From hell to the Hall
Wickenheiser’s nose, foot, wrist were broken, but never her spirit
The story of Hayley Wickenheiser’s journey to the Hockey Hall of Fame has been told so many times, it’s more than familiar. Though she’s only 40, the greatest woman to ever play the game grew up at a time when her hometown of Shaunavon, Sask. — like most Canadian centres of the day — didn’t see a market for organized girls’ hockey.
Until she was about 13, her only option was to play among the boys. And neither the boys nor their parents were always welcoming. When she wasn’t hiding in washrooms to avoid dressing-room mingling, or obscuring her long hair to hide her gender, her mother was demanding she be allowed to participate at the next hockey school.
“I just went through hell, really, to play,” Wickenheiser once said.
Perhaps one of the reasons she received the nod this week from the shrine at Yonge and Front — in a slamdunk of an induction that was Gretzky-esque minus the waived three-year waiting period — came down less to what she was forced to endure and more to what she’s chosen to bear. If Wickenheiser at times made the game look easy, scoring a remarkable 379 points in 276 games for Canada, a record that’ll be safe for years, she could never be accused of travelling the path of minimal resistance.
This week, to that point, she missed Tuesday’s call from hall chair Lanny McDonald because she was taking a practical exam at the University of Calgary medical school — just one of
the things she does when she’s not working for the Maple Leafs in their player development department, where she was occupied Thursday as an on-ice coach at the team’s annual development camp.
And during her playing career, it said something about her makeup that, for a handful of winters in the 2000s, she set her mind to the idea of competing against the boys. As a girl, she was forced to go into it. As a woman, she chose it, showing up at a couple of Philadelphia Flyers rookie camps and playing among male professionals in both Finland and Sweden, this after some upstanding sporting bureaucrats in Italy ruled her ineligible to compete amongst their men, possibly because she would have embarrassed them.
“A lot of people thought it was a publicity stunt. But for me it was just purely about getting better and always chasing the next level,” Wickenheiser said Thursday, speaking of her time in Finland. “I wanted to always play at the highest level that I could, and I felt that in the women’s game — first thing, we didn’t play enough games. And I didn’t think I was going to get better playing 25, 30 games a year. I wanted to play a full season and I wanted to go through a season where I was going to have highs and lows. (I wanted) to go to a place where I wouldn’t be the best player, but I’d have a chance to play a lot if I played good, and where I would be treated fairly and have a chance to maybe win. So that’s what happened when I went to Finland the first year. We won the (third) division to move up.”
Nobody is saying women need to play among men to be proven worthy competitors; they don’t. If Wickenheiser didn’t, she would have still been great. But Wickenheiser was of the mind that, if she didn’t, she’d be missing an opportunity to get even better. And the calculation wasn’t exactly easy. Peers didn’t universally support her; some were of the mind she could have better spent her time growing the women’s pro game in North America.
And the boys, in adulthood as in childhood, didn’t roll out a red carpet. “I remember my first practice, (the coach) sent a six-foot-four defenceman out to chase me every drill. Two weeks later he apologized to me,” she said. “He said he wanted the media to see I could handle the hitting. You know, I was tested all the time. … I knew there was always somebody out to get me, so to speak, so it elevated my game.”
Not that there weren’t low moments in her season among the jockstraps in Finland.
“You go to the rink, it’s dark. You come out of the rink, it’s dark. It’s Finland. I was essentially by myself,” she said. “Initially, Finns are very quiet and reserved people. So it took a long time to get to know my teammates. … I played the whole season with a guy — I thought he didn’t speak English. And then we won, and he turns to me, and he spoke perfect English. That was the experience. They were just shy. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to talk to me. He just didn’t know what to say.”
The game speaks, and in Wickenheiser’s first among men in Finland — wearing a visor instead of the full cage — she took a stick across the bridge of her nose. The nose broke. But Wickenheiser never did. “Many times my mom would say to me, ‘Are you sure you want to keep playing? This is kind of hard,’ ” Wickenheiser said. “And I always wanted to.”
Enduring pain, and playing beautifully despite it, is a career through line. She competed in Sochi, as a member of the team that pulled off one of the great comebacks in history, with a broken foot. In Turin, in 2006, she came home with a gold medal and a tournament MVP trophy despite a broken wrist. When she announced her retirement in 2017 she had in her possession four Olympic golds. But speaking of the value of enduring pain, she said Thursday that it’s a particular 1998 Olympic silver that left a lasting mark.
“I think what really shaped my career was maybe the loss in Nagano,” she said. “It was a feeling I never wanted to have again. So I set my sights, and I think the rest of my teammates,’ on trying to never stand on the blue line again with a silver.” Knowing what we know about her now, who’s surprised she never did again at a Games.