Planning For His Retirement Once He Quits Contributing To Team, Gretzky Says He’ll Quit Playing Hockey
From the back, all they saw were his black slacks, his black leather jacket, his strawcolored hair. He was just some guy in the shadows at Joe Louis Arena. And he was in their way.
Practice had not begun, but the teenagers from the Little Caesars hockey program were clattering toward the ice. Before you actually can skate at Joe Louis, you trundle down a hallway, clamber up to bench-level, squeeze through the narrow space between the end of the bench and the doorway to the pond.
Except this day last week, there was another part of the drill. The kids also had to turn sideways to avoid brushing their shoulder pads on the stranger who stood there, talking in the dimness because the rink lights were not yet on. The boys would step up, turn, squint at him through the cages on their helmets. Several of them seemed prepared to ask why he couldn’t go stand someplace else.
When they saw it was Wayne Gretzky, any words froze in their throats.
Hockey’s greatest scorer looked at every one of them, acknowledging their presence with a grin, if not a smile. When they all were on the ice, the coach came over and closed the door in the boards.
“Big, aren’t they?” the coach asked, smiling.
“They’re all big now,” Gretzky said. “Thank God I’m almost done.”
Almost done?
Wayne Gretzky was minus-11 entering the weekend, which hardly was the end of the world but certainly was the worst figure on the team. He had 12 points in 12 games, and while that was not the end of the world, it placed Gretzky third on the Los Angeles Kings, behind Rick Tocchet and Jari Kurri (each with 14).
“You want to contribute,” Gretzky said. “I get treated so well by the coaching staff, and there’s times after the games when I just sit down and say, `Well, I didn’t contribute the way I can.’ I feel I let myself down and I let them down. When that starts happening enough times, that’s when you’ve got to look in the mirror and say, `OK. It’s happening more than not.’ And that’s when I’ll say the end is near.”
In Toronto last weekend, with the Kings leading 3-2 in the third period, Gretzky hardly looked done. He had the puck in the left circle and saw defenseman Michel Petit coming into the play at the right point. Most of the skating hacks in the NHL would have been looking to the corners or the front of the net, because that’s where most of the hacks in the league should have been sending the puck. Sure, Gretzky checked those options, a quarterback reading the coverage, but he saw Tocchet in front of the net and knew Tocchet would screen the goalie’s view of Petit’s shot if Petit got the puck.
Gretzky’s pass landed flat and fat, and Petit got 200-plus pounds behind the shot and a 3-2 anxiety attack was in firmer control at 4-2.
The next night, Detroit led 4-1 through 43 minutes, but Los Angeles’ Robert Lang scored and the Kings had sudden life. Then Kurri carried across the blue line, hooked the puck between his skates to Gretzky, who he knew would be trailing. Gretzky saw his new left wing, Randy Burridge, had half a step on Sergei Fedorov, the star Red Wings center.
Fedorov seemed resigned to his fate. Burridge, no dummy, knew enough to drive to the net. You don’t question that the puck will get there when Gretzky is the one passing it; the question is whether you blow the sure goal he is putting on your stick.
Burridge got it right at 9:16, leaving the Kings more than half the third period to score the tying goal. Which they did, temporarily assuaging Gretzky’s concerns.
“People say you should play until they tear your sweater off your back; my feeling is, you should play until you can’t contribute anymore. That’s where I’m at in my life,” Gretzky said. “If I can’t be on in the third period and make a play to set up a goal to make it 4-3, then I’m not Wayne Gretzky. And that’s when I’ll know I should get out.”
He knows that time is nearing. Gretzky is 34 in human years, somewhere near a million in hockey years.
“When I started, at least there were words in the music. Now, I don’t know what they call it; I really don’t,” he said. “With the music these kids play in the locker room before the games, I walk out.
“Sitting in the locker room, you bring up somebody’s name and they go, `Who was that?’ I played with Bill Flett. He was my right winger. They have no idea. I say, `He won two Stanley Cups. Wore a cowboy hat.’ They go, `What?”’
He speaks with bewilderment, with a bit of a laugh. He is every parent, trying to keep up with the new generation. He knows the kids keep the game young. Gretzky knows the winning keeps him young.
He also knows that soon, simply being Wayne Gretzky will not be enough. Some day, someone will be just brash enough to tell Wayne Gretzky he’s in the way.
“You kind of wonder where it’s going to be, when it’s going to be, what game it’s going to be. That’s what I think about, because I don’t want it to happen,” Gretzky said. “As athletes, we all get scared that it’s going to end. You used to hear athletes say, `I’m ready to retire.’ But nobody’s ever ready to pack it in.
“My whole life has been centered around going to the rink every single day, and when it finally happens that they say, `You know what? Don’t go to the rink anymore,’ you draw a blank,” he added. “Where do you go? What do you do? You’ve got to find that `high’ that’s going to … not replace hockey but be something you can do. Some athletes find it and some don’t, and the ones who don’t end up really struggling in life.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” said the center, whose contract expires at the end of next season. “I know I don’t want to be a coach and I know I don’t want to be a general manager. I can’t. I don’t have the heart to tell a guy he’s cut, that he has to go to the minors - that `We just traded you to such-and-such.’ That’s hard. Sometimes, you’ve got to trade a guy you don’t want to trade.”
General manager Sam McMaster, who isn’t paid to be popular, took a lot of heat in Los Angeles for doing exactly that last week. McMaster completed two months of negotiations on a deal that sent defenseman Alexei Zhitnik to Buffalo for goalie Grant Fuhr and two lesser defensive prospects. Coach Barry Melrose loves size on his defense; now 6-foot Darryl Sydor is the smallest King on the blue line. McMaster wanted the team to get younger, so he sent 35-year-old Charlie Huddy to Buffalo in the deal, getting Philippe Boucher, 21, and Dennis Tsygurov, 23.
Zhitnik is the best player in the lot, so the Sabres win the trade. But there is going to be a life after Gretzky for the Kings and McMaster is in charge of planning for it.
“When I went to L.A. six years ago, I set a goal,”
Gretzky added. “I said, `Before I’m done, I want people to say, `Hey - I want to see a hockey game. I want to learn about hockey.’ And we’ve gotten to that point.
“Three or four years ago, I had concerns - `What’s going to happen when I retire?’ But it’s more solid out there than people think. We have a really strong nucleus of 12,000-13,000 fans, which is tremendous at the ticket prices we have … whereas before, it used to be 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 for half the price.”
For whatever remaining chances they have, people come to watch Gretzky check off the objectives still on his playing agenda. Gretzky wants to finish with more assists than anyone has total points. Because he skated into the weekend with 1,665 setups, Gretzky would need 186 more - two solid seasons’ worth - to pass Gordie Howe’s point total.
And he would adore another run at his fifth championship.
“Two years ago, to get to the finals with a team that really wasn’t expected to get there and to play as well as we did, really was enjoyable for me,” Gretzky said. “I starve for that. I starve to get back to the finals one more time. That would be a dream.”
After that 1993 final, after the Kings had lost in five games to Montreal, Gretzky made his first serious expressions about leaving the game. He restates them now less from an emotional standpoint than a practical one.
“I’d like to think I’ve got three or four years left in me; but the reality is, maybe I don’t,” he said. “I just don’t want somebody to say to me, `You know what, Wayne? You’re not dressing tonight.’ I don’t want it to happen like that.”
You wonder who would have the nerve to say those words, but Gretzky has thought about it. A lot. Before all those kids clomped past him last Sunday morning, Gretzky stood at the bench in Joe Louis, looked out at the ice, and imagined the night he would skate off the final time.
“Sure I think about it,” he said. “I’m closer to that now than I am to anything.”