h. Other individual winners: the Rangers’ Mike Gartner (fastest skater), Boston’s Ray Bourque (accuracy shooting), Minnesota’s Jon Casey (goaltending).