'learned In All The Lore Of Old Men'

Muzz, an ex-goalie of no great renown, must have been sensitive to the burden of wearing a 1 on one's back. Born Murray MacPherson, Muzz has been called Muzz so long that he looks like a Muzz. He is a cheerful bowling ball of a man and a practiced referee baiter. Fans battle for seats behind the Greyhound bench to hear him carry on:

"Mike? Mike? Dandy call, Mike. Just tell me one time why that looked like a charge to you when the same play 10 seconds ago didn't. Tell me that, Mike. Mike, I know you're not a homer. Don't look at me like I'm calling you a homer, Mike. You homer! Who said that?"

Muzz' hand, pudgy by nature, is swollen as round as a hockey puck from punching a railing during a recent loss. "Why not give him 99?" he shrugs. "He wanted it. The kid was going to be a marked man anyway. The way he plays, are you kidding?"

To be a marked man in Junior is not a terrific honor. For every player trying to make it into the pros as a goal scorer, there are five or six trying to get there because they can hit people into next week. Then there are the delightful few who don't worry much about next week, concentrating instead on, oh, the next three months in the hospital. Gretzky, so elusive on skates that he is nearly impossible to tag with a hard check, is subject to slashings across the wrists and legs that leave them a mass of welts after each game. Three times this season he has gone to the hospital for postgame X rays.

"It scares me to think there might be some big son of a gun who is just out there on the ice to try to get me out of the game," Gretzky admits. "Guys are always telling me that the next time I touch the puck, they're going to stuff their sticks down my throat. What can you do? You've got to go ahead and tough it and hope they were kidding."

The Greyhounds have loaded their bags onto a chartered, 30-year-old DC-3. Sault Ste. Marie is situated in Ontario approximately the way El Paso is in Texas, and the Hounds are the only OHA team to travel by plane. Next to Sudbury, which is a 186-mile stone's throw away, Sault Ste. Marie's nearest opponent in the 12-city OHA is 423 miles yonder.

The crew is late, but has carefully remembered to prop open the plane's door in the sub-zero cold. The interior of the DC-3 is lined with the recycled aluminum of old ice chests, and the players huddle in the seats like cubes in a tray. To pass the time, Muzz relates the story of the four-hour roller-coaster flight they took in November of 1975, the day the freighter Edmund Fitzgerald sank in a Lake Superior gale. "Thought I was a goner," he says.

"Hey, Boy Wonder," someone yells. "Make some more headlines. Fly us out of here. I'm freezin'!"

Gretzky is used to the flak. He enjoys it, as he enjoys all the attention showered on him. It is a system of checks and balances devised by his teammates so that all the hoopla doesn't go to his head.

Earlier in the year, on a day he was scheduled for a television interview, Gretzky lost an eyebrow and some other, less visible hair to the razors of the Soo veterans. They also loaded his hair with Vaseline. The kid had been initiated. Undaunted, Gretzky had Sylvia Bodner, whose family he lives with in Sault Ste. Marie, apply her eyeliner to his brow and use steam, detergent, lemonade and Bromo—"Kind of made my scalp sore"—to remove the Vaseline in time for the evening news. In another ploy, the team had the Soo police arrest Gretzky for streaking. "I've got to call my agent," he pleaded. He was innocently sitting in the back of the team bus in his shorts and sneakers when the police arrived. And in Ottawa a teammate, masquerading as a press secretary, phoned and asked Gretzky to lunch with Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. Gretzky took a rain check, explaining that he had to eat a training meal.