Wayne Gretzky (yes, really) belongs in our national dialogue
Early in the week, before many Americans realized they had awakened in the middle of a Stephen King novel, Anthony Fauci was talking in Washington about COVID-19 and about the only way to beat it.
The eminent immunologist didn’t phrase his remarks in those precise terms, but it was noteworthy that in the midst of what was inescapably a complex explanation of an urgent health issue in the dusted-off White House Briefing Room, Fauci invoked the iconic imagery of sports, and thus there was no misinterpreting the doctor’s intent.
I have no insight as to Fauci’s sports background, if any, nor even of his fandom, if any, except to say that he was born in Brooklyn (probably in the shadow of Ebbets Field, which is where everyone from Brooklyn seems to have grown up). But it was fascinating that one of the most-cited researchers in the field of immunopathogenesis and the co-author of such beach reading as “The challenge of emerging and re -emerging infectious diseases,” would, as a point of emphasis in his presentation, turn to hockey.
On Tuesday of this week, Fauci went to the podium in front of a fresh lineup of administration bobbleheads and said this:
“What I want to talk to you about today, just for a moment or two, is that we would like the country to realize that as a nation, we can’t be doing the kinds of things we were doing a few months ago. That it doesn’t matter if you’re in a state that has no cases or one case. You have to start taking seriously what you can do now that if the infections do come and they will come, sorry to say, sad to say, they will, but when you’re dealing with an infectious disease, you always have that metaphor that people talk about,
that Wayne Gretzky — he doesn’t go where the puck is, he’s going to where the puck is going to be.
“We want to be where the infection is going to be as well as where it is.”
Forty-eight hours later, the infection was going here, there, everywhere, but hockey itself was gone. The National Hockey League paused its season, chasing the NBA, the colleges, and all manner of additional sports entities. Those entities, led by the NBA, all acted more decisively and prudently than any of the flailing agencies in Washington, but in the jarring atmospheric drop in sports talk, is was if The Great One himself was left to skate alone in the empty arena of the mind. Or something.
The quality in No. 99 that Fauci was referencing and the one for which Gretzky was most widely appreciated was his anticipation, a quality on a level not seen before or since, a quality that has itself been studied scientifically.
Gretzky retired in 1999 with essentially this statistical profile: If you took away all of his goals (and there were an all-time record 894 of ’em), he would still be the all-time leading scorer by virtue of his 1,963 assists. Jaromir Jagr, No. 2 on the all-time scoring list, had 1,921 points. No wonder that decades after his retirement, Gretzky was still inspiring authors like Vivek Ranadive and Kevin Maney to publish “The TwoSecond Advantage: How we succeed by anticipating the future — just enough.”
Gretzky’s monstrous aptitudes in this area are mostly the stuff of Canadian folklore, of his father explaining to him the precognitive habits of the “smart” hockey player, and of a young Wayne’s slavish devotion to cultivating the principles of anticipation, driven by the realities of his modest size in early games against older and much bigger players.
But Ranadive and Maney, among others, folded that lore into neuroscience, by explaining that experiences (practice) produce neurons of encoded information and that repeating the experiences in response to the same stimulus wire the encoded neurons together. As the connections build up, information travels faster in the brain because it “can access a whole collection of information instantly,” resulting in “a complex, sophisticated mental model that assesses a situation in a flash, without having to access all the details stored deep in every memory.”
Dr. Fauci was saying that’s where we need to be, and he said it in the full and apparent knowledge that we are, right now, on the other side of it, the fear side, the side former NHL goalie Mike Liut once described ruefully like this: “I’d see him come down the ice and immediately start thinking, ‘What don’t I see that Wayne’s seeing right now?’”
This is why Fauci chose Gretzky, both for the anticipatory brilliance and for the abject fear of its absence. We’re all chasing the puck and we are nowhere near our Gretzky moment; we have no idea where it’s going.