This story, by associate editor Larry Wigge, first appeared in the April 26, 1999, issue of The Sporting News, after Wayne Gretzky and the Rangers lost, 2-1, in overtime to the Penguins in Gretzky’s final game in the NHL on April 18.
Bobby Orr glares across the ice at the old Boston Garden. It’s November 1979, and the recently retired Orr is watching a skinny little 18-yearold kid practicing when he turns to me and says, “That can’t be Wayne Gretzky. That can’t be the kid scoring all of those points. He’s just a runt. A strong wind could blow him over.”
That night, Gretzky crosses the blue line with the puck on his stick. His head is up — his head is always up as he surveys his options — always looking to make the best play. Bruins rookie defenseman Ray Bourque tries to double up the kid with a hip check. He misses. Goal, Edmonton.
“I still can’t get over how skinny he is,” Orr says afterward. “But it’s clear the kid is special. He’s there one minute and gone the next.”
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For 20 years, The Great One elicited similar reactions: Awe. Wonder. Excitement. And now he’s gone.
Gretzky skated his last lap around the ice Sunday at Madison Square Garden — with no regrets. He set a standard. by which all others are judged. He was the perfect blend of performance and personality. He made America pay attention to hockey. Wayne Gretzky did it all.
And now he’s gone.
“In a perfect world, I would have liked to have won another championship with a shot in the final seconds, just like Michael Jordan did,” Gretzky says. “But I’m lucky. I have plenty of memories to take away from the game with me.”
Amid all the Gretzky tributes, Orr put Gretzky on a pinnacle by himself, saying, “I look at Wayne Gretzky like I do Michael Jordan. No matter how many times I watched Wayne play, he never disappointed. They talk about Babe Ruth pointing to center field for a home run, but Gretzky was just as dramatic every time he came close to a record. He didn’t need to point — his numbers were Ruthian.
“People will say that Jordan was the best athlete of all-time. But those people didn’t watch Wayne at his peak, leading those great Edmonton teams in the 1980s. What he did in that 10-year period, I think, was better than any athlete ever.”
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By the numbers back up Orr’s accolades:
* 92 goals in one season
* 10 scoring titles (7 in the 1980s)
* 200 points four times in five seasons
* Four Stanley Cups in five seasons
* 9 NHL MVPs … in the ’80s
The only player to come close to the last record was not Jordan, but Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who won the NBA MVP six times.
“I remember seeing him on the ice for the first time (when he started his pro career with the Indianapolis Racers in the World Hockey Association) and thinking to myself that he was one of the owners’ kids,” Oilers G.M. Glen Sather says. “But from the moment he began to move on the ice, you could see he was more than that. He was like a chess master on the ice, outthinking everyone else, seeing plays before they happened.”
“Great players come and go,” former Islanders great Mike Bossy says, “but no one will be able to sell his game as eloquently as Wayne did.”
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No other player was so good he was removed from fantasy games, like Gretzky was, because his statistics were so much greater than anyone else’s. No other player could boast of getting 12 goals and 31 assists in 19 games with playoff pressure at a peak like The Great One did for Edmonton in 1988.
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After the Oilers swept the Bruins in the ’88 finals, Boston coach Terry O’Reilly stopped by the Edmonton locker room to shake hands with Gretzky. That handshake was the first time the Bruins slowed down No. 99 that series.
“It should be a league rule that you have to be passed around,” O’Reilly said to Gretzky. “Four Stanley Cups in five years. Other teams should get to borrow you for six months or a year, maybe.”
Little did O’Reilly know that Oilers owner Peter Pocklington already was dickering with Los Angeles to sell Gretzky to the Kings in a multiplayer deal that would be consummated on August 9, 1988 — a move that rocked not only the city of Edmonton but Canada as well.
“I’ll go to my grave believing we could have won seven or eight Stanley Cups,” Gretzky says. “There might have been better teams that have won the Stanley Cup, but those Edmonton teams were the most exciting team ever to win it. That team had so much emotion, energy and excitement.”
Gretzky’s move to Los Angeles began the pioneer stage of his career. He took a franchise that was averaging 6,000 fans and turned it into a box office success, selling out the Great Western Forum (16,006) every night. And in the process, he proved the NHL could succeed in a warm-weather climate.
“If this league doesn’t have Wayne Gretzky, there is no Dallas, no San Jose, no Anaheim, no Miami, no Tampa Bay and no Phoenix,” Senators president Roy Mlakar says. “He has opened a lot of opportunities the NHL wouldn’t have had without him.”
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“I remember going into a sports bar in Orange County (Calif.) to watch one of the Kings’ playoff games in 1993,” former Mighty Ducks G.M. Jack Ferreira says. “No one was watching the Dodgers or the Angels; they were all screaming at the TV screens with hockey on it.
“The Kings had star players before-they had. Marcel Dionne, Dave Taylor, Charlie Simmer and Luc Robitaille-but they couldn’t really sell the sport until Wayne came along.”
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Walter Gretzky remembers dragging. his son to hockey games all over Ontario. “When Wayne was just 6, he played with 10-year-olds and scored one goal. He was down on himself, wanted to quit,” Walter says. “I stopped the car on the way home and told him to stop whining, that he’d never be the biggest, strongest or fastest, but he could be the smartest. Four years later, playing in the same league, he had 387 goals.”
Gretzky is neither as quick nor as elusive as he was when he was having those 200-point seasons with the Stanley Cup champion Oilers. But he’ll still be the best passer in the world five years after he retires.
“He used to sort of pop up unexpectedly like a monster in a tunnel of horrors at an amusement park,” Devils defenseman Scott Stevens says. “When you saw who it was, it sort of scared the devil out of you.”
You are judged against what you accomplished when you were 25, when you had an astounding record 163 assists and 215 points, or when you were 21, when you scored an amazing 92 goals and earned 212 points.
Anything less just isn’t good enough, and because of that mind-set there never was any way for Wayne Gretzky to grow old gracefully in the game he redefined. However, rather than having to play with the Rangers as playoff pretenders for another year, he has opted to say goodbye.
“At the All-Star break, I honestly thought I’d be back,” Gretzky says. “I had thoughts about retiring at Christmastime, but they weren’t serious until I hurt my neck and couldn’t bend it — and after the Rangers missed the playoffs for the second straight season.”
Gretzky says he didn’t look forward to sitting through a long summer in which the Rangers were not expected to get help for him to finish off his still-great passes. And let’s face it, beyond winning another Stanley Cup, The Great One didn’t have much left to prove.
“All of those things,” he says when asked about the timing of his retirement, “and none of them. It came down to my instincts — a gut feeling that it was time. I said I’d play as long as the game was still fun. But honestly I didn’t think I had the dedication to prepare for another long, 82-game schedule. And for the first time, I started to feel the fatigue, mentally and physically.”
There’s a fine line great players walk. Jordan left when he still could have led the NBA in scoring and highlight moves. Willie Mays hung around too long. Gretzky is somewhere in between.
“I told Wayne we wouldn’t be the same team without him,” Rangers coach John Muckler says. “That’s impossible.”
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Gretzky says his greatest memory is of winning the Stanley Cup for the first time in Edmonton in 1984, followed by scoring 50 goals in 39 games in 1981 to shatter Rocket Richard’s record of 50 goals in 50 games. He says his only regrets are that the Kings didn’t win it all in 1993, when they lost in the finals to Montreal. And that the Rangers weren’t able to win it all in 1997, when they made it to the conference finals before losing to the Flyers.
Some say that his skills diminished appreciably and that playing for four teams — the Oilers, Kings, Blues and Rangers — tarnishes his image. But anyone who saw his All-Star MVP performance at Tampa Bay in January could still see him waving that magical stick of his.
Gordie Howe says the void will be huge.
“I told him not to do anything he would regret, to be careful not to leave the thing you love,” Howe says. “I’ll tell you one thing: He’s still better on one skate than most of the players.”
Those who didn’t see him early in his career forget he is the greatest goal scorer in hockey history, when he scored 92 goals in 1981-82. He finished with one assist in Sunday’s 2-1 overtime loss to Pittsburgh. He ends his NHL career with 62 scoring records, 894 goals, 1,963 assists and 2,857 points; also, he has nine 50-goal seasons, 15 100-point seasons and career records for playoff goals (122), assists (260) and points (382).
Is there another Gretzky out there?
“Not like him,” Howe says.
“No,” Orr says. “I’m not sure we’ll see another one like him in my lifetime.”
’80s and forever (TSN, April 26, 1999)
In 82 percent of the 1,487 regular-season games Wayne Gretzky played, he had at least one point.
“That’s like a batter hitting .400 lifetime,” Red Wings coach Scotty Bowman says. “It’s like a basketball player averaging 50 points for his entire career and a football player running for 3,000 yards a season.
“That’s how much better Wayne Gretzky was than anyone else in sports in his era, with the possible exception of Michael Jordan.”
“I know one thing,” former Penguins star Mario Lemieux says. “If I started in the NHL when he did, I couldn’t have accomplished near as much in my career. He paved the way for all of us with the way he changed the game. He set a standard by which all of us were judged.”
Think about it. How many players could be truly great for 10 consecutive seasons?
Just look at this 10-season comparison (1979-80 to 1988-89) of Gretzky and Peter Stastny, the NHL’s second-highest scorer in the ’80s:
Gretzky: 774 games, 637 goals, 1,302 assists, 1,939 points, 2.51 points per game
Stastny: 749 games, 385 goals, 674 assists, 1,059 points, 1.41 points per game
And if that comparison isn’t enough, Gretzky won his league’s scoring title outright seven times and tied another in the 1980s; he made it to five Stanley Cup finals, winning four; and was the NHL’s MVP nine times.
Says NHL commissioner Gary Bettman: “He was hockey’s Michael Jordan, Babe Ruth and Muhammad Ali.” — Larry Wigge
