99

by Al Strachan

  There had been some stories in the media concerning the fact that not all Canadian players were enamoured of Quinn’s coaching. Gretzky had no interest in entertaining that view, either.

  “American propaganda,” he snorted. “If you want to talk about hockey, you want to talk about Canadians. We’re the biggest story here. They’re loving us not doing well. They loved the start we had. It’s a big story for them.

  “I don’t think we dislike those countries as much as they hate us. And that’s a fact. They don’t like us. They want to see us fail. They love beating us. They may tell you guys something different, but believe me, when you’re on the ice, that’s what they say. They don’t like us.”

  It was an outburst that made news around the world. In Gretzky’s entire career as a player, he had never said anything nearly as contentious as this. Many in the American media were outraged, calling him a “crybaby” and worse. When I talked to him the next day, he had no intention of backing down or softening his comments.

  “I have no regrets,” he said. “I was trying to protect our hockey team. I said it with a great deal of passion for our game in Canada. I was upset at the cross-check. Had this been an American or Canadian player, a lot would have been made of it. I sat there for twenty minutes, and not one person asked me about that cross-check.

  “If that had been a Canadian or American player, it would have been the first question asked.”

  He said that his complaint about the American media was not based on a specific instance but more of a cumulative effect.

  “Every time I walked in, something new was thrown at me. There were all these stories, from coaches not talking to each other to Mario Lemieux having gone home. I just had no idea where all this was coming from. I just had enough of it.

  “For some reason, there were all these silly rumours flying around about our hockey team. It really started to wear on me, and it really bothered me, especially when our hockey team is here representing our country and doing what they can to win a gold medal and carrying themselves with a great deal of class.”

  This was a previously unseen facet of Wayne Gretzky. He was no stranger to the limelight, but when he played, even internationally, his remarks were more measured and his approach more diplomatic. Much more diplomatic.

  “When I was a player, I was a player,” he said. “Now I’m in a situation where I can defend our hockey team, and I feel obliged to do that. I’m no different than anyone else who has ever been involved here, whether it’s Bobby Clarke or Glen Sather. That’s what you do. You protect your team. That’s what I was trying to do.”

  In Canada, the reaction was mixed. Some said he was trying to divert attention from his team’s failure. Some said he was trying to divert attention from his own failure. Some said he was just a sore loser. Some said he had hurt the team by his remarks in that he had given them excuses.

  Those were opinions. The unassailable fact was this: after that speech, Canada never lost another game.

  Granted, they had some good fortune. But they could hardly be blamed for that, and no one can say that they would not have persevered without that good fortune.

  One instance was the stunning upset of the Swedes by Belarus, who won in the dying minutes of regulation time when a shot from centre ice bounced off Salo’s head and dropped into the net to break a 3–3 tie.

  “We knew going into the Olympics that, first of all, the Americans were going to be tough,” said Gretzky as he reminisced in 2012. “They had a good team, and the Olympics were in Salt Lake City, so we knew they’d be even better in front of a home crowd. They didn’t have a really great tournament in Nagano, and we knew they wanted to make up for that.

  “But the matchup that really scared us was Sweden. We just didn’t seem to match up well against them, and they beat us 5–2 in the first game. It was a flattering 5–2 because they handled us easily.

  “There’s no question that we got a break when they got beat in the quarter final on a fluke goal. Playing the Swedes at that stage would have been a tough game for us.”

  The next piece of good fortune for Canada came in the first elimination game, when they were playing Finland.

  Finnish goaltender Jani Hurme allowed an easy goal three minutes into the game to give Canada the luxury of playing with a lead for most of the evening. The Canadians eventually opened a 2–0 lead, but it lasted for only twenty seconds, so the pressure was on again. But Canada hung on and won 2–1.

  As expected, Canada had little trouble beating Belarus in the next round to qualify for the gold-medal game. Goaltender Andrei Mezin, who had been brilliant against the Swedes, was somewhat less so against Canada, and the final score was 7–1.

  Gretzky’s team was now poised to win Canada’s first hockey gold medal since the Edmonton Mercurys had done the job fifty years earlier. The competition was to be provided, as Gretzky had anticipated, by the United States—a strong, balanced team with Mike Richter in goal and dangerous snipers like Brett Hull and Jeremy Roenick up front.

  Being in Salt Lake City at the time, I had not been aware of the feverish anticipation for the game back in Canada. We had heard so much of the negativity and the criticism, but now, phone calls to various locales in Canada revealed that, two hours before puck drop, every bar in the country was full. We had expected an approach similar to the fevered anticipation for a Game Seven of the Stanley Cup final. It seems this game was more than that. It was on a par with the 1972 Summit Series or the third and deciding game of the spectacular 1987 Canada Cup.

  Even Gretzky got caught up in the anticipation. As he paced up and down before the game, he said, “This is the first time since I retired where I wish I could be out there getting ready for a game like this and just focusing on playing.”

  No game in history had more TV viewers. In the United States, NBC’s coverage drew a 10.7 rating, which translates into about eleven million viewers. In Canada, another 10.6 million people watched at home, plus millions more in bars. As became evident later, Canadians all over the world were watching as well, no matter how inconvenient the time might be. People were watching it in English pubs, on Australian beaches and in South American villages.

  The United States opened the scoring in that 2002 game, but even so, the Canadians seemed to be in control. To those of us watching at the rink, it appeared that the American goal had been nothing more than an aberration and that eventually the scoreboard would reflect the reality of the game.

  Sure enough, it wasn’t long afterwards that Lemieux made that now-famous play of letting a pass go between his legs to Kariya, who fired it past a surprised Richter. With eighty-seven seconds left in the first period, Iginla put Canada ahead 2–1. Both teams scored in the second period, but in the third, Iginla scored again to put the game out of reach, and in the dying seconds, Sakic made it 5–2.

  In Canada, it was party time. Previously deserted streets were suddenly alive with revellers, and in bars from coast to coast, impromptu renditions of “O Canada” broke out. The nation celebrated. Pride had been restored. Canada was at the head of the hockey world again.

  How much of it had to do with Gretzky’s speech after the Czech game?

  “Gretzky was the big force,” said assistant coach Ken Hitchcock. “He took the heat off us. He took all the crap. He put himself in the position to be blamed. These guys wanted to play for him. They didn’t want to let him down.”

  Gretzky himself wouldn’t exactly admit that his rant had been “staged,” as some in the American media had suggested, but he did concede that it hadn’t exactly been a spur-of-the-moment outburst either.

  “I learned that from Glen Sather,” he admitted. “There are times when you have to stand up and take responsibility. At that time, I didn’t think our team was very comfortable or relaxed. The hope was to take some heat off the guys.

  “It did.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It is the nature of Canadian hockey fans to be hypercritical. They expect
their team to emerge victorious at every important international tournament, and if a different result should materialize, they lose all sense of proportion, all sense of reason and all sense of propriety.

  Canadian fans are not unique in this regard. The concept is universal; it’s just the sports that differ. In New Zealand, the nation expects the All Blacks to win every rugby tournament. Brazilians expect their soccer team to win every World Cup. The Americans expect their basketball team to win gold at every Olympics.

  And if you’re the prime mover behind one of those teams, there are no excuses, no extenuating circumstances. Lose and you’re vilified.

  Wayne Gretzky knew all that. When he ran Team Canada in the 2002 Olympics and the team got off to a slow start, the outpouring of vitriol was nothing short of appalling. Even though the meaningful games were yet to be played, the majority of the country’s hockey fans not only seemed to feel that further involvement was hopeless but that Gretzky, the other management staff, the coaches and all the players were total incompetents.

  Only when the team won the gold medal were the critics silenced, at least temporarily, and the victory quelled any disagreement about who would be the executive director of the 2006 Olympic team. It would be Gretzky.

  The circumstances surrounding the launch of the 2006 team were unusual, to say the least. Gretzky held a training camp for thirty-seven players in August 2005, but the NHL had been shut down for the 2004–05 season, so some of the candidates hadn’t played a meaningful game for sixteen months.

  “We had a list of forty guys,” said Gretzky at the time. “We’ve got thirty-seven guys here, and each and every guy here has a chance to make it. And there could be guys on the team who aren’t even here.”

  In a way, the abundance of talent made management’s job easier. But at the same time, it also made it more difficult. It would be easy to put together a strong team that would be seen as a gold-medal favourite. But if the players who were cut were allowed to form Team Canada II, that group would probably be seen as a gold-medal favourite as well. The potential for second-guessing was enormous.

  Gretzky had a simple solution. “You take the best players,” he said. “Talent is always tough to beat.”

  Still, at that level of competition, there are always subtleties. As Gretzky said on another occasion, “It’s not just ‘Pick every guy who can score fifty goals, and we’ll win a gold medal.’ You have to take the best possible players, but they’ve still got to fit within the team concept.”

  Even though Canada was the defending Olympic champion, the pros and cons of both the 1998 and 2002 teams were studied closely prior to 2006.

  Gretzky tried to delay the naming of the team. “I don’t want to get into a situation like we had in ’02,” he said, “where we had to pick the team so early, and then there’s this huge controversy about so-and-so should have been on the team. We want to stay away from that as much as we can.”

  He was also aware of the potential impact on some players of having missed a year of hockey. The longer he was given to evaluate their current form, the better.

  Head coach Pat Quinn looked closely at the evaluations from 1998 and 2002 and decided that the team was evolving in the right direction. There would be no positional specialists in 2006, just good players.

  “Our theory for 2002 changed from 1998,” he said. “We were going to take the guys we thought were our most talented guys. To me, philosophically, that was a big change for us. It proved to be right.

  “Philosophically, we were a different bunch going in there because we were taking our best, and we were going to try to play a possession game and not be a fall-back trap team. We were going to see if we could do it that way, and we did. It took a while to get there, but we did.”

  As the date for the announcement of the team neared, Gretzky said, “I think the biggest change on our team today compared to 2002 and over the years is that before, we could take centremen and move them to the wing. You can’t move them to the wing now. We have so many good wingers now, there’s no room to move them.

  “We have centres now and we have wingers, and that’s the way it’s going to be.”

  Gretzky was fully aware of the ramifications of such a firm decision.

  “No matter what we do, there’s going to be a controversy,” he said. “The only way we’re going to be right is by winning the gold medal. Other than that, you’re not going to be right.”

  Wherever Gretzky went that winter, he ran into coaches and general managers who were lobbying for the inclusion of their players. Those he didn’t meet in person, he heard from by telephone.

  “Everybody wants to add guys to the team,” he said. “And that’s great, but who gets taken off? We can only have seven defencemen. We can only really have four centremen, and unfortunately, when you add guys, you have to take guys off, and that’s where it becomes really difficult.”

  Canada has traditionally been extremely sparing when awarding spots to promising youngsters. It has been the nation’s policy—one that proved fruitful in world championships, Canada Cups, the World Cup and the Olympics—to limit the turnover and lean heavily on players who had a proven record at the world-class level. In 2006, there were four youngsters who deserved serious consideration: Eric Staal, Sidney Crosby, Rick Nash and Jason Spezza.

  Because he had been dominant in Europe during the lockout and was the oldest, Nash was selected for the team. As the youngest, Crosby was left off. The other two were put on the taxi squad to be available if someone got hurt.

  The controversy over the naming of the team paled into insignificance compared to the controversy that erupted a few days before the team was to leave for Italy.

  There weren’t many dark days in Wayne Gretzky’s career, but he had a stretch of them in February when the so-called “gambling scandal” broke.

  It should be made perfectly clear right from the start that there was never a Wayne Gretzky gambling scandal. The media blew the story far out of proportion, implicated him by association and besmirched the pristine reputation he had worked so hard to establish.

  Even today, there are occasional foolish snide remarks in the media about gambling in the Gretzky household, but he did not gamble on sports and never would.

  The reports of a massive New Jersey gambling ring had hardly surfaced when a full-scale media feeding frenzy broke out, accusing Gretzky; his wife, Janet; his agent, Mike Barnett; Phoenix Coyotes assistant coach Rick Tocchet; and “over a hundred NHL players” of being involved in the ring.

  At the time, I was covering the annual meeting of the NHL general managers—which was, ironically, held in a suburb of Las Vegas. I quickly caught a flight to Phoenix where Gretzky was to coach his Coyotes that night. The team had announced that under no circumstances would Gretzky talk to anyone in the media before that night’s game. Nonetheless, I went to the rink in the latter part of the afternoon, and when Gretzky came in, flanked by two burly security guards, I started to approach him. The security guards were about to block me, but Gretzky stretched out his hand. “Hey Strach,” he said. “What’s up?”

  When I told him that I’d been dispatched there at the order of a disconcerted sports editor at the Toronto Sun, he quickly filled me in on the situation. He gave me the real story, not the one that was flooding the media.

  He started by saying, “I didn’t do it,” and added that he was “one hundred per cent innocent.”

  Of course, it was possible that he was lying. But if you know Wayne Gretzky, then you know he was telling the truth. At one point when I was doing research for this book, I spoke to Mike Keenan about an incident during Gretzky’s days with the Blues. Keenan didn’t remember exactly what had happened, so I told him Gretzky’s version.

  “Well, if Wayne said it, that’s the way it happened,” said Keenan. “If Wayne says it, you can take it to the bank.”

  When the gambling allegations broke, Gretzky was four days away from leaving for Turin. Many among the Canadian medi
a representatives already in Italy—and working on nothing but hearsay—were demanding that he step down and stay at home.

  “No way,” he said when I asked him about it. “I haven’t done anything wrong. Why would I step down?

  “I would never embarrass Team Canada or the country or hockey. If there was any truth to this, I would phone Gary Bettman and [Hockey Canada president] Bob Nicholson right now and say, ‘You know what? I resign. It’s over.’ Even if I made a one-dollar bet. But I didn’t. I would never do that. That’s the bottom line. The bottom line is I didn’t do it.”

  At the time, Gretzky didn’t deny that Janet and Tocchet made bets on the National Football League, but did not concede that to do so was illegal. Tocchet was already on an indefinite leave of absence and was facing charges, but Janet was accused of nothing more than betting on football games.

  Anyone who knew Gretzky at all would know that someone like him, a man always fully aware of the implications of his actions, wouldn’t dream of being personally involved in sports betting. “I have never bet on sports in my life,” he said.

  He admitted that even though he rarely gambles, he had occasionally done so in Las Vegas casinos. But he added that even in those surroundings, where gambling is legal, he made a point of never entering the area where sports bets are placed.

  “I wouldn’t even walk into a sports book in Vegas,” he said. “Even though it’s legal, I would never do that. That’s how serious I am about it.”

  Later that day, Janet issued a statement, backing up her husband’s assertions.

  “At no time did I ever place a wager on my husband’s behalf,” she said. “Other than the occasional horse race, my husband does not bet on sports.”

  What Janet didn’t say was that in most of the cases when Gretzky bet on a horse, he owned it.

  As we stood there in the bowels of the arena, Gretzky continued to stress his innocence of the charges.

  “If I had done it, I would say so,” he said. “If I had done something wrong, I would admit it.”