Goodbye to Gretzky

I grew up idolizing Canada's greatest athlete. Now he seems to be turning his back on his country.

- By James Jackson

I WAS BORN just weeks before the start of the 1985-86 NHL season. It was the height of Wayne Gretzky’s decade-long domination of the game, when his skill and prowess on the ice seemed superhuman. For eight years running, from 1980 to 1987, he was awarded the Hart trophy as the NHL’s most valuable player. From ’81 to ’87, he was the league’s leading scorer. It was never a question of whether Gretzky would score on any given night—only how often.

Growing up as a hockey fan in Caledon, Ontario, I knew I had to be the first to shout “I’m Gretzky!” when playing pond hockey with friends. I knew how controversial it was to leave him on the bench during the 1998 Nagano Olympics. And I knew that I was watching history unfold on the April afternoon in 1999 when he played his final game, against the Pittsburgh Penguins. I was watching on TV in a local barbershop when Gretzky scored his 2,857th point—an assist—further cementing a points-scoring record that still stands. I'll never forget the sight of him skating around the ice after the game, waving goodbye in his sweat-soaked Rangers jersey, tears streaming down his face. I was glued to the screen, even as my barber kept trying to turn my head back toward the mirror.

It’s hard to convey just how impressive Gretzky’s career was. He set dozens of NHL records, and some of them—like most career points, most points in a single season or scoring 50 goals in 39 games—may never be broken. But one is likely to be surpassed this spring: his 894 career goals. Over the past few months, the NHL dedicated a nearly obsessive level of coverage to Washington Capitals forward Alexander Ovechkin, the player poised to eclipse that number. Every time Oviscored, the league quickly uploaded a highlight of the goal on a webpage with the heading “The GR8 Chase” (a play on both Gretzky's “Great One” nickname and Ovechkin’s No. 8).