Dispatches from the Sporting Life (13 page)

Obviously Ms. Oates does not consider this to be the case with Mike Tyson, with whom she spent considerable time. Astonishingly, she adjudges Tyson “clearly thoughtful, intelligent, introspective; yet at the same time—or nearly the same time—he is a ‘killer’ in the ring… one of the most warmly affectionate persons, yet at the same time—or nearly—a machine for hitting ‘sledgehammer’ blows.”

Be that as it may, Joyce Carol Oates won me over with a fetching analogy: “The artist senses some kinship, however oblique and one-sided, with the professional boxer in this matter of training. This fanatic subordination of the self in terms of a wished-for destiny. One might compare the time-bound public spectacle of the boxing match (which could be as brief as an ignominious forty-five seconds—the record for a title fight!) with the publication
of a writer’s book. That which is ‘public’ is but the final stage in a protracted, arduous, grueling, and frequently despairing period of preparation.”

And this, she ventures, may be one of the reasons for the habitual attraction of serious writers to boxing.

John Updike, that readiest of writers, has pronounced adoringly about golf both in incidental pieces and his Rabbit Angstrom novels. “Like a religion,” he wrote in
Is There Life After Golf?,
“a game seeks to codify and lighten life. Played earnestly enough (spectatorship being merely a degenerate form of playing), a game can gather to itself awesome dimensions of subtlety and transcendental significance. Consult George Steiner’s hymn to the fathomless wonder of chess, or Roger Angell’s startlingly intense meditations upon the time-stopping, mathematical beauty of baseball. Some sports, surely, are more religious than others; ice hockey, fervent though its devotees, retains a dross of brutal messiness….”

In common, I should have thought, with Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Or conversely, hockey is just the ticket for sports agnostics like me.

Over the years, unable to act out my fantasies like George Plimpton, I have, all the same, on assignment for various magazines, been able to accompany
the Montreal Canadiens on a road trip, shooting the breeze with Guy Lafleur and playing poker with Toe Blake and others on the coaching staff. I have also got to hang out with Pete Rose and Johnny Bench in Cincinnati, and I once spent some time with the Edmonton Oilers when Wayne Gretzky was still with them. Gretzky, his immense skills undeniable, has to be one of the most boring men I ever met. To come clean, neither was the far more appealing snooker sensation Stephen Hendry the wittiest of luncheon companions, but, to be fair, I doubt that Gore Vidal ever scored a maximum.

N
ineteen eighty-five. Edmonton. One day in March, at Barry T’s Roadhouse out there on tacky 104th Street—wedged between welding shops and cinder block strip joints and used car lots—the city’s amiable sportswriting fraternity gathered for its annual award luncheon. The writers were going to present Wayne Gretzky with their Sports Professional of the Year Award again. “I’ll bet he tells us it means more to him than the Stanley Cup,” one of the writers said.

“Or the Hart.”

“Or his contract with General Mills. What do you think that’s worth, eh?”

Bill Tuele, director of public relations for the Oilers, joined our table. “Does flying really scare Gretzky that much?” I asked.

“Nah. It doesn’t scare him
that
much,” Tuele said. “It’s just that if we go bumpety-bump, he staggers off the plane with his shirt drenched.”

Gretzky, who was running late, finally drifted into Barry T’s. A curiously bland twenty-four-year-old in a grey flannel suit, he graciously accepted his
plaque. “Anytime you win an award, it’s a thrill,” he said. “With so many great athletes in Edmonton, I’m very honoured to win this.” Then, his duty done, he retreated to a booth to eat lunch. And in Western Canada, where civility is the rule, he was not immediately besieged by reporters with notebooks or tape recorders. They left him alone with his overdone roast beef and curling, soggy french fries.

There had been a game the night before, the slumping Edmonton Oilers ending a five-game losing streak at home, edging the Detroit Red Wings 7–6, only their second victory in their last eight outings. Even so, they were still leading the league. Gretzky, juggling his crammed schedule, had fitted me in for an interview at the Northlands Coliseum at 9:00 a.m. Increasingly caught up in the business world, he told me he had recently read
Iacocca
and was now into
Citizen Hughes.
Though he enjoyed watching television soap operas and had once appeared on
The Young and the Restless
himself, he never bothered with fiction. “I like to read fact,” he said. “I’m so busy, I haven’t got the time to read stories that aren’t real.”

After the interview, there was a team practice, and following the sportswriters’ lunch, he was scheduled to shoot a television commercial, and then there was a dinner he was obliged to attend. The next night, there was a game with Buffalo. It would be the seventieth for the Oilers in the regular NHL schedule but the seventy-second for Gretzky, who had played in eight Canada Cup games immediately before the NHL season. There were a further ten games to come in the regular season and, as it
turned out, another eighteen in the playoffs before the Oilers would skate to their second consecutive Stanley Cup.

But at the time, Gretzky, understandably, was in a defensive mood, aware that another undeniably talented club, the Boston Bruins, led by Bobby Orr and Phil Esposito, had promised better than they had paid, faltering more than once in the playoffs. “We’ve already been compared to the great Boston team of the early seventies, which won only two cups but they still say should have won four,” Gretzky said.

I asked Gretzky if he didn’t consider the regular NHL schedule, which more than one wag has put down as the longest exhibition season in sport, to be insufferably long and meaningless. After all, it ran to 840 games, from September to April, and when it was over only five of the then twenty-one teams had been cut from what knowledgeable fans appreciated as the real season—the Stanley Cup playoffs. “Well,” he said, “this city’s not like New York, where there are lots of things to do. In Edmonton in February, we’re the only attraction.”

When I asked Peter Pocklington, the owner of the Oilers, about the seemingly endless season, he protested, “We’re the only show in town. Coming to see Gretzky is like going to watch Pavarotti or Nureyev. What else are you going to do in Edmonton in the middle of the winter? How many beers can you drink?”

The capital of Alberta is a city you come from, not a place to visit, unless you have relatives there or an interest in an oil well nearby. On first glance, and
even on third, it seems not so much a city as a jumble of a used-building lot, where the spare office towers and box-shaped apartment buildings and cinder-block motels discarded in the construction of real cities have been abandoned to waste away in the cruel prairie winter.

If Canada were not a country, however fragmented, but instead a house, Vancouver would be the solarium-cum-playroom, an afterthought of affluence; Toronto, the counting room, where money makes for the most glee; Montreal, the salon; and Edmonton, the boiler room. There is hardly a tree to be seen downtown, nothing to delight the eye on Jasper Avenue. On thirty-below-zero nights, grim religious zealots loom on street corners, speaking in tongues, and intrepid hookers in mini-skirts rap on the windows of cars that have stopped for traffic. There isn’t a first-class restaurant anywhere in town. For all that, Edmontonians are a truly admirable lot. They have not only endured great hardships in the past but also continue to suffer an abominable climate as well as isolation from the cities of light. And to some degree, like other Westerners, they thrive on resentments against the grasping, self-satisfied East, which has exploited their natural resources for years, taking their oil and gas at cut prices to subsidize inefficient Ontario and Quebec industries.

Insults, injuries.

For as long as Edmontonians can remember, the biggies were elsewhere. Though they had contributed many fine hockey players to the game, they could only hear about their feats on radio or later see them on television. Hockey was
their
game,
damn it,
their
national sport, but New York, Chicago, Detroit, and Boston were in the NHL long before the league’s governors adjudged Edmonton not so much worthy as potentially profitable. But in 1984, Canada’s hockey shrines were either in decline, as was then the case in Montreal, or in total disrepute, as in Toronto. In those glory days, if Easterners wanted to see the best player in the game more than twice a season, if they wanted to catch a dynasty in the making, why, then, they had to pack their fat coats and fur-lined boots and head for Edmonton, home of the Stanley Cup champions and the Great Gretzky himself.

In March 1984, Gretzky the commodity was soaring to new heights of fame and fortune; Gretzky the most famous player ever was struggling, justifiably fatigued.

In a five-week period, Gretzky had been on the cover of
Sporting News,
two Canadian hockey magazines, and
Sports Illustrated
(for the fifth time), and he had shared a
Time
cover with Larry Bird of the Boston Celtics. He had tested his scoring skills against no less a goalie than George Plimpton, and he had been the subject of an article in the
Saturday Evening Post
and an interview in
Playboy.
He had, Gretzky told me, been criticized for submitting to the
Playboy
interview, accused of endorsing pornography. But as he put it, “You can’t please everybody.” Actually, the engaging truth is that his interview with
Playboy
was a triumph of small-town Canadian rectitude over that magazine’s appetite for salacious detail.

Gretzky was what athletes are supposed to be, but seldom are—McIntosh-apple wholesome, dedicated, an inspirational model for young fans. He was an anachronism, rooted in an age when a date wasn’t a disco, then your place or mine, but rather a movie, then maybe a banana split at the corner soda fountain. He had owned a Ferrari for four years but had never had a speeding ticket. He still phoned home to Brantford, Ontario, to report to his father three times a week. He struck me as nice, very nice, but incapable of genuine wit or irreverence, like, say, Tug McGraw. What he did tell me, his manner appropriately solemn, was that he felt it was his responsibility never to refuse to sign an autograph: “For that person, that kid, it could be the greatest thing that ever happened to him.”

Gretzky worked hard, incredibly hard, both for the charities he supported and for himself. He was boffo sales stuff. The hockey stick he endorsed, Titan, leaped from twelfth to first place in sales in thirty-six months. Gretzky also pitched for Canon cameras, Nike sportswear, General Mills Pro Stars
cereal, Mattel toys, Travellers Insurance, and American Express. These endorsements were handled by Michael Barnett of CorpSport International out of handsomely appointed offices in an old converted Edmonton mansion. There was a large portrait of Gretzky in action on a wall in the reception room as well as the essential LeRoy Neiman, and a placard with a quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Make the most of yourself, for that is all there is of you.”

CorpSport International represented other athletes, but for the past four years Gretzky, who then earned an estimated $1 million annually in endorsements—about the same as his salary—had been the major preoccupation of its thirty-four-year-old president. Barnett, a former minor league hockey player himself, was in daily contact with Gretzky’s lawyer as well as the firm that handled his investments. “Though Wayne listens to all his advisers,” Barnett said, “he makes his own business and investment decisions. We get some three dozen personal appearance requests for him a month, but he will only speak for charities. Pro Stars cereal advertises the Wayne Gretzky Fan Club on four million boxes. It costs seven bucks a year to be a member, and for that you get four annual Wayne Gretzky newsletters as well as this set of photographs.

“There have been seven unauthorized biographies,” Barnett continued. “Wayne gets between two to five thousand fan letters a month. Vickie Moss’s mother handles that for him.”

Mattel has marketed a Wayne Gretzky doll (“For avid fans, his out-of-town uniform, jogging suit, and
tuxedo are also available”), which has led to cracks about the need for a Dave Semenko doll to beat up any kid who roughs up the Gretzky doll.

Late at night, even as he talked business with Barnett, Gretzky autographed colour photographs of himself. Mattel supplied the photographs, which included its logo, but Gretzky, according to Barnett, paid the postal charges, about $2,000 monthly. Barnett also pointed out that since the Oilers took their first Stanley Cup on May 19, 1984, Gretzky had only six weeks off the ice before joining the Canada Cup training camp, playing in that series, and then moving directly into the NHL season.