~ in Winnipeg ~
When Wayne Gretzky was sold to Bruce McNall’s Los Angeles Kings in 1988, it was celebrated here in Winnipeg. The Jets would benefit from not having the Great One tormenting them from Edmonton — better farther away on a weaker club. Little did Winnipeg know that their team would follow Gretzky to the Sunbelt in 1996. Wayne went willingly, notwithstanding the tears at the famous Edmonton press conference, and Winnipeg would lose its NHL team to Phoenix. There would be tears enough for all.
That’s the story as told by the incomparable Stephen Brunt in his latest book, Gretzky’s Tears, on the changes that were wrought by Gretzky moving to Hollywood. Hockey, and hockey’s greatest player, decided to chase the money in warm-weather America. It’s a sad tale. But here in Winnipeg over New Year’s, is the perfect place to read this book. The Aughts were a difficult decade for the NHL, but the key moves were made back in 1988. Los Angeles got the glamour. Edmonton got the money and another Stanley Cup. Winnipeg got the shaft.
Last year’s major hockey story was the farce in Phoenix, where Gretzky finally ended up, coaching the Coyotes for about $8-million per year — about eight times what most coaches earned and, more to point, about $8-million more than the hemorrhaging Coyotes could afford. How did that happen?
Steve Ellman, a real estate developer, bought the Phoenix Coyotes in 2001 with a plan to build a new arena as the anchor for a housing development. It wasn’t about hockey. It was a real estate play. The money-losing team was not a sound investment, but in order to persuade local politicians to put up the cash for the new arena and to attract other investors, Ellman needed a winning front man.
“Enter Gretzky, once again playing the role of flashy bauble for a rich hustler, an unbroken line that extended all the way back to Nelson Skalbania,” writes Brunt. That seems harsh, no? About Gretzky, the boy from Brantford who represents all that is good about Canadian hockey?
But Brunt connects the dots and tells us that what happened in 1988 and 2001 was not something altogether new. The selling of the game had begun earlier, and while there are plenty of villains in the Canadian mind, Gretzky does not escape without blame.
Way back in 1978, when Gretzky was a teenager, he decided that his best interests did not lie in the NHL, but rather in chasing the money in the new WHA. He wasn’t alone. Bobby Hull, as it will be remembered here, left the NHL to sign with Winnipeg. What goes around comes around. Indeed, Brunt demonstrates, from that first contract with Nelson Skalbania, to the decade with Peter Pocklington in Edmonton, to the collaboration with Bruce McNall in Los Angeles, Gretzky rewrote the rules to his advantage.
That’s not our myth of Gretzky, Brunt explains, but neither does it condemn him. He went where he would be paid most. Who wouldn’t? But there is a price to be paid for the money. Our Babe Ruth was sold, and he was sold to a fraud and felon.
“Of all the things I’ve done in my life, the Gretzky deal is what I’m certainly most proud of — not just the Gretzky deal itself, but the whole momentum-shifting of hockey into the twenty-first century,” says Bruce
McNall. “I’m disappointed that there was no follow-up. The Gretzky deal was a start. It wasn’t a finish.”
McNall himself didn’t make it to the 21st century as an owner. He was in prison and sold the Kings less than 10 years after he bought Gretzky. But there was follow-up aplenty. Teams were put all over the American south. The NHL owners, chasing the money, made McNall the chairman of their board of governors. He in turn hired Gary Bettman, the man who has caused more tears than any other for Canadian hockey fans. McNall was right. The Gretzky deal was a beginning.
“It was … a watershed moment in the history of hockey labour relations,” writes Brunt. “The last romantic attachment to teams and uniforms and owners vanished with Gretzky’s trade. Players understood their true function in hockey’s economic system, and hardened their attitudes.”
It still has not finished. Hockey killed an entire season — surely the greatest management failure in the history of professional sport — to achieve a system that would allow its new fair-weather model to flourish. Yet floundering rather than flourishing is the case all over the south. There may still be tears in Edmonton, and Winnipeg and Quebec and even Hamilton. But there are no tears in Los Angeles or Phoenix, for you have to care in order to cry.
Tags: National Post