'learned In All The Lore Of Old Men'

"He's got this Boy Wonder thing under control," says Bumbacco, the man who selected Gretzky in the midget draft, even after receiving a letter from Walter Gretzky, an employee of Bell Telephone in Brantford, in which he said he wouldn't let his son play that far from home. "I told Mr. Gretzky we were running a business, and if Wayne was available, we'd take him. Then I had to fly to Brantford and convince him to come."

He did so, but not without the help of Jim and Sylvia Bodner, friends of the Gretzkys from Brantford who had moved to the Soo four years before. "I called up Mr. Gretzky," says Mrs. Bodner, "and it was such a relief to him that Wayne could live with people that he knew. Wayne's father wants so much to be a part of everything that Wayne's going through, and he can't. I know it's hard for him."

For a general manager, Bumbacco is not a dollars-and-cents type. However, as he says, "In dollars and cents, I'd say without Gretzky we'd be averaging 1,100 to 1,200 people per game. With him, we're averaging 2,500."

Bumbacco has been managing one team or another in Sault Ste. Marie for more than 30 years. Seventy of the players who grew up under him have gone on to college on scholarships, and 14 have ended up in professional hockey, among them Chico and Wayne Maki, Lou Nanne, Ivan Boldirev and—the local legends—Tony and Phil Esposito.

"People told me the same thing about Phil that they tell me about Gretzky: 'He can't skate,' " says Bumbacco. " 'Sure,' I tell them, 'You're absolutely right. He can't skate a lick. All he can do is score goals.' "

The Gitche Gumee—Lake Superior—is an eerie white wasteland in winter. Freighters like the Edmund Fitzgerald, loaded with ore from the Algoma Steel plant, crunch through the channel cut out of the ice in Whitefish Bay. The city of 80,000 is as flat as the frozen waterways around it, and its rows of Monopoly-board houses are broken up only by the billowing smokestacks of the mill and Abitibi Pulp and Paper. It is here that the waters of Lake Superior, boiling into rapids, start their journey to the Atlantic.

Hiawatha was Sault Ste. Marie's first legend, back when the Ojibway nation called that stretch of the river "Pauwating." He wasn't much for hockey, but some of Longfellow's descriptions make Hiawatha sound like something of a cross between Gretzky and Harvey Keck.

Out of childhood into manhood
Now had grown Hiawatha...
Learned in all the lore of old men,
In all youthful sports and pastimes...
He could shoot an arrow from him,
And run forward with such fleetness,
That the arrow fell behind him!

Sam Turco is at the Sault Memorial Gardens the night Gretzky's Greyhounds, as the Sault Ste. Marie team has been dubbed, try to break a seven-game winless streak in a game against Peterborough. He sits in the same seat he has occupied for 30 years, right behind the visitor's bench. Sam came over from Italy in 1912 and worked 25 years at Algoma Steel before he lost his leg to a hangnail that led to gangrene and forced him to start driving a cab.

Sam's got a handshake that Gordie Howe will be hardpressed to match at 72. "Ain't afraid of man nor devil," he says with a quick, hollow rap on his wooden leg. Another night Sam glowers down at Hamilton Coach Bert Templeton. "Cut out that cheap stuff, Bert!" Sam threatens. Rap, rap. "The one hit is fine, but that second shot's cheap stuff!"