Drilling away kids’ creativity
Gretzky part of film that takes aim at youth-sports culture
It’s one of hockey’s eternal nature-versus-nurture debates. Was Wayne Gretzky, the immortal Great One, brought into this world with divinely granted talents and a thirst for the game that made him predestined to become a record-book-owning marvel? Or was No. 99 the expertly made creation of a stage parent of a mad scientist — his famous father, Walter — who surely didn’t go a winter’s day without seeing to it young Wayne completed his daily allotment of drill work around those bleach-bottle pylons on that legendary Brantford backyard?
In one of the fascinating nuances of the new documentary film In Search of Greatness, Wayne Gretzky himself adds some narrative heft to both versions of his origin story. At one point in the film, which features Gretzky alongside athletic legends Pele and Jerry Rice lending voice to a thoughtful treatise against the suffocating structure of the prevailing version of childhood, Gretzky insists nobody ever forced him to practice.
“I’d be out there all day long because I loved it,” he says.
At another juncture, mind you, the Great One concedes that — just like there’d be no Tiger Woods without a hard-driving father named Earl; no Serena and Venus Williams without a coach-dad named Richard — there’d be no Great One without Walter.
“He made me the athlete I was. He was smart enough to realize, for whatever reason, that I had a gift. And he pushed that gift to another level,”
Wayne says. “If you sat down and interviewed my dad, he’d tell you he can make another Wayne Gretzky.”
The notion, real or imagined, that an athletic genius can be “made” explains the parental urge that’s helped spawn the modern youth-sports industry that Gretzky rails against in In Search of Greatness, which hits theatres Friday. You know the oft-cited problems of the moment. Kids are overscheduled. Their teams are over-coached. The drills are too militaristic. Parents and other overseers ruin everything by prioritizing the wrong things — early specialization and winning, to name a couple. So some of the key qualities that made Gretzky and Pele truly great — their convention-defying creativity, for one — are never allowed to germinate in today’s youngsters. To put it simply, thanks to the money at the top of the food chain, sports just aren’t fun enough anymore.
Gifted or not, born to a parent bent on living vicariously through them or otherwise, today’s kids don’t stand a chance of becoming the next immortal. The immortals, after all, didn’t spend their youths working towards scholarships or playing a 12-month hockey grind. Long before they got paid, they played, for the pure joy of it.
“If you take 10 kids to a pond today and said to them, ‘Go play,’ they’d say, ‘What do we do?’ Because they’re all so structured now. And it’s so analytical now,” Gretzky says in the film. “We’ve lost our creativity and imagination that we used to have in the ’60s and ’70s and ’80s.”
This isn’t the first time Gretzky has lamented the diminishment of his sport at the hands of systems-driven coaches and too-regimented youth leagues, but here his long-standing arguments about the devolution of the national winter sport are backed up with heavy intellectual artillery. Thought leaders David Epstein and Sir Ken Robinson, who’ve both written popular books on the building blocks of greatness, sporting and otherwise, reinforce Gretzky’s familiar criticisms with their own sciencebased lines of reasoning on topics ranging from coaching to philosophy to what it means to be a happy human being. There are appearances by rule-breaking musicians such as David Bowie and The Beatles because the film, said director Gabe Polsky, is about mental health as much as it’s about anything. Asking kids to be robots is a route to misery.
Polsky, who directed 2013’s excellent Red Army, about the first wave of Russian hockey greats to migrate to the NHL, has personal experience in the soul-crushing repression of on-ice creativity. A minorhockey standout in the Chicago area as a kid, he rose to achieve what many young athletes would consider a dream, playing at NCAA Division 1 Yale University beginning in 1999. At Yale, though, Polsky says he was relegated to the bench by a systems-driven coach who saw his offensive talent as a defensive liability. The scars linger.
“If you were creative, you were punished for it, basically,” Polsky said in a phone interview last week. “It was probably the most painful thing in my life. And look, a lot of people have a lot worse lives. They don’t have food. They don’t have many things. I understand and appreciate that. But this was spiritually debilitating, my experience playing at Yale. It was debilitating. If you know you can contribute in a major way and you have talent to express and put to use and you’ve worked hard at doing that, and then you’re just not able to do that, there’s no worse feeling.”
There’s a case made in the movie that today’s conventions prioritize the wrong things while ignoring the lessons contained in the stories of Gretzky and Pele and so many greats, who didn’t fit anyone’s prototype. Pre-draft combines, for instance, rank players in things such as bench-pressing and vertical leap because those qualities are measurable, not because they’re integral. Rice, the great NFL receiver, points out that, as a specimen, he wasn’t much of one. Ditto Gretzky.
“If they had me in the hockey combine, I’d probably be rated as the lowest. Because I couldn’t bench 195 (pounds) once,” Gretzky says. “And sometimes we read way too much into this stuff.”
So while Gretzky concedes that today’s players are superior athletes to those of his generation, he’s hardly convinced they’ve made advancements in the spaces that made him a peerless force.
“They’re bigger, stronger, better … doesn’t make ’em smarter,” Gretzky says with a smile.
For Polsky, that’s the crux of the argument.
“Here’s the thing — if 99 per cent of people were to design the perfect hockey player, I would guarantee you the farthest person from that would be Wayne Gretzky,” Polsky said. “He’s the antithesis of what a hockey player should be. And that says something — that greatness is not what you think. It’s always going to take different forms. The moment you try and make greatness into a formula is the moment you lose.”
Which brings us back to the question: If Walter Gretzky truly believes he could engi- neer another Great One if given the chance — and Wayne points out that after leaving his father’s tutelage he was “lucky” to be mentored by Glen Sather and flanked by a long list of Hall of Fame-bound teammates that also helped explain his ultimate dominance — why didn’t Wayne’s younger hockey-playing brothers, Keith and Brent, come to rival their elder sibling’s legacy?
“Not quite as motivated. They loved it, but not quite like I did. They did everything I did, except maybe didn’t do it as much,” Gretzky says in the film. “And then the other thing they had to deal with that I didn’t was the pressures of being Wayne Gretzky’s brother.”
As for the pressures of being the Great One, Gretzky has been living with those for most of a lifetime. The truth is he was born and made, self-driven and prodded. But the ultimate lament of In Search of Greatness is that the very conditions for his creation have mostly ceased to exist. We’ll have to make do watching future Good Ones in lieu.
The film, said director Gabe Polsky, is about mental health as much as it’s about anything. Asking kids to be robots is a route to misery