Wayne Gretzky turns 64 today.
For people of a certain age, the Great One being on the cusp of senior citizenship is a frightening thought.
It shows that even Gretzky can’t outrun Father Time. There is a certain part of him that will be forever young. That is especially true for a collection of local men, also born in 1961, who grew up in the minor hockey vortex that he created.
Gretzky remains the best player ever, with perhaps a few dissenting voices thinking Parry Sound’s Bobby Orr deserves consideration.
“I remember that they used to call him the 'White Tornado' because he wore these white gloves,” remembered local man Rusty Hastings, who suited up for the Barrie novices that played against Gretzky’s team from Brantford at a tournament in Brockville.
In Brockville, Brantford won a squeaker, 5-4. It was Barrie’s first loss that season, having won 25 consecutive games before that fateful encounter.
Gretzky scored a hat trick. Well, of course he did.
As luck would have it, Barrie and Brantford never drew one another again — not that season, nor the subsequent ones while Gretzky remained in minor hockey. Part of not crossing paths again was because Gretzky left early to play junior hockey.
That is not to say that the two groups of boys didn’t see each other. A lot.
They often played in the same competitions, including the famed Quebec Peewee Tournament, just never again against one another. One year at a tournament in Burlington, the teams were in adjacent rooms and briefly hung out together.
“I asked him, I said, ‘Wayne, how did you get so good?’” remembers Irv Johnston, who still lives in town. “He said, ‘I have a rink in my backyard.'”
The anecdote has been widely told from Gretzky’s perspective, how Walter Gretzky, sensing something special in his eldest son, filled in the family swimming pool to make a sheet of ice.
Johnston looked at the story from his own and a local perspective: “I thought to myself, ‘Hold on a minute, I play every day at MacMorrison Park’s rink (in north-end Barrie) and I’m never going to be that good.'”
It was not unusual for Barrie to produce good hockey teams that fared well against those from bigger communities around Ontario. Johnston and Hastings' group was led from the beginning by Doug Shedden, who would later go on to play in the National Hockey League, and, in and odd bit of symmetry, was teammates with Mario Lemieux in Pittsburgh.
The squad played in the first game at Eastview Arena. David Mayor scored the first goal. Doug Lougheed took the first penalty. They thumped a team from Toronto, Eringate, 7-2.
Aside from Shedden, Dave Miles had perhaps the most prolonged perspective of Gretzky because he later played in the Ontario Hockey League for the Brantford Alexanders and was drafted by the Detroit Red Wings. It was not unusual to see Gretzky in his hometown before training camps would open as summer wound down.
Miles recalls sharing a sheet of ice one day.
“There we were, passing the puck back and forth, just the two of us,” remembers Miles, who now lives in Florida. “We were the only two guys on the ice.”
Miles and Gretzky were 17. Miles was preparing for his first OHL season, while Gretzky was about to turn pro with Indianapolis of the World Hockey Association.
“I remember I would watch him do these things with the puck,” says Miles. “He’d go behind the net and do all this stuff. I was thinking to myself, ‘I could never even (attempt) that.’”
Miles, who assisted on Mayor’s first goal ever scored at Eastview, helped Gretzky in other ways: he drove him home.
“I had a car, he didn’t,” recalls Miles. “I remember he used to like to stop at Wendy’s on the way home … there we were, sitting in the Wendy’s parking lot eating a Frosty, me with Wayne Gretzky.”
Gretzky, infamously perhaps, bypassed the NHL Draft and ended up the property of Edmonton a year later, in a crafty bit of dealing by the pre-NHL Oilers and Peter Pocklington, who would sell him to Los Angeles about a decade later.
The 1980 draft class, of which Shedden was part of and Gretzky was excluded, had future Hall of Fame defencemen Paul Coffey and Larry Murphy taken near the top. But as Toronto-area kids, Coffey and Murphy didn’t play much in smaller centres. Gretzky did, and when he rolled into the next town he was the star attraction, all, ahem, 99 pounds of him.
“I still remember how they’d make sure he played in the biggest rink,” says Johnston.
Shedden was part a small group of players with local and regional connections that later played against him in the NHL. It included the likes of Steve Larmer in Peterborough, Jamie Macoun in Newmarket, Basil McRae in Beaverton and Bernie Nicholls from Haliburton. Goaltender Rick Laferriere was not from this area, but later moved to Barrie after his career ended and still lives locally.
“I remember (thinking) when we’d see other players, especially in the smaller centres,” recalls Hastings, who returned to the Oro minor hockey system after two years once that community’s arena was rebuilt.
“It was a (tough comparison) with this Wayne Gretzky guy.”
Hastings' comment, half in jest, is interesting in other ways, Though he didn’t mention Nicholls specifically, the Haliburton native’s NHL career was starting to flatline a bit before he was traded to L.A. He landed on a line with Gretzky — 70 goals and 80 assists followed the first season.
“Tough not to get better playing with that guy every day,” quips Miles, not referring to Nicholls but to the group of 1961-born Brantford kids who grew up riding shotgun with the Great One, most notably future NHL goaltender Greg Stefan.
Gretzky and his team were the gold standard, but they didn't win every game. One year at a tournament in Peterborough, Newmarket beat Brantford, giving Robert Schmidt a claim almost no one can say — he stopped Wayne Gretzky.
“I tell my son, my claim to fame is that Wayne Gretzky never scored on me,” Schmidt says of his team’s 4-2 win over Brantford in the semifinals in Peterborough.
“There was a big hoopla,” says Schmidt, more than a half-century later.
Schmidt later attended Georgian College and remains friends with Johnston and Miles.
Barrie, by the way, beat Schmidt’s team in the playoffs later that same season.
“I haven’t read the book, but I have heard that (Gretzky) mentioned (us)," he adds.
Newmarket later lost to the Larmer-led Peterborough hosts in the tournament final, but looking back is especially interesting for a few reasons. Macoun and Gretzky would later oppose each other in some legendary Battle of Alberta tilts when he played for the Calgary Flames. Macoun was also a member of the Toronto Maple Leafs in 1993 when Gretzky torched them in Game 7 of the conference semifinals.
The Leafs have never come as close to the Stanley Cup in the 32 years since and Gretzky has called it his "best game."
Historical achievements made Gretzky great, but the fleeting encounters as young boys are one of the reasons for his enduring greatness.
These boys are now all men, and if you’ll excuse the expression, old men. One such gentleman consulted for this story had two senior moments in and around speaking to us — he left the stove on after cooking himself dinner, then left his laptop at airport security when he was catching a flight the next day.
Another recently had a hip replaced.
Age defeats everyone, eventually.
But memories? Those last forever.