AN IDOL WISH

Maybe it was because it was a special day, the day school pictures were being taken. It was that day when a youngster chooses the face he wants to show the world.

Or maybe it was just because you could pick any day of the week, and Teemu Selanne likely as not would be wearing that jersey.

Edmonton Oilers, with No. 17 stitched on the back.

“I wore it all the time. To school. Outside. But I didn’t sleep in it,” Selanne said, laughing at the memory of a class photo of himself at 13 or 14, a hockey-obsessed schoolboy in Helsinki, Finland, with a smooth face and those distinctive eyes. “I had a poster on my wall, Jari and Wayne Gretzky,” Selanne said. “For sure, he’s the greatest Finnish player ever. When I was young, he was my idol.”

Now Jari Kurri is not only Selanne’s teammate with the Mighty Ducks but his close friend. Tennis partner, skating buddy, linemate, dinner partner.

As he talks, Selanne glimpses Kurri across the Ducks’ dressing room, and his eyes flicker and light.

“He was my idol,”

Selanne said, momentarily serious. “Until I got to know him.”

Then he erupts into peals of laughter, an outburst so common for Selanne, 26, so much rarer for the quiet Kurri, 36.

“Just kidding,” Selanne said. “Just kidding.”

In a way, it is as if Gretzky had been given the chance to play with Gordie Howe, or Paul Kariya with Gretzky. The same, but different.

“Playing with Wayne in the All-Star game was great,” Kariya said. “But it was a one-time thing. To play alongside your idol every game is only going to help Teemu.”

Selanne still remembers the book report he did on a Kurri biography a dozen years ago. “Second best in the class,” he said. “Everybody was so surprised because I wasn’t very interested in school.”

He remembers, too, the urgency he felt as he looked for that Oiler jersey when his pee-wee team traveled to Toronto for an international youth tournament. It was a time before the NHL had gone global, long before you could watch ESPN games all over Europe.

“I thought, ‘I want to find an Edmonton jersey with Jari’s number on it,’ ” Selanne said. “It was a big thing for me at that time.”

That time, of course, has long since passed. For Selanne, that adoring teenager lives on only in pictures.

“I don’t look at him like, ‘Ahhh, Jari,’ ” Selanne said, rolling his eyes up as if in awe. “We are more like friends. Maybe when I was 13 or 14, but not anymore. It’s a different relationship now. I just look at him more that he’s my teammate. Now he’s my friend.”

The awe, but not the respect, is gone.

“It’s not there anymore, not for anybody,” Selanne said. “Gretzky, nobody. At that time my dream was to play at the same level. Now when I’m here it’s more like the challenge is to play well. I don’t have idols anymore.

“Like when Andre Agassi was small, John McEnroe was his idol. But now when he’s at the top, he doesn’t have any idols. He had some role models and idols, but it’s not there anymore. It’s more like you respect the guy. He’s your teammate.”

*

Kurri is not merely the best Finnish player ever, he is the most prolific European-born player in NHL history.

There are the five Stanley Cup rings he won with Edmonton, of course, and two other trips to the finals. One with the Oilers, another with the Kings in 1993.

He has 583 goals in 1,099 games, and another 105 goals in the playoffs--more postseason goals than anyone but Gretzky and Mark Messier.

Kurri didn’t imagine this kind of career when he arrived in Edmonton in 1980 after being the 69th pick in the draft. But how could he have?

“Hockey was starting to change a little bit with the European influence,” Kurri said. “When I came we played old NHL style where if you’re a winger, you stayed on one side and didn’t even go across the ice.

“I guess in the back of my mind was just to come over here and play for one year and go back to Finland. I had no idea I would even spend two or three years. A few Finns had played in the NHL but none for a long time. We didn’t see games on TV. The only news I got was from players who had played here before. So it was tough to know about the league and what kind of hockey they played there.”

Kurri arrived in Edmonton as a wave of talent crested.

“The timing was so unbelievable. The players we had, and we were all about the same age. Maybe Gretz and Mark [Messier] were a year or two younger . . . We had a good, good time.”

Back in Helsinki, a youngster honed his game with Kurri’s picture on his wall and his jersey on his back. Word of a young Finnish star playing for his own old team, Jokerit, trickled back to Kurri.

“I definitely heard a lot about Teemu before he came over because we have a good friend we both know who I talk to a lot,” Kurri said. “He told me how well Teemu was playing and he would be a high draft choice.”

The friend was Matti Vaisanen, the scout who recommended Kurri to the Oilers years ago and now works for the Florida Panthers.

“Finally, they play together, I hope,” Vaisanen says now. “He has a chance to play with Selanne and Kariya, who wouldn’t want that?”

When Selanne burst onto the scene with 76 goals as a rookie in 1992-93, Kurri was no longer one of the few who knew of him.

“A lot of Finns we call Flying Finns,” Kurri said. “But Finnish Flash, that was a good one.”

Kurri and Selanne had met a couple of years earlier at a celebrity tennis tournament in Finland.

Six or seven years ago, their friendship was cemented when they began practicing together in Helsinki during the summer, mixing in tightly played clay-court tennis matches.

“When he has a good day, he can beat me,” Selanne said.

Their opportunities to play hockey together have come mostly during brief stints with the Finnish national team for tournaments such as the Canada Cup, recently the renamed World Cup. But since both have played right wing most of their careers, they have usually been on different lines. During the NHL lockout in 1994, both returned to their old team, Jokerit, where they played on a line together for 20 games. They both produced a sliver shy of a point a game.

“It was only like six or seven weeks,” Selanne said. “It wasn’t really like we started getting used to each other. For sure we both know our styles. For sure, I know where he wants the puck, what is his style to play hockey.”

Ten years separate them, and of course, Kurri’s five Stanley Cup rings.

But both have scored 70 goals in an NHL season. Both are right wings. Both were born in Helsinki.

“Jari’s mother is named Liisa like mine,” Selanne said. “We both played in Jokerit. We both started out wearing No. 11 there. We both shoot right. We weren’t planning this, but it just happened. It’s a lot of things alike.”

Alike, and different.

“They’re almost opposite,” Kariya said. “Jari’s more similar to me, really. Serious, focused, private. Teemu’s very public and open.”

“It’s different when it’s just the two of us,” Selanne said. “You know, if he would be like me, I would not get time to speak.”

Others see them as mentor and prodigy, big brother to small.

“Teemu’s father said to me at Teemu’s wedding this summer that he would be really happy if Jari came to the same team to watch out for him,” Vaisanen said.

“Well, everybody keeps telling me that it’s good that he’s going to look after me,” Selanne said. “But I think it’s the other way, that I’m going to have to look after him.”

*

So it is that a relationship turns.

Selanne’s career might still be rising toward its peak. Kurri is putting the final touches on one of the best careers in NHL history.

His 18 goals and 45 points last season with the Kings and Rangers were the lowest totals of his career for a full season. But his six 100-point seasons and four 50-goal seasons, his role in Edmonton’s five Stanley Cups and his association with Gretzky will put him in the Hall of Fame.

Selanne isn’t ready to call Kurri’s career a wrap. He finds himself in a position where he could be able to enhance and prolong the career of his good friend, once his idol.

“I think the last couple of years he wasn’t able to play style of hockey that he wants because he was on more checking lines, not getting so many power plays,” Selanne said. “I think now he has a much bigger role here. He gets more responsibility here. For sure, he’s one of the best all-around players in this league.

“I know how good he can be when he can play with some players who can help him and make his game a little easier.”

It has not been easy the last few years, not with the bungling in Inglewood that Kurri endured after the Kings’ 1993 run at the Cup.

“There’s a time when you feel a little bit down,” Kurri said. “But every year has its ups and downs. Summertimes, you can sit down and see how you feel, what are your motivations, things like that. Do you still want to play? Do you still have fun going to practice and in the games? I still enjoy it.”

He didn’t go panting after a Stanley Cup contender when he signed a $1.5-million, one-year deal with the Ducks. He looked for a satisfying role, one that might prolong his career. But he insists even five Stanley Cup rings haven’t left him satisfied.

“Winning is No. 1. I think that could be one of the reasons I’m still around,” Kurri said. “I’ve been able to play with teams that won the Stanley Cup five times, been in the finals seven times. It makes it much easier when you are winning. Enjoyable. The season is so much nicer. Everything’s so much nicer around you.”

Add all those playoff games to his regular season total and Kurri has played 1,284 games, enough to wear out many a body.

“It doesn’t hurt when you’re winning,” he said with a small smile. “You don’t feel tired. That’s the bottom line.”

Selanne has watched Kurri for so many years, he sees the changes.

“Maybe he’s not as fast and quick and smooth as what he was, but he has always been so smart,” Selanne said.

That’s what the Ducks saw when they signed him--the impeccable positioning, the defensive conscience, the playmaking skills, the dignity and the leadership.

“We looked at the tapes of our games with the Kings, and he was always their best player against us,” Duck Coach Ron Wilson said.

“Although he’s Finnish,” Wilson said, “he doesn’t appear to be finished.”