99

by Al Strachan

  Oddly, it was a knee injury that first set Gretzky down for a prolonged stretch—sixteen games in 1988.

  During a game against the Philadelphia Flyers on December 30, 1987, Gretzky was on the attack near the crease when he got crunched.

  “It happened as I shot the puck,” he recalled. “Kjell Samuelsson kind of slid under me and Mark Howe blocked me. I wrenched the knee, I snapped it. But I didn’t hit the post like some people said, and nobody landed on me.”

  The original club announcement, which made direct reference to the knee injury—unlike today’s ludicrous “upper-body” or “lower-body injury” announcements—speculated that Gretzky might miss a game or two. He knew differently.

  “As soon as I came back to the bench, Mess asked me how I felt,” he said. “I had heard it pop. I said, ‘It’s bad, Mess.’ ”

  He knew that everyone who plays in the NHL learns to accept injuries as a fact of life. “There’s no question that I’ve been terrifically lucky,” he said.

  In fact, the injury had its benefits. “The first week, it was really a nice rest,” he said three weeks into the recuperation. “Now it’s getting to be kind of boring. I can’t burn off energy. I can’t play squash. I can’t do anything.”

  But he could watch hockey, and by that time, he had a satellite dish, so he watched game after game while his knee healed, and, in the process, picked up all sorts of useful information about the tendencies of players around the league.

  Also, he got some rest. He had played in the Canada Cup in the fall, and a midwinter break wasn’t likely to do him any harm.

  As it happened, he was rested and dominant when the playoffs started. He not only led the Oilers to another Stanley Cup, he won the Conn Smythe Trophy as the MVP of the post-season.

  Gretzky’s luck continued to hold for three more seasons, but then he suffered a back injury that was not only the most serious injury of his career, it even threatened to end his career.

  It came in a Canada Cup game against Team USA in September 1991. Gretzky had outraced Chris Chelios to a loose puck in the corner and was squirming away from Chelios with his back to the play.

  At that point, Chelios’s defence partner, Gary Suter, rammed Gretzky into the glass. Just that summer, the NHL had decreed that checks of that nature would be punishable by a five-minute major. In today’s hockey, a suspension invariably accompanies the major. But in international hockey in 1991, Suter got away with it.

  “It was a legal hit,” protested Suter afterwards. “If it had been anyone else in the world, we wouldn’t be talking now. I guess that’s just the stature he has.”

  Team Canada coach Mike Keenan disagreed. “It was an illegal hit, no question about it,” he said.

  Suter seemed surprised by the controversy. “It’s unbelievable,” he said. “It’s a game of hits. Any other player but him. I don’t think it was a cheap shot.”

  Few would agree, especially those who grew up with today’s rules. And if it weren’t for the fact that international rules preclude enforcers and impose onerous punishments on fighters, there’s no doubt that Suter would have been forced to answer immediately for his indiscretion.

  But whether the check was legal or not, the resultant back problem continued to bother Gretzky. He played through it for the entire 1991–92 NHL season, but by the following September, it was determined that he not only needed a back operation, but his career might be over, and he was even in danger of being paralyzed.

  Hockey players’ backs tend to take a lot of punishment. The legal bodychecks are bad enough, but the cross-checks are worse, and in Gretzky’s era, they were all but ignored, especially if they were delivered near the net, where Gretzky spent a lot of his time.

  The NHL’s best scorer prior to Gretzky was Mike Bossy. A back injury forced his retirement. The NHL’s best scorer after Gretzky was Mario Lemieux. A back injury forced his retirement.

  Lesser stars of the era, such as Wendel Clark, Rod Gilbert, Paul Reinhart, Craig Simpson and many others all suffered debilitating back injuries.

  Gretzky battled severe pain for the entire 1991–92 season and expected that, once the hockey stopped, the pain would as well. It didn’t. It got worse.

  In early September, it got so bad that he was admitted to hospital and given intravenous painkillers.

  When I spoke to him in mid-September, he was despondent. Hockey had always been his great love, and he had been told there was a very real danger that he might never play again.

  But that was a secondary concern. “The first thing I’ve got to worry about is me,” he said. “At last I know what I have. All year, I thought it was a torn cartilage in my ribs. Now that we know what it is, we can start to clear it up. It’s not like it was last week. It’s not unbearable any more. The doctors say they’re not going to do anything until the pain goes, and they’re saying that should be in a week or ten days. But the last time I had this, the pain didn’t go away in a week. It was three months.”

  Once again, he had a bit of luck. He had entered hospital at just the right time and got his back examined a day before a major conference of back doctors opened in Seattle. Gretzky’s doctor attended and took along the pertinent data. As a result, many of the top specialists in North America were apprised of Gretzky’s problem, and they offered advice.

  It was determined that he had a form of herniated thoracic disc and was told that it was a one-in-a-million injury. Herniated discs are usually much lower in the spine. It was also decided that he would need an operation, but for various medical reasons, it could not be performed right away.

  In the interim, Gretzky undertook a rehabilitation program to help reduce the inflammation. At times, it seemed to be working; at times it didn’t. When he did a Hockey Night in Canada interview that aired on November 7, he strongly implied that he was facing an imminent operation followed by a lengthy period of recuperation, possibly as long as a year. When I talked to him two weeks later, he was much more optimistic.

  “The rehab program seems to be progressing,” he said, “which is great news. They can never sit across from me and tell me there is no risk, but we’re so much further ahead than we were a month ago. A month ago, they were telling me, ‘You’ve got to have an operation.’ That sort of thing.”

  The operation never happened, and Gretzky explained his pessimism during the HNiC interview by saying that his rehabilitation had been going well, but the day before the taping, he “kind of hit the wall.” At that point, he said, “I didn’t know what was going to happen, but I was extremely concerned, naturally.”

  When he spoke to his doctors, they told him that the temporary setback was a normal occurrence. “Things look really positive now,” he added.

  “I still get pain when I move, but it’s kind of diminished. I’ve got more mobility now. I get the pain in the front. There’s no pain in the back at all. It’s the inflammation in the back that blocks the nerve that comes out. You know how when people hurt their back, their legs go numb? Well, my injury is the nerve that goes around the front. That’s why I kept thinking it was my ribs that were hurt, and that I had torn a cartilage there.”

  Even though the future appeared brighter, there were no guarantees. Gretzky had been riding an emotional roller coaster ever since he entered hospital. Sometimes, the outlook was positive. Sometimes, it was negative.

  “When it happened, I said, ‘I don’t know where I’m going to be or what I’m going to do. I might not even skate this year, let alone play. I really don’t know.’

  “Two months ago, they said, ‘You’re done for this year.’ Four weeks from now, when I get into a healthier condition, I could get the pain back. Then there’s no choice. They’ll have to operate.”

  Again, he was lucky. The pain didn’t come back. With the use of MRIs—which were still an innovation—exercise, steroid injections and some world-class medical advice, he was able to return to the NHL on January 7, 1993. He had missed thirty-six games—almost half the season.r />
  When you’re gone from the NHL for that long, there’s invariably a negative reaction, even if you’re Wayne Gretzky. Not long after the layoff, he lost his confidence. Perhaps the two weren’t related. Perhaps what happened next was nothing more than coincidence. Either way, it was another difficult stage of Gretzky’s most difficult season.

  “I lost my confidence a couple of times in my career,” he admitted four years later, “but the worst was when I came back from my back injury. I was all gung-ho and I got going with a good eight- or nine-game run. Then, all of a sudden, sixteen games—nothing. I mean nothing. Not even a chance. I wasn’t involved in the play most of the time.”

  Eventually, he broke out with a six-point night, but he never forgot that slump and its impact upon him. “The craziest thing about professional sports,” he said, “is that whether you’re the best player in that sport, borderline or the weakest, if you don’t play with confidence, you can’t play.”

  In 1999, just before he retired, he missed twelve games because of a back injury, but that one involved a different area of his back and was not related to the previous problem. The injury evolving from the Suter hit was the worst he ever experienced.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  With the 1998 Olympics having been such a disappointment for Canadian hockey fans, the nation’s hockey establishment was determined to pull out all the stops in 2002.

  The Olympics were to be held in North America, the next best thing to home turf, in the year that would mark the fiftieth anniversary of Canada’s last gold-medal win. What better time could there be for the nation to regain its hockey pride?

  And who, the organizers asked themselves, would be a better man to run the team than Wayne Gretzky?

  Gretzky had retired as a player in 1999, and with his far-reaching connections, his hockey knowledge, his corporate ties and his experience—not to mention his availability—he was the perfect choice.

  It was an honour that Gretzky was eager to accept, and he took his responsibilities extremely seriously. As far as he was concerned, this was not to be a ceremonial position, nor was it to be approached in a lackadaisical fashion. The country’s hockey reputation was on the line, and by extension, so was the hockey reputation of Wayne Gretzky himself. Over the course of his career, everything he did made it clear how important that was to him.

  Accordingly, more than a year before the opening game of the 2002 Olympics—on February 2, 2001, to be precise—Gretzky and his staff met in Denver to put in place the first building blocks of what they hoped would become a gold-medal team and, at the same time, try to cast aside a few other obstacles that were in the way.

  To the average viewer, the Olympics are a fascinating sporting spectacle. But to anyone involved in them, they are a mystifying, complex maze of politics, kickbacks, under-the-table deals, intrigue and deceit. There is never a straight line from A to B in the Olympics. The path is always winding and circuitous—and it usually leads to a back door.

  Over the course of the next twelve months, Gretzky would become painfully aware of that fact. And he would also learn that not all of his Olympics difficulties would be created by Olympics people themselves. Sometimes, they would come from those who were supposed to be his allies.

  Even a year before the Games, he discovered that what he expected to be the straightforward matter of arranging practice time for the team was not just a matter of arranging practice time. That would be far too simple. That would not be the Olympic way.

  For starters, his longtime adversary Gary Bettman stood in his path. The NHL commissioner had not only shortened the Olympic break compared to 1998, he had insisted on a full slate of games on Wednesday, February 13, 2002. But Canada was scheduled to play its first Olympic game on Friday, February 15 against Sweden.

  As the adage goes, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. So Gretzky approached Bettman’s biggest enemy for help. He didn’t get any. “Our agreement for all players in all countries,” said NHL Players’ Association head Bob Goodenow, “is that there will be no tryouts or practices prior to the Olympics.”

  Either way, Gretzky seemed stymied. He wanted the team’s prospective players to get together at some sort of camp in August, but the way Goodenow had explained the situation, that was impossible.

  If Gretzky hadn’t named the team by August, then a training camp would be considered a tryout. If he had named the team, it would be considered a practice. Neither was acceptable.

  Gretzky next turned to Mario Lemieux, who was in the unique position of owning a team and therefore being one of Bettman’s bosses. Gretzky’s compromise, which he and Lemieux intended to present jointly, was that the full Wednesday NHL slate would be shifted to the preceding Sunday, which had a fairly light load. The Sunday games could be squeezed in elsewhere, and the Olympians could at least have a couple of days in Salt Lake City before the first puck was dropped.

  Bettman turned that down too.

  On the Olympic-provision front, there was the requirement that players be named to the team in April—ten months before the Games—so that the International Olympic Committee could maximize its revenues by involving the players in marketing and promotion over the summer.

  It wasn’t hard for Gretzky and his advisors to come up with eight surefire names, but those men had to agree to the responsibilities that went along with being named. They had to help with the previously mentioned marketing and promotion. More important, although this consideration was never mentioned in public, once they had been named, they were subject to random, unscheduled Olympic drug tests.

  NHL players, who battle through a rigorous eighty-two-game schedule, want to play the game and get on the charter flight or go home. They don’t want to sit in a room and submit to a drug test at the whim of an Olympic official while their teammates are kept waiting.

  They weren’t worried that the testing would uncover any serious drug use. But these guys were flying all over the continent all winter long in airplanes that recirculated germ-laden air. They got colds, and they took over-the-counter remedies that are available to all of us. Some of those remedies are banned by the IOC and would lead not only to a suspension, but also to the embarrassment that comes with being labelled a druggie.

  The Denver meeting also had to determine the Canadian Olympic team’s overriding philosophy. Was it to be an all-star squad or was it to be a mixture of stars and specialists? Was it to be composed only of veterans, or would some youngsters be tossed into the mix? While it wouldn’t be totally defensively oriented or totally offensively oriented, how was it to be weighted?

  Once those and other similar factors were determined, the management group had to come up with a list of the best forty players who fit the bill, fully expecting that no one would turn them down. In that regard, they were right.

  Gretzky made the calls himself, and there were, he said, “about three or four players” who, upon receiving his call, said something along the lines of “Yeah, right,” thinking it was a friend pulling a practical joke. But once they realized that it was indeed Gretzky they were talking to, they were delighted.

  Because coach Pat Quinn wanted Team Canada to have an offensive leaning, and because most of the candidates played for coaches who tended to stress the defensive side of the game, Gretzky desperately wanted his team to have a pre-season training camp and a couple of practices before the Olympics began.

  But since he couldn’t get either, he was prepared to bite the bullet as long as there was no cheating anywhere else. Widespread rumours suggested that the Scandinavian teams intended to hold tryouts under the guise of calling them summer camps, but with Gretzky’s proposal in that regard having been turned down, that arrangement came under scrutiny, and it was agreed that they would not be allowed to do so.

  “We are in the same position as all the other countries preparing for this tournament,” Gretzky said. “We would like to have a summer camp of some sort, but we understand the position.

  “Whether i
t’s organized or unorganized, if other countries are having some sort of camp, we want to be on the same page. That’s our concern.”

  In late March, when Gretzky had to announce the names of his first eight players with the Olympics still almost a year away, there were no major surprises.

  Al MacInnis, who had been seen initially as an automatic choice, had to be left off the list because of lingering questions about the state of his injured eye. His replacement was Scott Niedermayer, a highly versatile, swift-skating defenceman who, like MacInnis, was at home in both ends of the rink. This was revealing because one of the failings of the 1998 Olympic team was that the defencemen were sufficiently sound when it came to keeping the opposition off the board, but when Team Canada needed some offence and wanted the defencemen to join the attack, they fell a bit short. Chris Pronger and Rob Blake, the other two defencemen named, were as capable of joining the rush or quarterbacking the power play as they were of clearing the front of the net or blocking a shot. Also, they were all powerful skaters, an important aspect to consider since the Olympics were to be played on a European-sized ice surface, even though the venue was Salt Lake City, Utah.

  The inclusion of Steve Yzerman was also a revealing development. In his youth, he was almost purely offensively minded, but he had evolved into the best two-way forward in the game.

  In the post-Olympic soul-searching that swept Canada and its hockey establishment in 1998, there was widespread agreement that the team had not been sufficiently versatile. It had been geared to think defence first and was built with the specific aim of being able to handle Team USA in a gold-medal game. But the Americans imploded long before the medal round, and the Canadians found themselves playing a defensively oriented game against a bunch of Czechs who weren’t of NHL calibre but played solidly as a unit.