No Re-Gretz

It wasn’t merely a news conference. There are a million of those. There is only one of him. Wayne Gretzky. The Great One.

He was introduced as the greatest player who ever played. There are few moments when that sort of hyperbole is acceptable. This was one of them.

He entered the room, tall and slim and handsome. With him were his blond actress wife and two of the most adorable boys you’ve ever seen--”My daughter stayed at home because she was afraid she’d cry too much,” he said. He smiled and the click of cameras sounded like hail on a tin roof. He gestured and a new cloudburst hit.

He had everything, was everything, transcended what we have come to know about sport and entertainment, and there wasn’t a jealous bone in Madison Square Garden’s jam-packed Theater.

In size, it was a Ben Johnson-esque news conference. Cameras three rows deep, every seat precious, every sign, celebrity attendee, utterance taken note of. But when they took the Canadian sprinter’s number down at the Seoul Olympics in 1988, the phrase “Great One” and its corresponding ambience were nowhere to be found. “Stupid One,” perhaps, but certainly not “Great One.”

They played a video before Gretzky spoke. It started with clips of him as a youngster. He said later that he has been playing hockey since he was 3 years old, 35 years in all. It brought to mind the recent item in ESPN The Magazine about a conversation he had with his father. He had just played in an exhibition game and his team had lost, 7-1. His father saw him smiling and told him to be careful, because all the people were coming to see him. He had scored 378 goals that season and was 10 years old.

In the video, the jerseys changed rapidly, from age to age and team to team. But one thing stayed consistent, a big C, for captain, on the front.

Among the things he said repeatedly during the news conference was his desire, always, to be one of the guys. He talked about that as the main thing he’ll miss, the camaraderie, the inside stuff.

“There’s nothing like walking into the locker room and having a bunch of guys look at your new haircut and ask if you lost a bet,” he said.

Anybody else standing up there, in that sort of spotlight, and saying he just wanted to be one of the guys--it just wouldn’t fly. That includes the other great one, Michael Jordan. With Gretzky, as with most things he says and does, it worked, even seemed natural.

Anecdotal evidence on that is even better.

Gary Bettman, commissioner of the NHL, went to Ottawa for the Ranger game there Thursday night, and then hitched a ride back on the Ranger plane. That gave him a chance for a prolonged conversation with Gretzky, which ended, courteously, when Gretzky told Bettman that, while he was enjoying the discussion, he hoped Bettman wouldn’t mind if he went back to the coach area to be with his teammates.

“It’s our last flight together,” he told Bettman.

While everybody around him drowned in their hyperbole, Gretzky stayed calm, poised, even reassuring all that they should keep smiling, that this was a happy day, a wedding rather than a funeral.

Earlier in the day, Bettman had called him the consummate ambassador for the sport and had labeled him “McGwire, Ruth, Ali and Jordan all mixed together.”

A news conference questioner had referred to him as “a cultural icon.”

To all, Gretzky just smiled and talked about how his youngest son, Trevor, probably wouldn’t be there for his final game Sunday because he has a baseball game. And about how it will be very emotional when he takes off his skates for the last time, but that they might never get to the Hall of Fame because one of his teammates is likely to steal them.

There is no question that the Great One knows he is the Great One. He has just decided to never wear it on his sleeve.

When it was over, and you watched him move easily from one TV sound bite to another, smiling, being accommodating, dazzling each new questioner with a fresh story or a nicely phrased response, you had this sinking feeling of loss that you seldom had before.

Who else in sports today would phrase so beautifully, at his retirement news conference, the essence of what we have seemed to lose sight of in sport: “I tell kids today that if they want to become hockey players, do it because they love the game. Don’t do it for the money.”

As the TV one-on-ones went on, his wife, Janet, was surrounded in the hallway by other media questioners. As the circle thinned out, she paused, grimaced and said, “I guess I’m like you guys. I never thought it would end either.”

Outside Madison Square Garden, life buzzed on. The cabs honked and the people hustled, and the city that doesn’t work but keeps on trying to fix itself with Band-Aids kept right on pushing and shoving itself to wherever it goes after working hours.

The wind swirled against the overcoats and a drizzle turned hard and biting.

It’s still hockey weather here. Too bad.