99

by Al Strachan

  In a way, they got to play together again during the record chase. The occasion was the filming of a commercial in Culver City. “I played with him and it was a treat,” said Howe afterwards. “Those passes come over nice and flat, no wobble, just the right speed.”

  Howe was one of many people who praised Gretzky for his passes. Over the years, if a teammate told Gretzky he liked a certain type of pass, that’s what he got. Europeans like Jari Kurri and Esa Tikkanen wanted hard, crisp passes. Others preferred to have them come more slowly. They all got what they wanted, and many got passes they weren’t expecting. Gretzky was a master of the saucer pass—a puck lofted over a defender’s stick that landed flat and slid onto the teammate’s stick without any further bounces.

  Howe said he had no doubt that Gretzky would have been just as successful in his era. “He’d have done real well,” he said. “He’s too smart not to. In fact, he might have even been better. You only had one-line passes then. That holds down the scores, but it also allowed the better puck handlers to make their mark. He’s an excellent puck handler.

  “Wayne will get at least three thousand points before he’s finished,” continued Howe. “When he’s through, his record will last for a long time.”

  Howe was close. Gretzky ended up with 2,857 points, but on two occasions, he missed almost half the season due to injuries, and he retired when he was still a high-level player. Even so, Howe was certainly correct in his prediction that the record will last a long time.

  With Gretzky five points away from Howe’s record, the Kings headed to Vancouver, where the Canucks were coached by Bob McCammon, who had been an assistant coach with the Oilers for two of the Gretzky years. If anyone knew how to slow down the Gretzky juggernaut, it should have been McCammon.

  Or perhaps not. “You know what he’s going to do in certain situations and you can tell the players what to expect,” said McCammon, “but he is so good and his passes are so accurate that he can still get away with it anyway.”

  One of the tactics Gretzky used so effectively was to skate towards a defender at full speed, then stop, and, while the defender was still backing up, dish off the puck.

  “He always did that to set up Jari Kurri,” said McCammon. “Now that he doesn’t have a Kurri any more, he goes in deeper and hits Steve Duchesne coming in. It’s basically the same play but with Duchesne being a defenceman, he has changed it to fit the circumstances.”

  Some teams still tried to use a designated checker against Gretzky to shadow him wherever he went but McCammon knew that wouldn’t work so he chose to go in the opposite direction. Instead of delegating the job to one man, he preferred to assign it to six.

  “You need two lines to check him,” he said. “He has such stamina and he can stay out there so long, that no one line can do it.”

  But McCammon conceded that whatever tactic he or any other coach might use to try to minimize Gretzky’s production, the inescapable fact was that the more you tried to check him, the less chance you had of scoring.

  “If you’re really checking him, you have no offence,” said McCammon. “You’ve got one guy with him, so you’ve got two forwards going in on two defencemen. Gretzky takes one guy so far out of the play that he takes your offence away.”

  McCammon and his defensively minded Canucks had some success. They stopped Gretzky from scoring. But they didn’t stop the other Kings, and Gretzky assisted on three goals. Now he was going into Edmonton, of all places, needing two points to set the record.

  Edmonton goalie Bill Ranford, one of Gretzky’s many friends on that team, was determined that Gretzky would have to beat someone else for the record and played a superb game. Going into the final minute, the Oilers were leading 4–3, and Gretzky had been held to a single assist.

  But with a faceoff in the Edmonton end, Kings coach Tom Webster pulled goalie Mario Gosselin for an extra attacker. Off the faceoff, the puck went into the corner to Ranford’s left. Edmonton’s Kevin Lowe pounced on it and tried to lift it out of the zone and down the ice. Unfortunately for Lowe, one of the tallest players in the league, Larry Robinson, was at the point for the Kings. He reached up and batted the puck down with his glove. Duchesne then put it back towards the corner, but before it got there, Dave Taylor picked it up and lofted it across the goalmouth. Although Ranford moved quickly across his crease, Gretzky, stationed on the far side, got it on the short hop and fired it into the net.

  Wayne Gretzky had become the greatest scorer in the history of the NHL. Gordie Howe was proud. It was on a backhand.

  “I was cheering like hell,” said Howe later. “I feel I’ve gained more than I’ve lost in this.”

  There were still fifty-three seconds left to play, but the game was stopped for a presentation to mark the occasion. Howe was given the microphone and said, “I’d like to say in all honesty, after spending the last few days with Wayne, I thought I knew him before, but he has just grown an inch taller than he was in my mind. He’s a super young man, a great hockey player who shares everything he does. It’s really nice for me to be sharing those honours with Wayne.”

  With the crowd chanting, “Gretz-ky, Gretz-ky,” Howe passed over the microphone and, as always, Gretzky handled the situation perfectly. He pointed out that both the teams that had helped him set the record were in the building, and he thanked them. He thanked the Edmonton fans. He thanked his family and Howe. He even made a special point of saying hello to Joey Moss, the clubhouse attendant with Down syndrome he had long ago brought into the Edmonton organization.

  Gretzky said that hockey “is the greatest game in the world, and I owe everything I have in my lifetime to the game of hockey.”

  After a thirteen-minute ceremony, the game resumed and went into overtime. Rising to a dramatic occasion as usual, Gretzky scored again to give the Kings the win.

  He made sure that it was a great night not only for himself but also for a number of charities. The memorabilia from that record-setting occasion was set aside and distributed as follows:

  Sticks: He used a different stick every shift. Each one subsequently had a numbered brass plaque attached to verify its authenticity and was then donated to charities that were free to sell them to raise money.

  The record-setting stick and puck: They were donated to the Hockey Hall of Fame.

  Sweater: That, too, went to the Hall of Fame. There had been thoughts of Gretzky doffing it on the spot, but there was a fear that an unscrupulous dealer might later claim to be selling the sweater Gretzky wore for the rest of the night.

  Gloves, skates and pants: They were given to Wayne’s dad for the “museum” in his basement. Eventually, they will be donated to the Hall of Fame.

  Souvenir photographic prints: There were ninety-nine of them, each numbered and autographed by Gretzky and Howe. The shot was taken when they made their TV commercial in Culver City, and both were in uniform. Gretzky wore his Kings outfit; Howe wore the Detroit Red Wings uniform of the era in which he played. All proceeds went to charity.

  Commemorative T-shirts: Under an NHL marketing agreement, Gretzky got half the proceeds, and the NHL got half. Gretzky gave his half to charity. The NHL kept its half.

  For much of the weekend, Gretzky had mulled over a request to do an “I’m going to Disneyland” commercial seconds after the record was set. Had the momentous goal come in overtime, he would have done it, but he didn’t want to do it while the game was still in progress, so Disneyland got shut out.

  There were still many more points and goals to come for Gretzky, but now his name was on the sport’s most coveted individual record. It was a remarkable achievement that made him more aware than ever of his greatness. But it also made him aware that the years were flying by.

  “Gordie was saying something the other day that is true,” he said at the time. “The hardest thing about hockey is that the older you get, the more you love it. I’ve said that many times. I enjoy it more now than when I was nineteen, when I first came in. I think part of the re
ason is that you know you’re getting closer to the end. I love the game now more than ever.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Breaking Gordie Howe’s record was Gretzky’s last major achievement of the decade. There were many more major achievements to come, but not in the 1980s.

  From a hockey perspective, the decade had been Gretzky first, Gretzky last and Gretzky in-the-middle. Not only had he dominated the game, both on and off the ice, but he had changed the face of the National Hockey League, and, by extension, the face of hockey throughout the world.

  When the decade began, the NHL was shrouded in negativism. Fans were lethargic, driven away from the sport by a number of factors, not the least of which was its lack of parity. The Philadelphia Flyers garnered 116 points that season, compared to fifty-one for the Colorado Rockies and Winnipeg Jets. The Rockies, who had moved from Kansas City, where they were also unable to mount appreciable fan support, were two seasons away from leaving Denver for New Jersey.

  The best players the North American game had to offer seemed inept in comparison to their counterparts elsewhere in the world. In the 1979 Challenge Cup, the NHL All-Stars lost two of three games to the Soviet Union’s national team, the third by a 6–0 score.

  The lack of stability was another factor that cast a pall over the league. In the seventies, teams had moved and battled bankruptcy—not always successfully—with astonishing regularity.

  But in the 1979–80 season, like a knight in shining armour, Wayne Gretzky rode onto the scene. His impact was immediate and, over the course of the next decade, almost incalculable.

  There were, as there had been throughout his life, the professional contrarians, the naysayers who insisted, for one convoluted reason or another, that Gretzky wasn’t really as special as he appeared to be. They said he couldn’t have played in a six-team league (a ridiculous assertion) or that he was feasting off a watered-down league—without explaining why no one else did the same. But in a way, the debate was good for hockey.

  Instead of discussing the latest lunacy from the board of governors, or the latest inexplicable decision from the league’s disciplinarian, or the latest financial woes of a specific franchise, or the latest set of attendance problems, fans were now discussing hockey. They were discussing Gretzky’s place in the game, and as a result, the focus switched to the game’s positive aspects—its speed, its grace, its artistry and its offence—all of which were exhibited by Gretzky.

  As the decade progressed, the spotlight stayed largely on Gretzky’s primary team, the Edmonton Oilers, with their five Stanley Cups, the fifth of which came in 1990.

  When Gretzky broke into the NHL, the reigning dynasty was the New York Islanders, with their tight, defence-first system augmented by one powerful scoring line. The burning question in hockey became an obvious one: Could the Oilers, with the kind of swirling, high-tempo, high-offence game that had never before been seen in the NHL, overcome an old-style powerhouse like the Islanders?

  It was Gretzky who made this debate possible, and his annual domination of the scoring race was the reason that sports fans were discussing hockey again. The NHL was on the rise.

  NHL executives, never slow to copy a formula that seemed successful, saw what was happening in Edmonton. They saw that, on a regular basis, Canadian teams were at the bottom of the NHL’s road-attendance figures. They saw that, on a regular basis during the Gretzky era, the Edmonton Oilers were at or near the top of the NHL’s road-attendance figures.

  This was a language the executives understood. Even though you weren’t going to find offensive players of Gretzky’s calibre, his was the type of game the fans wanted to see—and more important from the owners’ point of view, the type of player fans would buy tickets to see.

  The teams of the previous decade had featured one or two big shooters. Any guy who could blast the puck was singled out as a curiosity. By end of the 1980s, the numbers had been reversed. Teams had only one or two guys who didn’t have a blazing shot.

  In the seventies, it was embarrassingly apparent to North American fans that their players couldn’t skate with the Europeans. Head-to-head competitions, especially the Challenge Cup, proved it. But, for the 1984 Canada Cup tournament, Glen Sather built a Team Canada that had heavy representation from his Oilers and a stated objective of beating the Soviets by matching them step for step, stride for stride. The strategy worked. No longer was the NHL seen as a league of plodders.

  By the end of the eighties, the international doors had opened. Soviet and other eastern European players were on display in the NHL every night and there was no appreciable difference between their skating skills and those of their North American teammates. They were faster than some, slower than others.

  There remained some problems over which Gretzky alone had little control. The players weren’t paid enough to give the NHL a major-league aura, and television exposure in the United States was minimal—partly because, in vast areas of the country, there were no NHL teams to support.

  But in 1988, when Gretzky was sold to the Los Angeles Kings, the foundation was laid for Gretzky’s presence to do a lot to overcome those problems as well.

  Kings owner Bruce McNall immediately went to work on the salary factor, giving Gretzky an eight-year, twenty-million-dollar contract. (In 1990, he boosted even that number.) At the time, that meant that Gretzky was getting about fifteen times as much as the average player. With a disparity that wide, it was just a matter of time until the gap narrowed, especially for the elite players.

  The problem of exposure throughout the United States, on television and in underdeveloped markets, was also soon to be overcome, and Gretzky would play a major role in the solution. From a marketing point of view, he had become, if not the biggest name in American sport, very close to it. Marketing executives agreed that if you wanted the best possible athlete to endorse your product, you had to have one or all of Gretzky, Michael Jordan and Bo Jackson.

  That was an absolutely astonishing development. Even with Gretzky’s emergence, hockey was a distant fourth in acceptance after baseball, football and basketball. But to the amazement of the advertising world, Gretzky was in with the best.

  The bible of the business was Advertising Age. In its August 15, 1988, issue, right after Gretzky’s arrival in Los Angeles, a feature article warned Gretzky to beware. “Wayne Gretzky may be the most marketable athlete in the history of Canada,” it read, “but he’s about to learn the ice-cold realities south of the border. Hockey doesn’t sell here.”

  The author had made the mistake of looking at the present and assuming that it portended the future.

  “Mr. Gretzky, widely considered the greatest player ever to put on skates, has netted several long-term endorsement deals and more than $1 million a year in Canada,” the article stated. “But he has been unable to score consistently with any U.S. advertiser and doesn’t appear in any U.S. ads.”

  At that time, that was partly true. He could have scored some U.S. ads, but he was being cautious. Either way, a little more than sixteen months later, nothing could have been further from the truth.

  By then, it was January 1, 1990, and even Advertising Age had changed its tune. Gretzky was part of a Nike commercial with Bo Jackson that the magazine called an “unequivocally magnificent piece of advertising.” He had just made the first 3-D commercial in history. It was for Coca-Cola and was to run during the upcoming Super Bowl. He was the key figure in an American Express ad campaign that focused on his pursuit of Gordie Howe’s record. He had appeared on the cover of People magazine once and twice on the cover of Sports Illustrated. He had even been the guest host of Saturday Night Live.

  A series of ads for Peak anti-freeze that featured Gretzky and former National Football League coach Mike Ditka, which had run regularly on Monday Night Football, had been replaced by a new series of ads. This time, the ads were done by Gretzky alone.

  Four production companies were making pilot episodes of a show they hoped to sell to ABC to foll
ow Ted Koppel’s Nightline. Independently of each other, they all approached Gretzky to be a guest on the pilot.

  A Coca-Cola billboard campaign across the United States featured a picture of Gretzky with the caption, “Official soft drink of the Great One.” It didn’t identify Gretzky. He had become so well known, there was no need to do so.

  Prime Ticket, the cable-television company that held the rights to the Kings’ games, ran a billboard campaign in Los Angeles with a simple message: “No cable, no Gretzky.”

  Because of the magnetism that Gretzky clearly exhibited, advertisers flocked to his agent, Mike Barnett, to try to get Gretzky to promote their product. But in marketing, as in any other aspect of his life, Gretzky imposed standards that set him apart from the others.

  “In the United States, corporations tend to not want to commit to long-term relationships, probably because there are so many celebrities,” Barnett said. “The general feeling is that there is no need to commit to a long-term spokesperson because you can catch the next one on the way up or an even larger one on the way down. That does not fit with our philosophy whatsoever.

  “The word ‘relationship’ is very important to Wayne Gretzky. As proud as he is of his consistency on the ice over the years, he’s also very proud of his long-term relationships with companies.”

  David Burns was the president of Burns Sports Celebrity Services in Chicago, the pre-eminent company in the United States acting as a middleman between sports figures and corporations.

  “If you look at the overall picture of sports in the United States, football and baseball get nearly all the commercial attention,” he said. “Basketball is next, and after that is hockey; so hockey is the fourth sport.

  “The one exception is Gretzky. There is no number two or number three or number four in the list of hockey celebrities. I’m speaking for the States now. There is only one hockey person that people ask for.”