Wayne Gretzky: He Knew All the Angels

During the 1980s championship run by the Edmonton Oilers, Wayne Gretzky once skated against a goalkeeper hired for the morning practice, a policeman named Floyd Whitney. If Gretzky took one shot against Whitney, he took 20. Astonishingly (at least to a baseball writer), the goalie stopped every shot by the greatest hockey player who ever lived--except for one.

That one came when Gretzky slipped into a corner and vanished into a scrum of swirling bodies. The rent-a-goalie came out of the goal mouth to confront the NHL’s second-leading scorer, Jari Kurri. Just then the puck plunked off the moonlighting cop’s back and rolled into the net. It had come from the unseen Gretzky lost in that corner.

Still, the baseball scribbler congratulated Whitney afterward on the tour de force. All but the magical carom shot, he’d snared in his big first baseman’s mitt. What a morning for a working man. Here, with a smile of chagrin, officer Whitney confessed.

“I didn’t even see some of them,” he says. “Gretzky was aiming for my glove.”

Wait. You mean everything that happened, Gretzky made it happen that way?

“If you take your eye off Gretzky, he’ll bank it off your skate, your back, your helmet, your wife. I could hang a nickel in the net, and he’d hit it every time.”

I don’t know hockey. I understand it only if I think of it as basketball with a thousand turnovers. But I know this: When Gretzky came to town, I never took my eyes off him. To see Gretzky moving with the puck was to see Larry Bird moving with the basketball. Something good would happen. It was almost as much fun to watch Gretzky without the puck. You knew that pretty soon the puck would be on his stick again.

Because I had no idea how the puck came to Gretzky, I considered myself hockey-challenged. But in time I realized that no one else could explain it, either. Today, of course, everyone says it’s simple. They say Gretzky is hockey’s Michael Jordan. Maybe he is. But to compare Gretzky with Jordan is to leave unexplained how Gretzky did it.

Better by far to pair Gretzky and Larry Bird. Though neither had Jordan’s prodigious athletic skills, they did have supranatural hand-eye coordination and enough speed and strength to move with all but the very fastest and strongest.

What Gretzky and Bird both had, better than Jordan, was an understanding of their games’ geometry. Lesser players would be confused by the kaleidoscope of constantly shifting colors. Somehow, inexplicably, Gretzky and Bird knew in advance what the final pattern would be. Gretzky has said:

“People talk about skating, puck handling and shooting, but the whole sport is angles and caroms, forgetting the straight direction the puck is going, calculating where it will be diverted, factoring in all the interruptions. Basically, my whole game is angles.”

In Bird’s prime, you’d see nine pairs of sneakers off the floor and one pair on the floor -- then you’d see nine pairs on the floor and one in the air, and the one pair would belong to Bird, who knew how to get a rebound.

You’d see Gretzky on the far side of the ice, alone, and somehow the puck would bounce off that board and this skate and wind up on Gretzky’s stick, as if drawn to him, when in fact he simply moved to where he knew the puck would come. Then Gretzky would make a pass, forcing a teammate to chase it to a spot from which he could score. He understood, as Bird did, what can be understood only by players who are given extraordinary gifts and then work like hell to be worthy of the gifts.

Until Gretzky scored 92 goals in a season, Phil Esposito’s 76 had been the record for 11 years.

“It takes guts,” Esposito says, “to recognize you have that much talent and to dedicate yourself to it.”

Before little Tiger Woods played golf, little Wayne Gretzky played hockey. He grew up in Brantford, Ontario, an hour’s drive from Toronto. His father, an amateur hockey player, sprayed down the back yard with a garden hose to build Wayne a frozen pond at age 4, two years into his career. Wayne was 10, 4-4 and 70 pounds when his father drove him home from a loss and told the little great one, with certain good humor and certain sadness, “You can’t be normal. For you, there can never, ever be a bad game again. Every game now, everyone will expect a miracle.”

The next year, Gordie Howe asked, “Do you practice your shots, son?”

“Yes, sir, I do.”

“Your backhand, too?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Good. Make sure you keep practicing that backhand.”

Of all the extraordinary entries on the Gretzky record log, we know one only because Gretzky has told us: His first goal in Junior B league, his first goal in Junior A, his first in the WHA, his first in the NHL -- all came on backhand shots.

He’s 38 now, classy as ever, sincere, humble, the very model of a gentleman, at the end of a lifetime on the ice in pursuit of his passion.

“When the play isn’t so great,” he has said, “my hands are cold and my feet are freezing. But when it’s really good, I can’t get enough cold, it’s so hot. And then I don’t hear anything except the sound of the puck and the stick.”

I don’t know hockey. But I know this: As long as men beat sticks against the ice, they’ll remember Wayne Gretzky.