by Al Strachan
“After I signed, I asked him to lend me some money because I had no money in my pocket. He said, ‘Here’s a hundred. I know you’re good for it now.’ ”
“Walter Gretzky helped Wayne,” said Ludzik. “There’s no question about that. There’s no question that he taught him certain things and helped him deal with things that came up. But hockey players like Gretzky, Gordie Howe, Bobby Orr, that’s a God-given talent that comes along about once every fifty years.
“He makes you proud that you were a hockey player, and he makes you proud you played in his era. He was the man. He was Mickey Mantle. He was Joe DiMaggio. He was Babe Ruth. He was everything rolled into one. I enjoyed playing against him, and I felt honoured just to talk to him.”
CHAPTER FOUR
On January 26, 1982, Gretzky was finally able to go into an American bar for a post-game beer. Being as concerned about his reputation as he was, he would never have taken a chance by entering a bar underage, but this was his twenty-first birthday.
By then, he was in his third NHL season, shattering records night after night, and well on his way to setting an NHL mark for most points in a season (212, a record that fell four years later when he racked up 215).
A few weeks earlier, he had just finished scoring fifty goals in the first thirty-nine games of the season. The previous record for the fastest fifty goals, held by Maurice Richard and Mike Bossy, was fifty games.
By the end of the month, Gretzky was almost certain to surpass the NHL record of most goals in a season—seventy-six, by Phil Esposito in 1970–71—and in fact finished the season with ninety-two.
But when the media brought the Gretzky birthday to the nation’s attention, the reaction to his brilliance was astonishingly negative. In Brazil, Pele had been declared a national treasure by virtue of his brilliance on the soccer field. In Canada, hockey fans, many of whom were in the media, tried to outdo each other in pointing out Gretzky’s shortcomings. Being a national treasure was nowhere in the picture.
Granted, some of the criticism came from the United States. Stan Fischler, an American hockey writer who had christened himself the “Hockey Maven,” insisted in The Hockey News (a Canadian publication) that until Gretzky had been smashed into the boards a few times by defencemen in the mould of the legendary Black Jack Stewart, his records were suspect, and he could not be considered to be a great player.
Stewart was certainly a tough player in his day. But since he couldn’t skate backwards, it was not likely he would have managed to come within ten feet of Gretzky. It’s hard to crunch anyone into the boards from ten feet away. It was an astonishingly stupid remark, but certainly not unique.
Many Canadians, of course, were upset that Gretzky was highly paid. Canadians rarely like to see anyone get a lot of money, especially other Canadians. The problem with that line of thought was that it overlooked a major point: Gretzky was highly paid because wherever he went, buildings sold out. That meant the owners of those teams pulled in a great deal of money—much more than Gretzky was getting. But the fans tended to focus only on Gretzky.
Gretzky was also criticized because he hadn’t singlehandedly defeated the Soviets in the 1981 Canada Cup. The Canadians lost the final game of that series 8–1, and only eight more goals from Gretzky could have changed the outcome. How could he be called great if he couldn’t even contribute that much?
Two criticisms of Gretzky were even sillier than those already mentioned. Nevertheless, they were repeated relentlessly in the media and wherever hockey fans congregated.
The first was that he was shattering records because the league was so watered down.
Why anyone would consider the league to be watered down at that point was never made sufficiently clear. The World Hockey Association had been absorbed into the NHL three years earlier, so the competition for NHL jobs was tougher than ever. Talented Europeans were starting to come into the league and even Americans were fighting for NHL spots. But even if one were gullible enough to accept the watered-down theory, why wasn’t the league diluted for other stars, like Bossy, Peter Stastny and Marcel Dionne? Why weren’t they, as veterans, destroying all the long-established records the same way that this twenty-one-year-old was?
Furthermore, when the WHA teams were absorbed, they were allowed to protect only two skaters and two goalies. The rest were either reclaimed by the NHL teams that held their rights or went into a dispersal draft. As a result, the Oilers as a team were not particularly strong.
When Phil Esposito set his scoring record, he had the likes of Bobby Orr, Ken Hodge and John Bucyk to contribute to his cause. Bossy had Bryan Trottier, Denis Potvin and Clark Gillies. Guy Lafleur had Steve Shutt and Jacques Lemaire, not to mention a host of other players who made up what was the most dominant team in NHL history.
And Gretzky? It’s true that Glenn Anderson, Paul Coffey and Mark Messier were on that 1981–82 team, but they were still a long way from their peak years. In fact, they rounded out the top four in Edmonton Oilers’ scoring that year, but Gretzky outpaced them by 107, 123 and 124 points respectively.
And if the league was so watered down, why was Gretzky sixty-five points ahead of Bossy, the second-leading scorer, when the season ended? In all the years that the NHL had been in existence, the biggest margin between the scoring champion and the runner-up had been twenty-three points. Gretzky almost tripled that.
But an even sillier suggestion, one that I had to dispute regularly on the call-in radio show I hosted around that time, was that there was a secret league edict forbidding any checking of Gretzky.
Astonishingly, that theory exists to this day. It defies all logic, and its adherents are on a par with those who believe that the earth is flat, that Elvis Presley is still alive or that the end of the world is imminent. But those people existed in 1982 and they exist now.
Their argument is that the NHL wanted to get more attention, and to do so, it needed someone to dominate scoring and break all the meaningful records. Gretzky was deemed to be the man, and in order to facilitate his quest, the league commanded all its players to leave him alone.
Well, that would definitely do the job, wouldn’t it? After all, no NHL player has ever ignored a league edict about violence.
There’s also the matter of the coaching fraternity, not a group known for shouldering the blame if it can be shunted somewhere else. Isn’t it a stretch to believe that a coach who just lost a playoff series—and perhaps his job—because Gretzky ran rampant would not mention in the post-game press conference that his team would have done better if they’d been allowed to check Gretzky?
Thousands of players came and went in the NHL during the course of Gretzky’s career. The likelihood of such a major secret being kept by so many people for so long, particularly when it was no longer in their interest to do so, simply defies belief.
In the later stages of his career, Gretzky was one of the league’s elder statesmen, and he had established himself as a player who did not run opponents, did not use his stick as a weapon, did not take cheap shots and did not fight. By that time, no one took a run at him. Similarly, they did not take a run at Steve Yzerman, Joe Sakic, Ron Francis, Adam Oates, Mike Modano and a host of others. But it had nothing to do with any secret edict. It was simply an adherence to the accepted code of conduct in the NHL.
In the earlier stages of his career, before Gretzky became an elder statesman, opponents did not take a run at him for two reasons. One was Dave Semenko; the other was Marty McSorley.
Because of those two players, the league definitely had a no-hit edict for Gretzky, but it certainly wasn’t secret, and the punishment wouldn’t come from the NHL head office.
“At the first sign that anybody might be thinking of going after him,” said McSorley, “I’d skate over in front of their bench and say, ‘Guys, that’s not going to happen tonight. If anybody thinks it is, come on over right now and we’ll talk about it.’
“That usually put an end to it,” said McSorley, “but I alway
s let them know that I didn’t care about suspensions. I’d tell them, ‘You go after Gretz and you’re going to get hurt. You may get hurt so bad that I’ll get suspended, but I don’t care. You should, though.’ ”
Semenko didn’t talk as much as McSorley. He preferred a stony—and scary—glare to get the message across, but he had the same mindset. When it came to hitting Gretzky, there was to be zero tolerance.
“I don’t take any credit for any of Gretz’s records,” said McSorley. “He set them all, and he’s the greatest player the game has ever seen. But I like to think that I helped to make sure that he was able to show everybody what he could do.
“I didn’t do anything to set all those records. I just made sure he was left alone to set them.”
Another one of Gretzky’s teammates in Los Angeles, Ken Baumgartner, offered the memorable observation, mentioned earlier, that “hockey is a game which lends itself very well to retribution.” That was the way the tough guys on Gretzky’s teams thought in those earlier years. Those who hit Gretzky, or even indicated that they might be planning to hit Gretzky, were subject to the NHL’s own particular brand of retribution.
It had nothing to do with a secret no-hit edict.
CHAPTER FIVE
For some reason, perhaps because of the notoriety the concept gained in the Soviet Union, hockey general managers like to build their strategies along the lines of five-year plans. Ask any incoming general manager about his hopes for the team that he has just taken over, and he’ll almost certainly say that he envisions a Stanley Cup within five years.
But history shows that it’s a Herculean task, and even more so when you start as a “merger team.” That’s why the achievement of the young Gretzky-led Oilers cannot be underestimated. The Oilers’ road to their first Stanley Cup had its potholes and even some washouts. To go from being a “merger team” with a skeletal roster to Stanley Cup champion in five years was nothing short of magnificent.
For those fortunate enough to be unfamiliar with the idiosyncrasies of the National Hockey League governors and the legal battalion that guides their actions, a merger team was basically an expansion team—but with even less chance of success.
When the NHL merged with the World Hockey Association in time for the 1979–80 season, four WHA teams—Quebec Nordiques, New England Whalers, Winnipeg Jets and Edmonton Oilers—entered the NHL.
The NHL wanted to eliminate the competition from the WHA without getting hammered with an antitrust suit—which, in the United States, pays triple damages to the wronged party. To reach its goal, the NHL had to “expand.” The arrangement was basically a merger, but the lawyers, being lawyers, didn’t allow it to be called that. By the time the merger was effected, the WHA had shrunk from twelve franchises to six. Four of them were sucked into the black hole of NHL expansion, and the other two were left out in the cold.
But teams coming in from the WHA weren’t allowed to simply bring along their WHA rosters. They were permitted to protect only two skaters and two goaltenders. The rest were reclaimed by the NHL teams that held their rights—if they wanted them—or tossed into a pool to be picked off at random, not only by the four incoming teams, but also by the seventeen existing NHL teams.
Naturally enough, the Oilers protected Wayne Gretzky. They missed out on their second priority selection of Bengt-Ake Gustafsson because the Washington Capitals claimed he belonged to them, and NHL president John Ziegler, to no one’s surprise, ruled in their favour. The Oilers kept goaltenders Dave Dryden (the less-talented brother of the illustrious Ken) and Eddie Mio, whose obscurity was such that one NHL GM, upon reading the typewritten protected list, remarked about his curious surname, which he read as M 10.
Those three players were the base upon which the Oilers were to be built. From that point on, they were on their own.
It was a delightful turn of events for Gretzky, despite the fact that when he signed with the WHA’s Indianapolis Racers at the age of seventeen, he had given up any thought of ever playing in the NHL. “I was fine with the WHA,” he said years later. “When I signed, I never thought I was going to play in the NHL. I fully anticipated playing my whole career in the WHA.”
At the time, his only real interest was the playing side of hockey, not the politics behind the game. Had he been the keen student of the sport that he later (but not much later) became, he would have realized that the future of the WHA, with its shaky financial base, its second-rate arenas, its shifting franchises and its inability to capture major markets, was extremely limited.
But his agent at the time, Gus Badali, recognized the value of the NHL over the WHA. When Nelson Skalbania, the Racers’ cash-strapped owner (those who remember the WHA will recognize the redundancy of that description) decided to sell Gretzky, Badali chose Edmonton over Winnipeg because he knew that Edmonton had a new arena and therefore had the better chance of getting an NHL franchise.
To make life even more difficult for the incoming WHA teams, the NHL governors decided to reverse the protocol for the entry draft. Instead of following the procedure used in all the other expansions that had occurred as the league grew from six to seventeen teams over the previous twelve years, this time the new teams would draft last. That meant that the teams coming in from the WHA could select no earlier than eighteenth.
As it happened, by the luck of the draw, the Oilers were last. With the twenty-first pick overall, they chose Kevin Lowe. With the forty-eighth pick, they chose Mark Messier. With the sixty-ninth pick, they chose Glenn Anderson. Not a bad start.
The next year, they drafted Paul Coffey, and the year after that, Grant Fuhr. The building blocks of the dynasty were in place.
At first, it didn’t look much like a dynasty. With the exception of a couple of grizzled veterans, the team looked more like a bunch of kids on a school outing. The pre-game ritual was road hockey—or as near to it as they could come. While fans were streaming into their high-priced seats in anticipation of a battle of hockey’s best professionals, the Oilers were running around in their underwear under the stands using a “puck” made from a rolled-up sock wrapped in hockey tape and trying to score on the backup nets that NHL arenas keep near the Zamboni entrance.
Instead of yelling “Car!” when their scrimmage had to be interrupted, they yelled, “Game!”—and went into the dressing room, put on their skates and uniforms, and went out onto the ice for the pre-game warmup.
Gretzky was an immediate success in the NHL. In his first season, he tied Marcel Dionne of the Los Angeles Kings for the scoring championship, but since Dionne had more goals, he was declared the winner of the Art Ross Trophy, and Gretzky the runner-up.
However, knowledgeable hockey people contend that a video review of the 1979–80 season would produce a considerably different tally—that Gretzky would outscore Dionne by ten or more points. Playing in Los Angeles in front of the league’s lowest attendance, Dionne is believed to have been awarded assists that he did not deserve, whereas Gretzky, playing most of his games in Canada, got only the points he had legitimately earned. Neither team had many games televised in those days, so there aren’t sufficient videotapes to prove either point. Whether Gretzky did or did not deserve the 1980 Art Ross Trophy will never be known.
At the time, Gretzky’s many fans were upset, but he wasn’t. “That one never bothered me,” he said long after he retired. “The only thing I ever questioned was that I thought that they should change the rule so that it doesn’t happen again. There will be times again when two guys are tied and they should both get their name on the trophy.
“It didn’t bother me. I got ten others. I got my share. But it might be a guy who never gets a chance again.”
Gretzky’s 137 points gave him the single-season record for a first-year player, but in a decision that was typical of the lunacy that came out of the NHL head office in those days (yes, even more so than today), it was determined that since he had played in the WHA as a seventeen-year-old, he was not an NHL rookie—even though
he was ineligible to play in the NHL during his WHA tenure. NHL rules require a player to be eighteen.
The league did concede that Gretzky’s fifty-one-goal debut season made him the youngest player to crack the fifty-goal barrier, but it did not give him the rookie record. Similarly, Gretzky’s eighty-six assists represent the highest total ever for a first-year player, but the NHL record for a rookie—the definition of which is, of course, a first-year player—is shared by two players who had seventy assists: Peter Stastny (who was twenty-five at the time and had played professionally in Europe) and Joe Juneau.
The official NHL record for most points by a rookie is 132, held by Teemu Selanne, who came to the NHL after fulfilling his military commitments in Finland and was twenty-two.
Today’s NHL governors could overturn those earlier rulings if they wanted to. After all, it’s just a matter of a change in the record book—a change that would compensate for the lack of common sense on the part of their predecessors.
It was a monumentally stupid decision to make an eighteen-year-old first-year player ineligible for rookie awards, but the NHL has always taken a cavalier approach to its record book. That’s why there are never any asterisks, even though, thanks to Commissioner Gary Bettman’s propensity for locking out the players on a regular basis, the circumstances under which records are set are in a constant state of flux.
Gretzky didn’t let the NHL’s idiosyncrasies inhibit his assault on the record book. Two years after becoming the most dominant rookie in league history—no matter what the league’s definition of “rookie” might be—he set a record that may never be broken, the one that he now looks upon most fondly. He scored fifty goals in the first thirty-nine games of the season.
