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 The Great One of a Kind
Posted: Wednesday April 21, 1999 12:49 PM
Wayne Gretzky was starring as an 18-year-old professional when Michael Jordan was struggling to make his high school varsity, when Larry Bird and Magic Johnson were still in college, when the National Hockey League and the National Basketball Association were still coupled as America's twin major winter sports leagues. That was the autumn of 1978. During these past two decades, Gretzky rose to heights, in the Dixie-fied, Sun-Belted United States, that no ice hockey player had ever enjoyed. Since there was no poetry sufficient to do him justice, he became known, simply, as The Great One -- very likely the most treasured human being ever born in Canada. The records Gretzky set in his prime may best be translated this way, into baseball language: suppose Mark McGwire hit 75 home runs every year (sometimes 90) and he also hit .400 every year (sometimes .420). Not only that, but Gretzky was a winner who made all his teammates better. He was The Great Team One. But, now, at the end of Gretzky's winding trail, the NHL has slipped back. If it was a movie, hockey would be subtitled and couldn't get into the multiplexes. Meanwhile, the NBA has leapt forward, now grouped with Major League Baseball and the NFL as very much a part of our everyday American culture. Bird and Johnson -- not to say, Michael Jordan -- all left the building, even as Gretzky stayed on the ice. More and more, though, No. 99 wasn't so much a player as a tourist attraction. After his glory years, somewhere up in Alberta, he was dished off -- first to Los Angeles, then St. Louis, then New York. But it was backwards, as if he really didn't have anything do to with playing hockey. Instead, it was more a matter of putting Gretzky on display in Hollywood and Manhattan, hoping that the right people would venture out to see him out of curiosity, and then fall in love with hockey -- maybe even invest in hockey. It's hardly Gretzky's fault that no electric replacement came along to succeed him, but in the last couple years, when he's slowed down to the point where his skinny body started taking too many direct hits, there's been the sense that Gretzky is rather like one of those old leading men, still cast as the romantic love interest when he ought to be the wisecracking buddy. He was right to retire. Could it have ended up any differently? Well, suppose, in the 1980s -- when Johnson was in L.A., when Bird was in Boston with the most storied franchise in basketball, and when Jordan was in Chicago -- suppose instead they'd been hidden away in Indianapolis, Salt Lake City and Portland. And suppose that Gretzky had been skating in New York or Chicago or at the romantic shrine of the sport, the Montreal Forum. And suppose the No. 2 sneaker company hadn't placed a big bet on a black rookie from North Carolina, but Coke and McDonald's had chosen to feature the idol of the ice. Might sports history have gone differently? Hockey always suffers because it televises so terribly, so maybe nothing could have changed the way things were destined. Maybe location, location, location doesn't mean that much anymore -- not when every couch has a clicker. Still, Wayne Gretzky was everything a sport could have ordered up to be its cynosure. He was not just fabulous of talent, but pretty to see. Not just personable, but humble and handsome, both. But yet, graceful as he was, he couldn't lift his brutish sport. The irony is that he was so incredibly good that we tend to remember Gretzky then, rather than admire hockey now. These commentaries, which appear each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition, are posted weekly by CNN/SI.
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