Gretzky statue has celebrities on Cup

Maybe you’ve heard about that Texan, Brad Oldham, the sculptor who was hired to produce a statue of The Great One holding up the Stanley Cup, for the opening of the Wayne Gretzky Sports Centre in Brantford, a couple of months ago.

Everyone’s up in arms since a sharp-eyed 12-year-old lad looked closely at the Cup the other day and saw that some of the things carved in it were clearly wrong, including Wayne “Gretzsky” playing for the 1998-99 Stanley Cup-winning Detroit Red Wings.

Now, it’s bad enough that a statue in his own hometown has the spelling of his last name wrong, but everyone knows Gretzky was playing for Dallas that year, when Ken Hitchcock’s team won the Cup, and to this day Gretzky is reviled in Buffalo because he had one foot in the crease when he scored the winning goal.

But it’s time to put an end to all the caterwauling about the other inscriptions on the bronze Stanley Cup, which the artist says were put there by “a studio employee” who didn’t think anyone would actually read the names.

For example, I actually covered the 2002-03 Edmonton Oilers team that’s on there for having won the Cup, and can vouch for the presence on the roster of players like Ralph Waldo Emerson — what a pain in the butt, always making these deep observations about Life — and Oscar Wilde, the dressing room wit.

More like halfwit, Rocky Balboa used to say, but then, he took one too many hits to the melon. Nobody ever did a baseline test on him.

“He had a brain scan once, and it came back negative,” Wilde said, but most of Oscar’s best lines went right over Balboa’s head.

Good stay-at-home defenceman, though. Oprah Winfrey, the big power forward, and clever little Robert Frost from San Francisco were on the team, too, and so was the offensively gifted (mostly offensive) Kanye West, though he never seemed to shut up about himself.

“You may be talented, but you’re not Kanye West,” he told Frost one day, after Bobby scored three against the Penguins.

“My greatest pain in life is that I will never be able to see myself perform live.”

Emily Dickinson was the chair of the 37-member ownership group, so she would come in sometimes and elbow Craig MacTavish out of the way to make the pre-game speeches, almost like poetry some of them, and that’s how she got her name on the Cup.

Muddy Waters? He was called up from the farm team in Mississippi for the playoff run after Bill Gates got hurt, and was a popular guy on long plane rides, playing guitar and singing the blues — the boys especially liked Got My Mojo Workin’, though more than a few were partial to Champagne & Reefer (and I don’t mean the song, haha).

It’s a little-known fact, that the scribes used to fly on the team charters, so it happened that this one trip to Boston, I was sitting right behind Emily Dickinson and with a bunch of the players across the aisle and in the row behind me.

And they started up, as usual, with some great pronouncement by Emerson, who was looking forward to the trip because he was from Boston.

Wilde was never happy when he was flying to the States.

“America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between,” he said.