I can’t remember a time in 27 years in the business … that I have felt such a personal loss. I’M NOT ready for this. Hope he is. Until the past week, there was good reason to believe Wayne Gretzky was still loving the game too much to not give it another year. But his neck hurts, his feelings hurt, and as long as he knows it is time, then, of course, it is.
Nobody ever has had a better sense of time and place than Gretzky, both on a rink and off. One more season probably will be one too many with a team that didn’t protect him, or complement him, or incredibly, assess bad alternatives and reassure the greatest hockey player who ever lived that he was wanted back.
So as he walks away, we wish we could say it was only the Rangers’ loss. But damn them, it’s not. They let their fans down, the league down, the game down. And personally, I can’t remember a time in 27 years in the business, the first seven of which were largely marking time until the arrival of a talent impossible to fathom and player too good to be true, that I have felt such a personal loss.
It wasn’t going to go on forever, sure. But I needed a long and slow goodbye, a year, at least. So, like a defenseman standing by the post, knowing a Gretzky passout is coming and powerless to deflect it, he has slipped The End by me, and now I don’t know what to do? Cry? Wind my watch while waiting for another Wayne Gretzky to come along? The exercise will be more futile than, in his prime, it was to try to stop him, more unfeasible than it ever was to try to fully explain him.
He weighs 170 pounds, is merely a better-than-average skater, at his best had a shot that couldn’t have broken anything even as flimsy as a Neil Smith excuse. And in a sport where headhunters roam, where might is right and no running out-of-bounds is possible, Gretzky pulverized the record book, raising the statistical bar like only two other athletes in history, Babe Ruth and Wilt Chamberlain.
Michael Jordan, acclaimed with close to unanimity the greatest athlete who ever lived when he retired in January, won six championships to Gretzky’s four, but never outscored his closest opponent by 25-35 per cent in a season as Gretzky did in his best years.
If Jordan gets an edge by some strange accounting that give him points for walking away at his absolute top, it is also saying he never took a risk, like Gretzky did moving in mid-career to revive a starving Los Angeles franchise. If Gretzky’s impact suffers from his sport’s lower profile, Jordan still never saved a franchise or inspired the growth of more in an entire region of the United States.
Nor did Jordan, smooth, fast, powerful, operate with an obvious physical deficiency in relation to the players around him, as did Gretzky. So, if it is arguable who accomplished the most within the context of their opportunities, there is no question that no team sport has ever produced a player of Gretzky’s utter genius.
Stan Mikita and Bobby Clarke had extraordinary vision, were the two best passers we had ever seen, until Gretzky saw a game no one else ever had. He dissected it with such precision that we were given an entire new definition of just how great that great could be.
He was magic. And even equipped with a ratty hat and cane and scarfs suitable only to wrap around the weak and procrastinating, GM’s neck, Gretzky sill produced moments of the old hocus-pocus in New York. He was Great again in 1997, way too much for the Panthers and a 104-point Devils’ team. And too good, still, to quit any franchise that had sense to give him a winger who could skate and finish, who could have kept Gretzky one of the ten best NHL players even at age 38.
Unfortunately, the Rangers haven’t been able to do that, to this regime’s eternal shame, even if Gretzky will say as much on the day somebody catches him on the all-time goals and points list. Checkers found him like Teflon and some people jealous of an image he worked at every day with decency, not deception, wondered why nothing bad ever stuck.
How? Somebody who earned millions and still gave the game more than it could ever provide him suffered the number of petulant moments you could count on one hand over 20 years. Not only was Gretzky first to 200 points in a season, but first to hand the Cup to Steve Smith the year after the defenseman had blown one by banking the puck into his own net, first to give it to Keith Acton, who had never touched it before in 10 years before joining the Oilers in 1988.
That exquisite sense of his surroundings that made Gretzky so great shone off the ice, too, making everybody around him comfortable, making anyone who failed to fully appreciate him a far bigger fool than anyone who ever tried to stop him.
Like playoffs that will begin next week for a second straight year without Gretzky, the game of course, will go on. As was Mario Lemieux, Eric Lindros, Paul Kariya, Peter Forsberg and Jaromir Jagr are excellent players, seat-sellers all, with flair that safely can carry the game into the next millennium without being able to lift Gretzky’s skates.
No one is coming to replace the most accomplished athlete in history and certainly the most unique, so only the headline writers will enjoy the idea on No. 99 calling it quits in 1999. I think it’s one of the most painful things I’ll ever read.
