Gretzky Has More Than Gold Medal on His Mind

Compared to this, trashing a few rooms seems like child’s play.

The rooms destroyed by American hockey players in Nagano in 1998 could be repaired. The damage to Wayne Gretzky’s reputation may not be fixed so easily.

Gretzky arrives in this factory city Tuesday, flying in with a Canadian team favored to win Olympic gold. He’ll have a lot to think about on the flight overseas, most of it nothing to do with what happens on the ice.

The Great One comes immersed in a betting scandal so shocking -- and so unexpected -- that it threatens to overshadow anything Team Canada does with the puck.

The first questions he’ll hear won’t be about body checks or even about hockey Czechs.

They’ll be about $75,000 Super Bowl bets, his alleged bookmaking assistant coach and a wife who could allegedly wager money big enough to move the lines in Vegas, albeit not on hockey.

Journalists will ask Gretzky why he is caught on wiretap recordings talking about ways his wife, Janet Jones, could avoid being implicated.

Mostly, though, they’ll want to know how Gretzky wasn’t aware of anything even while his right-hand man and the woman who shares his bed were allegedly exchanging money and betting slips more often than his Phoenix Coyotes were scoring on power plays.

The answers so far are less than satisfactory.

“I’m just too tired mentally and physically to talk any more about it,” Gretzky said before leaving Phoenix. “There’s nothing more for me to talk about. And if you have questions for people involved, contact them.”

Uh, Wayne, that would be your wife and your coach. And they haven’t exactly been leaving their home numbers for us.

Maybe you could put in a good word, though. Because there has to be a reasonable explanation for all of this.

Maybe it’s nothing more than a desperate housewife looking for some action and an assistant coach trying to supplement his per diem. Maybe it’s a few people caught up in the excitement of the NFL playoffs and has nothing to do with hockey.

Whatever it is, it’s not good. Not for Gretzky, not for a sport that seemed to be making a promising start toward respectability once again.

And certainly not for a country that covets a gold medal in hockey more than it does a good exchange rate with its southern neighbor.

Canada will still be favored when it begins defense of its Olympic gold on Wednesday against host Italy, but the betting scandal that erupted earlier this week won’t go away by the time the gold medal is decided on the final day of the Games.

By then, Phoenix assistant coach Rick Tocchet and two others will have made their initial court appearances on charges of promoting gambling, money laundering and conspiracy in New Jersey.

By then, there will likely have been more leaks about “Operation Slapshot” and more known about the possible involvement of other NHL players, coaches or executives.

What we know -- or at least have been told -- so far is damaging enough. Sources told the Associated Press that Gretzky’s wife bet at least $100,000 during a six-week investigation and that bettors wagered $1.7 million over the same period through Tocchet, a New Jersey state trooper and another man.

Gretzky earlier denied having any prior knowledge of the investigation, but sources told the AP that he was heard on wiretaps talking to Tocchet about ways to keep his wife’s name out of the probe.

If Gretzky wasn’t forthcoming then about what he knew and when, can he be believed now?

To be fair, there is no evidence Gretzky placed bets himself or was involved in the betting ring. This apparently wasn’t Pete Rose making bets in the tunnel before games while he was managing the Cincinnati Reds.

Jones hasn’t been charged with anything either, and if she’s guilty of a crime for betting on the Super Bowl, then so are millions of other Americans.

Not many of them who don’t make a living on the Las Vegas Strip, however, bet $75,000 on the game, like the Star-Ledger of Newark reported investigators as saying Jones did.

Hopefully Jones took the Steelers minus 4 points. And hopefully she got paid before the police moved in.

In the end, the case against Gretzky will probably be tried in a court of public opinion rather than in a courtroom. Though the NHL doesn’t forbid betting by players on sports other than hockey, there’s a huge stigma -- legitimately fueled by betting scandals in the NFL, major league baseball and college basketball -- about athletes and coaches making wagers.

The NFL is so frightened by betting that it won’t even let Las Vegas buy Super Bowl television ads. NBA commissioner David Stern allowed a meaningless All-Star game to be played in the gambling city, but if he was set against a team moving there before, the Gretzky scandal will give him another reason to say no.

Gretzky will always be known as the greatest player ever to lace on skates.

We will have to wait until long after the Turin Games to find out whether he’ll also be known for something far less flattering.