Facing Wayne Gretzky: Players Recall the Greatest Hockey Player Who Ever Lived

INTRODUCTION

THIS BOOK IS part of a series that includes a couple of books on baseball. In describing that sport, it’s easier to use the facing metaphor, since the pitcher-to-hitter interaction is so much a one-on-one encounter.

Hockey is different. Its swirling whorl of action makes any face-toface moment between players (excepting scorer and goalie) a fleeting thing. Thus it’s not so easy to extract stories about particular moments that happened in games, but I hope that the diligent research I did in preparation for each interview has produced fact and detail that will entice and entertain readers.

In addition, it’s a hard thing to figure out in what order to feature this information. Simply putting these stories into the categories of Forwards, Defense, and Goalies didn’t seem workable, partly because Wayne Gretzky’s career was so long and had so many facets.

So what made sense in the end was to divide the book into sections roughly replicating the major eras of Gretzky’s career, then, within sections, to use positions as a guide. But understand that most of the players interviewed for this book played across eras of Wayne’s childhood, WHA, and NHL careers. And some of the interviewees give off-ice perspectives. All of this information, however, adds up (I hope) to a picture of what it was like to face Wayne Gretzky.

Readers might wonder why this group of people was chosen to tell the Gretzky story. The answer—I could have interviewed a hundred more former players, and I still might have missed a key detail. The other factor is the human one—some guys are just very difficult to find, or they promise to do an interview but then never respond to follow-up requests. At some point, the writer has to just recognize that it wasn’t in the cards to interview that person. Having said that, I’m very happy to have talked to the accomplished and gracious men who are in this book. There are many Hall of Fame inductees, many record holders, and more than a few with name recognition that will transcend time. But even those with a more modest place in hockey history gave me compelling material, and I offer these stories to readers in the hope that they will agree.

If just a few of these memories are preserved for posterity where they might otherwise have been lost, I will feel as if the year spent on this project was worthwhile for me and an important contribution to hockey history.

Section One: Becoming a Pro

Mike Ruby

Center

Ruby never played NHL hockey, but he does have the distinction of having played minor hockey for Newmarket on a team that was one of the only ones to keep Wayne Gretzky in check in his miraculous 1971-72 season. This event happened during the 12th Annual Peterborough Community Church Hockey League Novice Tournament, February 25–27, 1972. Ruby wore sweater No. 11 for Art’s Variety. Gretzky wore No. 9 for the Brantford Nadrofsky Steelers.

MY FRIENDS AND I, including future NHLer Jamie Macoun, played all of our hockey in Newmarket. We had a pretty decent team for the time period, certainly from a relatively small town in Ontario. We had a fair bit of success, and I think that was measured, one particular year, in playing against Gretzky and having the success we did in a tournament game [in Peterborough]. When you look at what he was doing in that year, it was off the charts.

We played against Wayne in the year that he really got a tremendous amount of recognition in the media in terms of being a talented player with superstar status. It was in the Peterborough Church League Novice tournament. The games were at the Memorial Centre and Northcrest Arena in Peterborough, wintertime of 1972.

My recollection is that his skill set was pretty amazing. Our goal in that game was to focus on him and keep him off the game sheet, and for whatever reason, probably just good team play, we were pretty successful in that tournament game. When you look back on what his accomplishments were throughout that season [and] the unbelievable statistics, it was a pretty proud moment for our team to contain him in the game in Peterborough.

What I recall is that he was on a phenomenal run where he scored something like 500 goals and 300 assists for his Brantford team. We met him getting close to the finals in the tournament, and our Newmarket team is one of only two or three teams that beat his team that year. We actually took him either off the score sheet or kept him to one goal. For our group at the time—and we had a pretty decent team growing up as well, won a bunch of Ontario Provincial Championships—it was a pretty big feat to keep a kid who was as well-known as Gretzky at the time limited in his scoring abilities, because he had been lighting it up in that tournament to the tune of seven, eight, nine goals in many of the games.

From the start of the tournament, his skill was recognized. We knew who he was. We knew what he was doing in terms of his skills and the records he was accomplishing that year. We had seen him. We watched him, and as I recall, he was playing against Oshawa the game previous to when we played against him, and he was incredible. He lit up the scoreboard to the tune of seven or eight goals, and so we knew we had our work cut out for us. Our only game plan was to go with two forward lines and put a man one-on-one with him. That’s what we did, and with that and some good defensive play—Jamie Macoun was one of our stalwarts on defense—and good goaltending, we managed to pull off a one-goal victory against his Brantford team and eliminate them from the tournament.

When I look back on that, I saw the records somewhere for that year, and I think his Brantford team lost only two or three games that season, one of which was to our team. It was one of the few times that he was held—I think we held him to one goal—it was one of the few times that entire year that he was kept to one goal. I’m not even sure he was kept off the score sheet any of his games that year. Incidentally, that year, he wasn’t playing above his age group. We were both born in 1961.

The year that we played him, his Brantford team was keeping almost like a chart of the team’s record for that year, and it also had a breakdown of Wayne’s statistics game-by-game and the score result game-bygame for the entire season. That board was in his restaurant at one time, but is now gone, and was in the Hall of Fame at one time as well, and it did have the game against my Newmarket team on it, as I recall from seeing it. Where it has gone to now, I don’t know.

Anyway, it was a pretty proud moment for our Newmarket team, especially going back that many years and seeing the type of player Wayne became, and to have had that opportunity to play against him as a youngster and have that kind of success. Albeit it was only one game, but it was a pretty proud moment.

Bobby Smith

Center

Smith battled with Gretzky, and beat him, in the OHA scoring race during the 1977-78 season. He was the overall first pick, taken by Minnesota that spring, and played with the North Stars and Montreal, taking the Stanley Cup with the Habs in 1986. He also captured the Calder Memorial Trophy as rookie of the year in 1978-79. His best year in the NHL saw him notch 114 points (1981-82). Over his career, he came in at just a touch under one point per game, with 1,036 points in 1,037 games. After retiring, he served as the general manager in Phoenix and now owns the Halifax Mooseheads of the Quebec Major Junior Hockey League.

THE YEAR BEFORE my last year in Junior, I led the Ontario league with 65 goals [in 1976-77], and I was kind of prescheduled to go first overall 12 months later. I was over at a friend’s house, and some adult said, Oh, there’s a kid from my hometown who’s going to be playing in the Ontario League next year, and I kind of rolled my eyes and thought, Yeah, I’ll keep my eye open for him. How many times do you hear this?

The year that Wayne Gretzky played for the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds was my last year of Junior [1977-78]. He was a sixteen-year-old who burst onto the national scene, though of course people in the Toronto area knew who he was. I was nineteen, exactly three years older, which was a huge advantage at that point, and I actually beat him in the Ontario Hockey League scoring race, and I don’t think that anyone in the 35 years since then has equaled the point totals that Gretzky and I put up that year. The fact that he was ahead of me in the first half of the season and behind me in the second half of the season probably is why I got 192 points instead of 160.

The first time we went up to Sault Ste. Marie, the Greyhounds beat us, and I had a very good game, a very good road game, with a goal and two assists, and Gretzky had three goals and four assists, and I was just shocked with this kid. This was the first time I had seen him. I can’t say that I thought Gretzky’s skill set would translate into 200-point seasons in the NHL; nobody could do that. Still, it was shocking what a good hockey player this guy was.

He was not a big guy, but I remember the uncanny ability he had then that obviously translated into his record-breaking NHL career. I scored 1,000 points in the NHL, and Gretzky got—what?—2,000 and something. His scoring records are unfathomable. Two hundred points when 100 points made you a star. There were more 100-point players back then, but still, that does not take away from the totals that Gretzky put up. The fact that you had fabulous players with 120 points, and he had 215—the feats were amazing.

I do remember one time one of the coaches saying that if Gretzky really got lucky one night, if things fell into place for him, he could get 15 points. The scoring chances he generated, that he would create for his teammates—you could see that that was true. He had eight points some nights.

People don’t realize what a good skater Gretzky was. I remember we went to an event at the end of my rookie year [1978-79], the Canadian Superstars—there were soccer competitions and tennis and other things and a 100-yard, or -meter, dash. And there were professional soccer players and professional football players, and Gretzky [just finished with his WHA campaign] won the 100-meter dash. And I thought, Holy smokes, you’ve got to have explosive legs to beat the big professional athletes in other sports in the 100-meter dash. So it always made me laugh when people would denigrate Gretzky’s skating. He was a fabulous skater. And not only his ability—as I used to say—to skate figure eights in a phone booth, but he was fast as well. People talk about speed with Guy Lafleur and guys like that, but with Gretzky, he was a fabulous skater. His ability to get scoring chances for himself, and for his teammates, was unmatched in the history of the game.

As a counter [to that scoring ability], you paid extra attention to all the things that you usually talk about defensively. The general thought was that defensemen don’t pinch down; they might get a two-on-one. Against Edmonton it would be, "Never pinch down; we can’t give them a two-on-one. Third man try and stay high so they didn’t get three-on-two breaks became, Third man always stay high; we can’t give these guys a three-on-two." I think it was more the emphasis, rather than completely changing the way we played the game.

Another story I’ll tell you about him is that his first year in the NHL, he tied for the scoring lead with 137 points. And we were playing [against Edmonton] in Minnesota one night, and he came down, and we had strange nets in Minnesota that year, where the puck could go through the mesh, and it happened a few times during the year. And he came down and cut to his left, as he did so often, and fired a slapshot back across his body, and it went right through the net, and Gretzky was fading away to the point that he couldn’t see it. But I could see it, and it went right through the net. There was a player on Edmonton’s bench, Stan Weir, and he started yelling, The puck went right through the net.

Nothing happened, so truth be known, Gretzky scored 138 points that year. I just had the perfect view from the bench, as did Stan Weir from the Edmonton bench, and the puck went over the goalie’s glove and went right through the mesh, clean as could be, and play went on, and nobody noticed. It was 2-2, so the last thing I was going to say was, Hey, Mr. Referee, blow the whistle, that was a goal.

That mesh was just a millimeter too loose, and it cost Gretzky the scoring championship.

Jamie Hislop

Right Wing

Hislop competed with the WHA’s Cincinnati Stingers in the first year of Wayne Gretzky’s professional career. In fact, he played in Gretzky’s first game. After the WHA disbanded, Hislop found himself with Quebec before he moved to Calgary, where he felt the full fury of the Battle of Alberta. He was an assistant coach with the Flames during the mid-1990s.

MY CAREER WAS shortened by an eye injury, so I only played a bit against Gretzky when he was young, but I did play against him in the WHA his first year. I remember hearing about him earlier, going home in the summer as a college student at the University of New Hampshire before I turned pro, and then maybe in my first couple of years pro in Cincinnati, I remember hearing about this whiz kid. I remember the insert in the Toronto Star or whatever. I remember this kid from Brantford.

When he first came into the WHA, it was an exciting thing to happen to the league. What the league was looking for was just something to one-up the NHL, so when they landed Gretzky, that was a coup. As a player, I remember seeing this wiry, skinny young kid, probably wasn’t the prettiest of skaters, the most explosive or powerful skater, but you could tell that he had great hands, great hockey sense, great vision, all those things.

The last year of the WHA [1978-79], there were rumblings that there was going to be a merger and that certain teams would [go to the NHL]. I don’t think we really knew which ones, though it became gradually clearer as the season went along. As far as how Gretzky fit in, I don’t know if we knew if Edmonton was going to be one of the teams, but we kind of had a feeling that it was. Everybody was kind of excited that maybe the WHA and the NHL were going to merge and that some of the players would end up in the NHL, because as a kid, that’s your dream. But we were also playing in the WHA, which was a darned good league, and there was a little bit of sadness about it folding.

In those very early days [of Edmonton in the NHL], it was kind of like the WHA when [Gretzky] first came in. He was a skinny little kid, but I remember him being a pretty dominant player even then. He may not have put up the points that he put up later in his career, but he was still a really good player.

He was just so far ahead of everybody in terms of his vision, his creativity, and knowing where everybody else was on the ice. As the opposition, if you tried to really focus on Wayne and take him away, whether it was one guy, two guys, if you tried to check him tightly, he ended up dishing it off to his wingers, or off into open space so that his wingers could skate onto the puck, and he ended up maybe not scoring that night, but he had three assists. You’d wonder why he passed like he did, but also how he passed like he did. You’d marvel and wonder, How did he see that guy, or how did he get the puck to that guy? It might not have been right on his stick, though most of the time it was, but it was also to the space where he anticipated that player to go.

[In the early 1980s] there was a huge rivalry when Calgary and Edmonton were involved together. And back in those days, it was a true battle of Alberta. It was rough, tough hockey, and Edmonton definitely had the swagger, and they were led in that area by Glen [Sather]. Glen was a young coach, with a real good bunch of young kids, and they all had that swagger to them, just being young, and teenagers, and winning all the time. If they as a group got off the bus and were coming down the hall, you had that feeling that those young guys had that swagger, that they had a cockiness to them. It wasn’t arrogance; it was cockiness. Gretzky didn’t really have that image, though. But he was part of that group. But it was a good swagger, a good cockiness. They just knew they were good.

We always had plans drawn up as to how we were going to counter against Gretzky that night, whether it was one man assigned one night to do the best job he could, or whether it was the more zone-type coverage. We always tried to do something with Wayne. Obviously, you can’t let him go. Then there’d be times where it was like, Let’s take the body on Wayne, but whatever we tried, it never seemed to work. We would come up with a formulated plan, but if you were covering him too tight, he’d dish it off to his wingers, and if you were covering his wingers too tight, he’d do the scoring.

His special talents were his vision, his creativity, and his ability to see a couple of plays ahead. Whereas a guy like me, a normal, grinding-type Joe, you’re just kind of worried about what’s happening at that moment and you’re trying to deal with that, he’s thinking plays ahead. A guy like Jari Kurri, he could think with Wayne Gretzky. Gretzky would come in and delay on the entry, Paul Coffey’s jumping up ice, but the big thing was that Wayne just got it onto their stick, or he got it into that area where they would just skate right on it, and it was there for them.

I was coaching [in Calgary] with Dave King in ’93, and he did a tremendous job in preparing the players through tape and all that. He’d show power play setups, different plays coming down and different tendencies that [Gretzky] liked to do, but with Wayne, it was never one tendency. He would just find a way to get it done. I remember how hard he was to cover. If it was your job that night to cover Wayne, to line up and check Wayne, it was virtually impossible. You always kind of relished the challenge, and some nights you might have done it better than others, but a realistic goal was to limit him to maybe two points. It was pretty hard to keep him off the score sheet. If you kept him to one assist, you’d probably done your job pretty well.

Rick Dudley

Left Wing

Dudley began his pro career with the Buffalo Sabres, jumped (as people said then) to the WHA’s Cincinnati Stingers from 1975-79, then returned to Buffalo before briefly playing for the Winnipeg Jets, where he wore No. 99 for a time. As both a WHA and NHL player, he observed firsthand the young Gretzky. Later, Dudley was the director of the LA Kings pro scouting when Gretzky came to the team, and he has also served as coach, general manager, and in other capacities with Buffalo, Florida, Ottawa, Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, and the Atlanta Thrashers.

THE FIRST TIME I saw Gretzky play, I had heard of the young phenom, because a pundit in Toronto had said Wayne Gretzky could not play in the NHL. And so I was kind of looking forward to seeing him. They said it again while he was playing in the WHA, but I certainly formed a different opinion than that very quickly watching him play.

The first game we played against Indianapolis, I think he had three points. They were beautiful assists, but I can remember talking to some of the teammates, saying, Well, yeah, but he threw that puck blindly. [It seemed] he was just lucky. He just threw the puck to a space and somebody happened to be there. Nobody could do that naturally. Then a couple of more games went by, and he got three more points, so I remember saying, You know what? For a guy that’s just throwing the puck blindly, it ends up in the right place an awful lot. I remember after a while going, Oh my God, this guy actually can see that much. I played against Bobby Orr quite a bit, and watching Gretzky was something almost surreal. He could make those plays that no one else could.

I just remember those first days, after about the third game, I started to think how stupid my comments were after the first game against Gretzky. I was thinking, It happened three times tonight—he threw the puck, and it ended up three times on the tape of the player on his team, as opposed to sliding harmlessly into the corner. And after three games, you’re going, Oh, gee, that’s nine times now—that they’ve ended up scoring because he threw a puck that you didn’t think he could possibly know where the player was, and it ended up exactly where he wanted it to go, and so maybe it’s not a fluke.

I played against Gretzky quite a bit. A lot of times in Cincinnati, we would play our line, regardless of who I was playing with, against the top line on the other team. I played with a wonderful center. Robbie Ftorek was one of the best hockey players I ever played with. The reason we would have played against a line like Wayne’s was Robbie was brilliant. He was one of the most underrated players in the history of the game. He played much of his career in the WHA.

With [Gretzky] on the ice, you worried about everything. Here’s