Gretzky's Tears: Hockey, Canada, and the Day Everything Changed - Hardcover

Brunt, Stephen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0307397297 ISBN 13: 9780307397294

Publisher: Knopf Canada, 2009

Synopsis

Renowned sportswriter Stephen Brunt reveals how “the Great One,” who was bought and sold more than once, decided that the comfortable Canadian city where hockey ruled couldn’t compete with the slushy ice of a California franchise.

Bobby Orr’s career ended prematurely, with tears. Wayne Gretzky’s tears, unlike Orr’s, announced not an ending but another beginning. Gretzky’s Edmonton Oilers had four Stanley Cup victories, but Gretzky may then have had other goals in mind.

Beginning with his dad, Walter, and continuing with Nelson Skalbania, Peter Pocklington, Bruce McNall, Jerry Buss — and with the CBC’s Peter Gzowski as chronicler for the eager masses — the enormity of Gretzky’s talent attracted all sorts of people who were after a variety of vicarious thrills.

About this title

About the Author

Stephen Brunt is Canada’s premier sportswriter and commentator. In addition to Searching for Bobby Orr, he is also the author of Facing Ali: The Opposition Weighs In, and of The Way It Looks from Here: Contemporary Canadian Writing on Sports. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, and in Winterhouse Brook, Newfoundland.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter One
The Next One
 
It is the same story. It is a different story.
 
Small town, working folks, genius sprung straight from the land, honed on frozen slough or backyard rink. Twenty years on, the shinny creation myth hadn't really changed so much, even if so much else had. A new setting now, and Brantford wasn't Parry Sound. Not the near north, the cottager's idea of wilderness, not a prairie crossroads, a backwoods outpost, but the kind of place where most Canadians really lived. It was a city of modest proportions, industrial and gritty, the town that Massey Ferguson built, the country's capital of combine harvesters. The Grand River split it in two, but on Varadi Avenue most of the skating was done on dad-made ice. Walter Gretzky was a driven man, a hard man, who never made more than twenty-five grand working for the Bell (Alexander Graham had lived in Brantford too). He grew up on a farm, never drove a new car, and counted every nickel. He was a tough little guy who once cracked his skull in an accident on the job, was in a coma for awhile, was off work for eighteen months while the family struggled to live on disability payments. When he recovered, he was left deaf in one ear and his head hurt all the time. There was nothing golden or glamorous about Wally. He didn't like the night life or want to charm the ladies or walk with the ex-athlete's swagger, though he certainly didn't mind a bit of attention. He had a big schnozz, a face right from the old country, and his kids would never have to wonder where he was.
 
His boy, or at least the one born with the gift, didn't play with a lurking anger; his competitive instincts were cloaked in softer fabric. He would almost never fight. He was handsome in a different way—not along the square, straight, crew-cut lines of the 1950s, but skinny, feminine in a way. And bright enough, though school was beside the point. Everybody who saw him at the rink, nearly from the earliest days, understood where his destiny lay, that he would be the next one. Even before his voice had changed, the press flocked to Brantford to see the wonder child, to ask him how it felt to be so special. There would be no more eureka moments, no more accidental discoveries of unknown hockey genius, stumbled upon in a chilly old barn of an arena. Wayne Gretzky we knew before we knew what he really was or what he really meant. (By the time the next one came along, in Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, the path was so familiar, the tale had been so processed, that it would seem stage-managed, contrived, reduced almost to cliché.)
 
The story of the nurturing, demanding dad, the ridiculous scoring feats in minor hockey, the parents end-running the system, the short career in junior, the jump to a rebel professional league—it was all played out under the lights. As before, our hero would change the game, would reimagine it with his genius, would set the National Hockey League on an entirely new course, would be its face shining among the heathens, its image and salvation. For the country, he would come to represent something else—not just the embodiment of national identity wrapped up in a game, but what it felt like to have that bought and sold.
 
The same story, and different.
 
 
A chapter closes.
 
It was the wrong place, the wrong uniform, but the trappings, the setting, were beside the point. It didn't really matter now whether he was a Bruin or a Blackhawk. The end had come, as he had long known it would, prematurely, painfully, bitterly. In 1978, Bobby Orr was thirty years old, and he wouldn't be playing hockey anymore.
 
He had stumbled through six games at the beginning of that final season with Chicago before finally surrendering to the knifing pain in his left knee, wrecked and repaired, wrecked and repaired again. All that remained was to make official what was obvious, to share the bad tidings with the world.
 
Orr had never been comfortable with public intimacy, even the feigned, phony kind that was fast becoming the currency of celebrity. He was imbued with the stoicism of his forebears, their natural reserve, a shyness bordering on the antisocial that had fully kicked in when he left Oshawa for Boston as a teen. The walls he had erected only grew thicker as they wanted more of him. The modern world was redefining sports stardom, with everything, every personal detail, fair game, and he hated that. But now here he was at a press conference, laid bare under the bright lights, with shutters clicking, cameras whirring, and Bobby Orr began to cry. "I'm very, very happy that I attempted to play again," he said, reading carefully, deliberately from his script. "I now know for sure that my leg—" He paused, trying to hold back the emotion. "—cannot handle playing."
 
He continued, haltingly.
 
"I am disappointed but I am relieved. I would not want to go through the rest of my life thinking, well, maybe there was that chance. I now know I am no longer able to play."
 
The saviour of the Boston franchise, the sport's first breakout superstar, the face of the great expansion, the liberated athlete-as-entrepreneur, for awhile the greatest earner in all of professional sports, departed the scene in a very different world than the one he had entered as an eighteen-year-old in 1966. Players were chattel then. Owners were conservative and omnipotent. Hockey was a funny little regional six-team operation, cobwebbed, musty, unchanged for decades.
 
Nearly all of the players had agents now, and they had a union, and they might wind up showcasing their skills in a whole host of exotic locales, since the NHL had continued adding teams in fits and starts after doubling the original half-dozen, driven by the lure of quick money and a phantom American television audience. The established league couldn't move fast enough to satisfy the imagined demand, so another loop was cobbled together by hockey hustlers, though on the shakiest of foundations. Veteran players, Orr's contemporaries, cashed in enthusiastically, bolting the NHL monopoly for the chance to earn big money playing in strange uniforms for slapdash teams with silly names, that might fold in the face of a strong breeze. The World Hockey Association and Boston's penurious owners had more to do with breaking up the Bruins' dynasty than had any rising foe. Even Bobby Orr had briefly flirted with becoming a Minnesota Fighting Saint, following the path of Gerry Cheevers and Derek Sanderson and the rest of those who had fled Boston Garden, before he finally signed the fateful deal with Chicago.
 
He and Alan Eagleson had helped build this new world, exploiting the leverage created as the greatest player the game had ever seen, the greatest product it had ever produced, to break the shackles. Now he, though not Alan Eagleson, was about to exit, stage left. For an unhappy retirement. For a cloistered personal life. For near financial ruin. For a period in which he would be so estranged from the game that had defined him, and that he had so helped define, that his two sons would never feel the urge, or the encouragement, to even lace up a pair of skates.
 
 
A chapter opens.
 
It is the age of the hero capitalists, of new-money sex appeal, of the art of the deal celebrated as though it were honest-to-God art. Real estate flippers as movie stars, Michael Milken and Ivan Boesky and Donald Trump, blue-suited pin-up boys. Still to come, the crashes and burns and bankruptcies—and in some cases the jail sentences—but for a brief shining moment they are right there at the heart of the zeitgeist, even in the backwaters.
 
Six days before Bobby Orr announced his retirement in Chicago, two of those high fliers got together in the most northerly metropolis in North America to play what was, next to high-stakes backgammon, their favourite game. Nelson Skalbania and Peter Pocklington shared a simple set of business principles: buy low, sell high; calculate risk and reward; use other people's money as often as possible; run circles around the stodgy old guard, with their inherited wealth, their safety-first instincts; take chances they never would; search out the cutting edge and ride it, even as you started to bleed a little. Both of them, business-wise, were on the make, always looking for one-night stands and not a partner for life.
 
There were also differences, though those matching thick, full, dark beards could make them appear, on the surface, almost to be the brothers on the cough drop package. (Skalbania felt compelled to point out that when it came to facial hair, and by implication to other things, he was the sui generis and Pocklington the knock-off.) Skalbania hailed from Vancouver, earned a structural engineering degree from prestigious Cal Tech, then ditched his profession to make his first fortune in real estate, where he loved the adrenaline rush of the big score. Pocklington came from square southwestern Ontario, though he was more than happy to morph, as were so many others, into an oil-boom Alberta free-enterpriser. He quit school early and started out selling used cars—including the family's own, without his father's permission. In business he could play the bully, and he was a bit rough around the edges. Some of his schemes were over and done with in an instant, and some investments he hung on to until they had maxed out, until the moment the asset had begun to depreciate. Remember that phrase.
 
Among the things they had in common were that neither knew a damn thing about hockey and neither let the fact that they didn't know a damn thing about hockey prevent them from sinking money into the business of the game. Skalbania was the first to get into the World Hockey Association, and he fit right in with its wild and woolly cast of promoters and dreamers and pretenders. Like the rest, he bet that any sports franchise—anywhere—at the bargain-basement pric...

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf Canada
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0307397297
• ISBN 13: 9780307397294
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272