Gretzky at 50: Superstar's maturity matched skill

By Kevin Allen
USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/
January 26, 2011

Wayne Gretzky takes in a Kings-Lightning game at Staples Center earlier this season. (Kirby Lee / US Presswire)

The arrival of Wayne Gretzky's 50th birthday Wednesday simply means that his body has finally caught up with his mind. Even when Gretzky was a young man, he seemed to have the wisdom of a 50-year-old.

His 50th birthday gives us cause to recall what a remarkably dominant athlete he was. We can pick your favorite Gretzky NHL record. He only has 60 from which to choose. How about 215 points in a single season? Or, do you like 50 goals in the first 39 games in a season? Certainly, Gretzky's 51-game points streak is hockey's equivalent of Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak.

But as impressive as Gretzky's athletic accomplishments were, his ability to maturely, intelligently handle his stardom was probably even more impressive.

The first time I met Gretzky was 1983, when he was at a news conference in Detroit's Joe Louis Arena. That was the season he netted 87 goals and every sportswriter in America wanted to talk to him. He went to the podium in every city he visited. In Detroit, the late sportswriting legend Joe Falls asked Gretzky whether he enjoyed being peppered with questions in every NHL city.

Not really, he answered truthfully. But he said his father had taught him that if he was planning to take from the sport of hockey, then he was going to have to put something back into it.

Gretzky said he planned to remember his father Walter's words each time he was asked to do an interview.

Gretzky was 22 then, and he seemed much older and wiser than most of the people in the room. Certainly I can verify that Gretzky fulfilled the promise he made in Detroit that day. Gretzky became rich and famous through hockey, but I always felt he put everything he had back into the game.

On his hockey card, his position should have read center/ambassador. The two vivid images I have of Gretzky in my head is his pull-up move, curling at the blue line and hitting the trailer with a perfect pass. The other lasting image I have of Gretzky was him walking into an interview room. He was a player on and off the ice.

Every season, Gretzky's news conference at the All-Star Game was a can't-miss event. It was his state-of-the-game address. He answered every question thoughtfully, and he could speak knowledgeably on any issue in the game.

Gretzky was always fascinating. In the 1980s, he announced he would wear a visor in practice. The idea was he might wear one in a game if it didn't hinder him in any way. It was reasonably big news because not many players were using visors back then. Gretzky understood that if he wore a visor, it would have an impact. I flew to Minneapolis to talk to him about it after a practice at the Met Center in Bloomington.

He told me after practice that he was sorry to say the visor experiment hadn't been fruitful. He offered the standard complaint about losing sight of the puck in his skates, and then he said something that was both surprising and enlightening at the same time: He didn't hear as well when he wore a visor.

Instantly, I understood the sixth sense that Gretzky seemed to have about where everyone was on the ice at all time. He used everything he had, including his hearing, to give himself an advantage. The visor had blocked his own personal surround-sound.

New York Rangers senior advisor Mike Barnett, Gretzky's close friend and former agent, was reminding me this week about when Nike tried to design a skate that was identical to the Dauost skates that Gretzky had worn for years.

According to Barnett, Nike X-rayed Gretzky's boot and measured it. The belief was that Nike had a perfect replica.

"Wayne would go out and try them and he said, 'I feel like my toes are going downhill and it's too tight on my toes,'" Barnett recalled.

The Nike officials said that couldn't be true because their measurements had been precise.

"But Wayne insisted that something wasn't right," Barnett said.

Eventually, Nike officials figured out that the slope of the blade under the boot was one-tenth of an inch higher in the heel of Gretzky's old skates than the skates Nike had designed for him.

No one understood all aspects of the game better than Gretzky. His dad had the same awareness of equipment. Barnett recalls that Walter Gretzky would note that his son's batch of sticks were too long. "Wayne would cut a quarter-inch off and he could tell the difference," Barnett recalled.

Gretzky also understood how to be a teammate. Former NHL player Tom Laidlaw remembers when Gretzky came to Los Angeles, he thought he would be playing with a guy who would be bigger than the game.

"One day, Gretzky came back to talk to me in the back of the bus and I'm thinking if Wayne is coming to talk to me I'm either in trouble or I've been traded," Laidlaw said. "But he tossed me a beer and ended up talking about all the players I played with in junior hockey. He remembered some guys on my team that I didn't remember."

Laidlaw said he quickly realized "Wayne just wanted to be one of the guys."

Throughout his career, Gretzky always tried to do or say the right thing. Some would say that Gretzky's well-manicured demeanor was his way of preserving his public image. They would make it seem like that was a negative. But shouldn't everyone be trying to do that? Don't you try to teach your children that their reputation is important. I remember former NHL player Bill Gadsby told me the story that his father once told him. "I've given you a good name and I want you to keep it that way."

It was unsettling to see Gretzky's name dragged down the dirt road a bit during the Phoenix Coyotes' financial crisis. With his high coaching salary and the team's poor performance, he was an easy target for frustrated fans.

But on the occasion of Gretzky's 50th birthday the overwhelming sentiment I have about the Great One is that the NHL needs him back in the game. When you consider what classy Mario Lemieux had done as owner of the Pittsburgh Penguins or the success that Steve Yzerman is having as Tampa Bay's general manager or the smooth transition Luc Robitaille made from player to president of the LA Kings, it suggests to me that Gretzky is better suited for management than coaching. Yzerman passed his final exam to become an NHL general manager by leading Canada to an Olympic gold medal in 2010. Gretzky did the same in 2002.

The NHL needs Gretzky. It needs his wisdom, insight and his willingness to be a good teammate for the sake of the sport. Hockey doesn't need him behind the bench. It needs him in a place where he has a pulpit.

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