99

by Al Strachan

  “Not too many people can say that they had that much time to spend with the greatest player in the world. I’ll cherish those moments until the day I die.”

  Keenan remembered it fondly as well. “Mario was still a boy,” he said. “He was only twenty-one. He couldn’t believe how much he learned about winning. And Wayne said it was the best hockey he ever played.”

  On that subject, there is no greater authority.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Wayne Gretzky was enjoying one love affair when another one ended.

  On August 9, 1988, he and his new wife, Janet, were three weeks into their marriage and staying at Alan Thicke’s house in Los Angeles when he found out that his ten-year love affair with the Edmonton Oilers was over. He had been traded to the Los Angeles Kings.

  The trade didn’t come as a great shock to Gretzky. As soon as it became apparent that it was coming, he took part in the negotiations, but the timing of the announcement had been in some doubt. It was called a trade because a number of players were involved. Gretzky, Marty McSorley and Mike Krushelnyski were going to Los Angeles. In return, the Oilers got Jimmy Carson, Craig Redmond, Martin Gelinas, three first-round draft picks over a five-year span and fifteen million dollars. But really, it was much more of a sale than a trade, a way for Oilers owner Peter Pocklington to line his pockets.

  The trade was initially presented to the public as a deal that Gretzky had requested. But as the facts gradually emerged, it became apparent that the deal had been made by Pocklington. Even general manager Glen Sather did not have a hand in the proceedings until Pocklington’s decision to move Gretzky had become irrevocable.

  Only when it became obvious that he was going to be traded, whether he liked it or not, did Gretzky request the move to Los Angeles. The events did not unfold the way Pocklington presented them, with Gretzky approaching him and asking to be traded to Los Angeles.

  There were a number of reasons for Gretzky’s choice. Janet had a home in Los Angeles, and Gretzky got along well with Kings owner Bruce McNall. Furthermore, as always, he was considering the good of the game he loved so much. He knew that if he went to Detroit—another team that had been making overtures to Pocklington—he would be stabilizing one of the league’s traditional markets, but nothing more. The Red Wings are an Original Six team. The Vancouver Canucks were also interested, but at that point Gretzky didn’t want to go there either, although he changed his mind later in his career.

  Los Angeles was a different story. Gretzky knew that if he could make hockey popular in southern California—and, judging by the response of Kings fans when he had played there for the Oilers, that was almost certain—he would give the NHL a tremendous popularity boost in the United States.

  In that era, the NHL couldn’t get the television exposure it coveted because it had too many “black holes,” too many markets without a nearby team for potential viewers to support. A popular team in Los Angeles could start to change that because Americans, like people of most nationalities, are chauvinistic.

  Wayne Gretzky playing in Edmonton wouldn’t interest anyone in Florida. But Wayne Gretzky playing in Hollywood for one of their own teams? To an American, that was different. It was the same thinking that led Major League Soccer to bring in David Beckham to play for the L.A. Galaxy. Beckham, like Gretzky, was known worldwide in his sport, and by playing in Los Angeles, he could deliver credibility to an entire league.

  The hockey world had seen a similar tactic a quarter of a century earlier when the World Hockey Association tried to establish credibility by luring Bobby Hull away from the NHL.

  Even though Gretzky did not make the move to change the face of the NHL, he was fully aware of the potential impact. He might not have foreseen the NHL that exists today, with one-third of its teams in the southern part of the United States, but he certainly realized that he could at least change hockey’s status in California and the Pacific Coast region.

  At the press conference to announce the trade, he said, “The Los Angeles Kings are important to the NHL and this division. We need Los Angeles and Seattle, and we need San Francisco. Hockey is strong in Canada, and it will always be our number-one sport. We need to create that atmosphere in the United States. Hopefully, I can be a part of that.”

  The Gretzky trade generated shock waves across Canada—and even across much of the United States. Most Canadians were outraged that a national hero like Gretzky was going to leave a Canadian team to play in the United States. There were overtures in Parliament to have the trade blocked by statute. In Edmonton, Pocklington was burned in effigy. The remaining Oilers players even threatened to stage a strike in the hope of forcing Pocklington to sell the team.

  For days, the debate raged. Charges and counter-charges flew. The blame game was popular. Was it all Pocklington’s fault? What about Janet? What about Wayne himself? How much did the small-town image of Edmonton have to do with it? Was the depressed Canadian dollar a factor? What about the swashbuckling Kings owner Bruce McNall? Was it all a result of the classic Canadian inferiority complex? Was there complicity on the part of the NHL?

  In many ways, the debate got silly. But behind it all, for those who really wanted to strip away all the emotions and look at the facts, it was clear that although Gretzky didn’t help his case by trying to do Pocklington a favour at the time of the initial press conference, he acted with his usual class and grace afterwards.

  Pocklington, naturally, didn’t want to be portrayed as a traitorous villain who had sold Canada’s best-loved athlete to the Americans, so he asked Gretzky to take the blame for the trade and pretend that he had initiated it.

  To make sure that he presented himself in the best possible light, Pocklington hired Jeff Goodman, a former speechwriter for Pierre Trudeau, to prepare his speech for the press conference. One was written for Gretzky as well, but he refused to read it. He threw it away.

  But he wouldn’t correct the clear implication in Pocklington’s statement that “I truly understood when Wayne approached me and asked to be traded to the Los Angeles Kings.” Pocklington opened with “It is not my intention to mislead the public” before he waded into an attempt to mislead the public.

  Gretzky, for his part, agreed that he had approached Pocklington. “For the benefit of Wayne Gretzky, my new wife and our expected child in the new year,” he said, “it would be for the benefit of everyone involved to let me play for the Los Angeles Kings.”

  At that time, Gretzky never contradicted Pocklington’s implication that the trade had been forced upon him by Gretzky and was therefore in need of a quick response. It was nothing of the sort. It was years in the making and partly Gretzky’s own fault because he assumed that Pocklington could be trusted and would deal with him fairly. Neither was true. Here is what happened:

  When Gretzky first joined the Oilers, Pocklington realized even then that having Wayne Gretzky at your beck and call could be a very valuable asset, so he did not sign him to the standard NHL player’s contract. That document, formatted by the league, spells out the terms of the deal, the compensation involved and the responsibilities of both parties. Instead, Pocklington got Gretzky to sign a personal-services contract. In other words, Gretzky’s obligation wasn’t to the Oilers, it was to Pocklington.

  Today, every NHL player must sign a standard league contract, but in those days, with John Ziegler at the helm as president, the NHL head office took a much more cavalier approach to every aspect of the business.

  In the summer of 1987, an older and wiser Gretzky, who was fully aware of the financial difficulties that Pocklington was starting to encounter, approached Pocklington to replace the personal-services contract with a player’s contract. With an agent, Mike Barnett, and a financial advisor, Ian Berrigan, working for him, Gretzky emerged with a five-year deal. Because he had heard the rumours that Pocklington might trade him, Gretzky got a clause inserted that gave him the right to opt out of the final two years and retire. If he played the five years, he would become a f
ree agent.

  Pocklington agreed to the terms, but the existence of the opt-out/free-agency clause worried him. With every day that passed, Gretzky got closer to his release dates and, as a result, his value decreased.

  There was, of course, an easy way out of this dilemma. Pocklington could offer Gretzky a long-term contract at a suitable salary. But that option wasn’t even a consideration for Pocklington, who paid Gretzky such a relatively low salary that he didn’t crack the list of the top 100 best-paid athletes in North America. There were times, even when Gretzky was head and shoulders above everyone else in the sporting world, that he wasn’t the best-paid player in the NHL.

  So, having dispatched the option of paying Gretzky what he was worth, Pocklington took the alternate course. It soon became apparent to hockey insiders that Gretzky was on the block, and offers started to come in.

  At the press conference, in his usual attempt at self-aggrandizement and to indicate that he wasn’t being as mercenary as he was, Pocklington said, “A few months ago, the Vancouver Canucks, through a Vancouver businessman, offered to pay more than we are receiving from the Kings. The deal was refused.”

  The reference was to a deal being brokered by Pocklington’s old friend Nelson Skalbania, who sold him Gretzky’s rights in the first place back when the two owned teams in the World Hockey Association. The idea was that Skalbania would be the middleman in a deal that would see Frank Griffiths, who owned the Canucks, and Jim Pattison, who owned a number of businesses in Vancouver, cough up twenty million dollars for Gretzky.

  Griffiths would get Gretzky’s services as a player and Pattison would get him to shill for his car dealerships, among other things. Griffiths despised Pattison, so Skalbania probably couldn’t have pulled off the deal, but that didn’t stop Pocklington from alluding to it.

  Either way, it made Gretzky aware he was going to be sold. He told Pocklington that if he was to be moved, Los Angeles would be his choice. Knowing that McNall was dying to get Gretzky and extremely liberal with his cash (or anybody else’s, as it turned out), Pocklington agreed. And since he was doing Gretzky such a great favour, he said, he expected Gretzky to reciprocate by saying the trade was his idea.

  Gretzky went to Los Angeles to resume his honeymoon and, unbeknownst to Pocklington, was in McNall’s office when the two owners began discussing the terms of the trade. McNall put the call on speaker-phone so Gretzky could hear.

  They talked about the players involved, and they talked about the cash. They talked about the timing of the announcement. All aspects seemed to be complete when Gretzky began shaking his head. “Get Marty,” he mouthed to McNall.

  “I need Marty McSorley to be thrown in as well,” said McNall.

  “I’m not sure about that,” Pocklington replied. “I’ll have to talk to Glen Sather about it.”

  Gretzky started waving his arms frantically. “Hang on a second,” said McNall and he placed Pocklington on hold.

  “You can’t let him talk to Glen,” Gretzky said. “Glen will never let Marty go. Tell him you have to have Marty.”

  McNall reconnected with Pocklington. “No, Peter. We have to get this deal done,” he said to Pocklington, “and Marty has to be in it or the whole deal is off.”

  Pocklington included McSorley in the trade.

  The deal was done. Gretzky was a King.

  But there was another twist to the story, and this part refers not to what was, but to what might have been.

  When Gretzky signed that five-year standard player’s contract with its three-year opt-out clause in 1987, it was shipped off to the NHL’s head office to be filed. The old personal-services contract was a thing of the past.

  But in a rare burst of scrutiny, the league decided that some of the new clauses had to be reworked. The changes were relatively minor, but nevertheless, they had to be made and the contract was shipped back to the Oilers.

  However, the changes were not made, and nobody at the league level seemed to worry about it. Gretzky, the best player in the world and by far the biggest draw in the National Hockey League, played the entire 1987–88 season and won a Stanley Cup with the Oilers without a contract!

  By that time, Gretzky knew that Pocklington was planning to move him. The day after the Oilers won the Stanley Cup, he went down to the rink for the official team picture and afterwards sat in the sauna with his buddy Jari Kurri.

  “Jari, I don’t think I’ll be back,” he said. “I think I’ll be somewhere else by next season.”

  Recalled Kurri, “I said, ‘Come on. I can’t believe that’s going to happen.’ But he had that feeling when he talked to me.

  “Later that summer, I was teaching at my hockey school when my agent, Don Baizley, called and told me there was a big rumour that Wayne was going to be traded. It wasn’t final at that time, but it was soon after. I took my phone off the hook. There was nothing I could say.”

  Gretzky had a reason for his prophecy. “That was the day when everything started,” he said. “We had the phone call from Vancouver. It was a tough situation. We’d just won the Stanley Cup.”

  He paused for a moment, then laughed. “I thought I’d played pretty well.”

  That was not a bad assessment. He had just been awarded the Conn Smythe Trophy as the most valuable player in the playoffs.

  With the Vancouver call alerting him to the possibility of a trade, Gretzky sought a legal opinion on his contractual situation. Meanwhile, the NHL’s board of governors, apparently finally having woken up to the seriousness of the matter, had struck a five-man committee to look into Gretzky’s contractual status. Both the governors’ committee and Gretzky’s lawyer came to the same conclusion: if Gretzky wanted to press the matter, he was almost certainly entitled to declare himself a free agent.

  Fortunately for Pocklington and the NHL, it was not Gretzky’s nature to dash off to the courts at the first hint of a disagreement. He still wanted to play in Edmonton, but because Pocklington had other ideas, he prepared himself to move on.

  “Would you want to go back and play for somebody after you got a phone call [to discuss the acquisition of your services] from another owner?” he asked me rhetorically.

  “I could go back and play, and love the city and love the people. But how can I go back and play for a guy that wants to move me? It’s as simple as that. I’m not bitter, and by no means am I trying to get into a war of words. For ten years, I had nothing but great things to say about what that team meant to me and what that city did for me.

  “But out of the blue, while I was on my honeymoon, I got a phone call from another owner. That’s when there was no turning back for me as far as I was concerned. That’s when I felt that it was best that I be moved on.”

  He had played the first year of what, legalities aside, was a five-year deal, and in Pocklington’s view, time was of the essence.

  “In fairness to the Oilers,” said Gretzky, “I had them in a position they didn’t like to be in. I had them in the situation that in four years, I was a free agent without compensation—no compensation whatsoever.”

  Still, anyone who knows Gretzky knows that he would never have simply walked out on a team and a city that had been his life for what would have been fourteen years at that point.

  “They got scared,” said Gretzky. “They thought I might.”

  Over the years, Gretzky’s animosity softened. In 2013, I asked him if he had ever had any further contact with Pocklington. “I saw him a couple of times,” he said. “I said to him, ‘Now that I’ve got into management I can understand why you did what you did.’ We get along well now.

  “Even when he traded me, he said, ‘Look, I’m going to trade you.’ He never lied to me.”

  Pocklington, by the way, eventually saw his financial empire crumble. He sold the Oilers in 1998 and moved to the United States. In 2008, he declared bankruptcy with assets of $2,900 and liabilities of $19.7 million.

  In 2009, he was charged with bankruptcy fraud. In May 2010, he pleaded g
uilty to perjury and was placed on probation until 2013.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Los Angeles Kings had always spent their training camps in much the same way that they spent their regular seasons: in virtual obscurity.

  Their chosen site was sleepy Victoria, British Columbia, a sedate community so well known for its geriatric population that it was often referred to as “God’s Waiting Room,” and the Kings’ camp fit its surroundings perfectly. It was as devoid of excitement as the city, garnering only the most minimal attention from the media. A Vancouver hockey writer, en route to the Canucks’ camp in Duncan, B.C., might make a fleeting appearance. The beat reporters of the two Los Angeles daily newspapers showed up out of a sense of obligation but always with a clear mandate from their editors to produce as little copy as possible. The Los Angeles electronic media stayed home, and for the most part, so did Victoria’s hockey fans.

  All that changed radically in 1988.

  In the tiny Juan de Fuca Community Centre, where the Kings practised, an audience in double figures had been considered a busy day. Not in 1988. Not with a Gretzky sighting available. The place was so packed that management began to worry about safety issues and fans had to be turned away.

  The Kings quickly announced that their first scheduled exhibition game—against the Canucks in Duncan—had been sold out. Their first home exhibition game, usually attended only by family and a few bored friends, had also been sold out, even though ticket prices had been doubled over the previous year. And scalpers were selling them at twice the doubled price.

  The L.A. beat writers were no longer able to devote their days to tennis, fine dining and hangover-nursing. Now their editors wanted at least one good-sized story every day, and preferably two. Columnists and wire-service reporters from Vancouver settled in for the long haul, as did a horde of electronic media people.

  Prime Ticket, which held the Kings’ television rights, announced that it had suddenly decided to show sixty-two games that season rather than the originally planned thirty-seven. In that era, this was almost blanket coverage, on a par with what fans of the Maple Leafs and Canadiens could expect from their teams. One of the Prime Ticket producers was dispatched to Victoria to put together some features for the season’s telecasts.