GET OVER IT, CANADA
How the 1988 trade that broke Canada’s heart saved its game
A LOOK BACK TO FIND THE SILVER LININGS OF MOMENTOUS EVENTS IN CANADIAN HISTORY THAT WE HAD LONG DECREED AS DISASTERS.
As Canada celebrates its 150th birthday this year, we take a new look at some of the past events and Canadianisms that our collective conscious has decreed as disasters — and find the surprising upsides
He promised “Mess” he wouldn’t cry. But there was Wayne Gretzky, blond, young and perfect, dabbing away tears at Edmonton’s historic Molson House brewery. Thanking Oilers fans and struggling to find the right words before falling into silence, a heartbreaking quiet broken by the assembled media who filled the void with applause. They clapped in thanks as we all cried — August 9, 1988 — the day Wayne Gretzky, the greatest hockey player ever, was sold to some crook in Los Angeles ( Kings owner, Bruce McNall) for a huge pile of cash (US$15 million) and some draft picks by a Canadian millionaire (Oilers owner, Peter Pocklington) with money problems.
If Wayne Gretzky could be traded, no player was safe, and Canada’s game, at the highest level, was precisely what hockey fans feared it to be: a business, cold, cruel and emotionless. It can be difficult after all these years — Gretzky retired in 1999 — to put Gretzky’s genius as a player during his Edmonton days into words. To see it was to feel it — an electric current pulsing through the arena, with a sense of anticipation that every time Gretzky touched the puck something magical was about to happen.
The Trade, meanwhile, had all the elements of a Shakespearean tragedy: the prince ( Wayne); an alluring beauty awaiting him in L.A. (actress Janet Jones); filthy lucre changing hands; and a cold-whipped Canadian city getting stabbed in the back by a couple of greedy kings. It was awful.
On some level, it still hurts. But if we can allow ourselves to see past the tears, it is clear that the great betrayal was the greatest thing that could have happened to hockey.
By leaving Edmonton, Gretzky rescued the game from its parochialism, from its all-too-loving and smothering Canadian birthplace, where hockey — our game — could never fully achieve the purest expression of itself. If there is no trade, there is no Sidney Crosby leaping with glee after dispatching the Americans in the gold medal game at the 2010 Winter Olympics.
If there is no trade, there is no deification of Mark Messier as the quintessential hockey captain — the leader who was able to win in Edmonton without Wayne Gretzky — and win again with the New York Rangers in 1994, snapping the franchise’s 53- year championship drought. There would have been no NHL expansion into the sunbelt States. Without expansion — from 21 to now 31 teams — there is no NHL employment boom, and no insatiable global hunt for top-tier hockey talent, a search that triggered a gold rush of Europe’s hockey elite onto NHL rosters, adding an international flavour to a league that was once almost exclusively Canadian, for better and worse.
As much as The Trade was an end, it was the start of something new, something greater than before.
A memory: I am 12-yearsold. The Oilers are playing the Leafs at Maple Leaf Gardens. It is a blowout. I sneak down to the front-row seats with a buddy. We press our faces against the glass as the third period ticks away, to see Gretzky up close. One side of his sweater is tucked into his pants. His hair is shaggy. He scores, lifts his arms in celebration and spins into the embrace of his teammates — as the supposedly hostile crowd goes bananas for him.
That ability to win over admirers in other teams’ rinks while challenging the traditional conventions of the game — even the image of what a hockey player looked like ( blond, skinny and Bambi-legged?) — was what Gretzky brought to L.A. in 1988. The Kings were terrible, an afterthought in a star- studded town. With Gretzky, they became a sellout attraction. With Gretzky, hockey blossomed in Califor- nia. (Auston Matthews, the Leafs wunderkind, is California-born, Arizona-raised). Even the former president Ronald Reagan and his devoted wife, Nancy, had Kings tickets. In 1993, L. A. made the finals — after a Gretzky hat trick sank Toronto in the semis — and lost to Montreal. But. Still.
Change, indeed, came at a price. Winnipeg would lose the Jets to Phoenix — where Gretzky became a coach and part owner — before returning, by way of Atlanta. Quebec lost the Nordiques, possibly for good. This, too, was the Gretzky effect, amplified by a seriously impaired Canadian dollar in an era of rapidly ballooning NHL player salaries paid in U. S. dollars. But the take-away was thus: if hockey could shine in cynical L.A. it could make it anywhere, including, for example, Nashville, Tenn., home to 2017 Stanley Cup finalists and the biggest hockey street parties ever seen in an American NHL city.
June 21, 2017, Las Vegas, Nev. Gretzky, now 56, is tasked with handing out the NHL’s most valuable player award. He is tanned, not so skinny anymore, shaggy- haired and passing the Hart Trophy to Connor McDavid, the 20- year- old captain of a dynamic, young Oilers team. It is the plot twist to the old Shakespearean tragedy: there is hope anew in Edmonton. Gretzky is back working with the Oilers. McDavid has arrived. Anything is possible.
And hockey is still Canada’s game. This we know, only we share it now with the world, and are all the better for it.