“He was never that good,” he mumbled, bagging the milk.
“Hmm?”
“He was only as good as the fellows around him,” said Mr. Checkout, who looked about 60 or 65 years old.
I shook my head, told him I didn’t agree, gave him my money and left.
If anyone, it tends to be the older guys who refuse to give Gretzky his due. Their favorite argument is that none of today’s stars would have amounted to much in the rough and tumble six-team era of the 1950s and 1960s. The late sportswriter Dick Beddoes is said to have grumbled that Gretzky would have been a third-line player in the old days. I don’t know if he ever changed his mind.
Nostalgia and sports are a powerful mix– those old black and white newsreels are beautiful – and the golden memories can be blinding. There are lots of old guys (some younger guys, too) who just know the NHL has never been the same since the days of the Rocket and the Kraut Line and Turk Broda.
So the retirement weekend represents a turning point for hockey fans of Wayne Gretzky’s generation. We now have license to indulge in nostalgia. From here on, we can sit back and say “not as good as Wayne.”
And he’ll only get better as we get older. We will become the new old guys. The process has begun. They had the Rocket. We had Gretzky. Not a bad trade.
Occasionally, a true vintage moment creeps into the mix. There is one goal against the Bruins, from the early days in Edmonton, when his hair still feathered from the back of his helmet. He’s on the backhand, freezes a defenceman with a shoulder dip and slides the puck between the guy’s legs, picks it up forehand, does a little shift to send the goalie sprawling, and roofs it. It lasts about three seconds and tells you everything you need to know.
Perhaps the most striking measure of Gretzky’s impact isn’t found in the numbers, but in his standing among fantasy leagues and hockey pools. For a few years during the mid-eighties, it was not unusual to see Gretzky banned from the pool. No one could pick him, because he scored too much and would throw the entire competition out of whack. Gretzky was too good for fantasy hockey as well as the real thing.
I remember explaining this to my friend Bob sometime in 1985 or 1986, showing him the previous years statistics to illustrate. Bob, a casual hockey fan, checked the margin of Gretzky’s scoring lead. “For f**k’s sake,” he exclaimed. “That’s f**king ridiculous!”
He’s lost a step or two, but was still the best playmaker on the ice on Sunday. He made a dozen or so excellent passes, but the game was half over before his ham-fisted teammates finally converted one of them into a goal.
Everyone wanted him to score the winner in overtime, but it didn’t happen. “Maybe when I was younger I might have got the winner,” he said after. It was one of his more telling statements: I can’t do those things anymore. It’s over.
But the best moment wasn’t a goal. I think it was the middle of the second period when Gretzky took the puck behind the Swedish net. A pair of defenders stood awkwardly in front, terrified. Gretzky motioned to the right of the net, now back, now left, now back, the yellow jerseys hesitating, freezing, stumbling in front of him.
Finally, after maybe eight or ten seconds, an embarrassed defender dislodged the net to get a whistle. By this time the entire building was on its feet, players included, watching one man hold the game on a string.
It isn't on most highlight reels. But I had never seen anything like it in my life, and I don’t imagine I ever will.
