Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (17 page)

I maintained silence through the “Queen” and allowed myself but one chop at Frog Larocque's goal pads, then set up. Orr and I were like reflections, he standing solid and staring up at the clock from one corner, me doing the same at the other, both looking at time, both thinking of each other. We were the only ones in the arena, the crowd's noise simply the casing in which we would move, the other players simply the setting to force the crowd's focus to us. Gus Demers had advised me to level Orr early, to establish myself. Coach Therrien wanted me to wait for Orr, keep him guessing. I ignored them all. They weren't involved. Just Orr and me.

His style had changed little since bantam. Where all the other players seemed bent over, concentrating on something taking place below them, Orr still seemed to be sitting at a table as he played, eyes as alert as a poker player, not interested in his own hands or feet or where the object of the game was. I was fascinated by him and studied him intently during the five minutes I sat in the penalty box for spearing some four-eyed whiner in the first period. What made Orr effective was that he had somehow shifted the main matter of the game from the puck to him. By anticipating, he had our centres looking for him, not their wingers, and passes were directed away from him, not to someone on our team. By doing this, and by knowing this himself, he had assumed control of the Hardrocks as well as the Generals.

I stood at the penalty box door yanking while the timekeeper held for the final seconds. I had seen how to deal with Orr. If the
object of the game had become him, not the puck, I would simply put Orr through his own net.

We got a penalty advantage toward the end of the period and coach sent me out to set up the power play. I was to play centre point, ready to drop quickly in toward the net rather than remaining in the usual point position along the boards and waiting for a long shot and tip-in. Therrien had devised this play, I knew, from watching Orr, though he maintained it was his own invention. I never argued. I never even spoke. I was equipment, not player, and in that way I was dependable, predictable, certain.

Torchy's play, at centre, was to shoulder the Oshawa centre out of the faceoff circle while Chancey, playing drop-back left wing, fed the puck back to me, breaking in. A basketball play, really, with me fast-breaking and Torchy pic-ing. The crowd was screaming but I couldn't hear. I was listening for Orr, hoping he might say something that would show me his flaw, hoping he might show involvement rather than disdain. But he said nothing. He stared up at the clock for escape, the numbers meaningless, the score irrelevant. He stood, stick over pads, parallel to the ice, back also parallel, eyes now staring through the scars of the ice for what might have been his own reflection. Just like me, once removed from the crowd's game, lost in his own contest.

The puck dropped and Torchy drove his shoulder so hard into the Generals' centre I heard the grunt from the blueline. Chancey was tripped as he went for the puck, but swept it as he fell. I took it on my left skate blade, kicking it forward to my stick, slowing it, timing it, raising back for a low, hard slapper from just between the circles. I could sense Orr. Not see him. I was concentrating on the puck. But I could sense him the way you know when someone is staring at you from behind. I raised the stick higher, determined to put the shot right through the bastard if necessary. I heard him go down, saw the blond brushcut spinning just outside the puck as he slid toward me, turning his pads to catch the shot. His eyes were wide open as his head passed the puck; he stared straight at
it, though it could, if I shot now, rip his face right off the skull. He did not flinch; he did not even blink. He stared the way a poker player might while saying he'll hold. Orr knew precisely what my timing was before I myself knew. I saw him spin past, knew what he was doing, but could not stop; my shot crunched into his pads and away, harmlessly.

The centre Torchy had hit dove toward the puck and it bounced back at me, off my toe and up along the ankle, rolling like a ball in a magician's trick. I kicked but could not stop it. The puck trickled and suddenly was gone. I turned, practically falling. It was Orr! Somehow he'd regained his footing even faster than I and was racing off in that odd sitting motion toward our net.

I gave chase, now suddenly aware of the crowd. Their noise seemed to break through an outer, protective eardrum. There were no words, but I was suddenly filled with insult as the screams tore through me, ridiculing. It seemed instant, this change from silently raising the stick for the certain goal, the sense that I was gliding on air, suspended, controlling even the breath of this ignorant crowd. Now there was no sense of gliding or silence or control. I was flailing, chopping at a short sixteen-year-old who seemed completely oblivious to the fact that Batterinski was coming for him.

I felt my left blade slip and my legs stutter. I saw him slipping farther and farther out of reach, my strides choppy and ineffective, his brief, effortless and amazingly successful. I swung with my stick at his back, causing the noise to rise. I dug in but he was gone, a silent, blond brushcut out for a skate in an empty arena.

I dove, but it was no use. My swinging stick rattled off his ankle guards and I turned in my spill in time to see the referee's hand raise for a delayed penalty. I was already caught so I figured I might as well make it worthwhile. I regained my feet and rose just as Orr came in on Larocque, did something with his stick and shoulder that turned Frog into a life-size cardboard poster of a goaltender, and neatly tucked the puck into the corner of the net.

The crowd roared, four thousand jack-in-the-boxes suddenly sprung, all of them laughing at me. Orr raised his hands in salute and turned, just as I hit him.

It was quiet again, quiet as quickly as the noise had first burst through. I felt him against me, shorter but probably as solid. I smelled him, not skunky the way I got myself, but the smell of Juicy Fruit chewing gum. I gathered him in my arms, both of us motionless but for the soar of our skates, and I aimed him carefully and deliberately straight through the boards at the goal judge.

Orr did not even bother to look at me. It was like the theory you read about car accidents, that the best thing you can do is relax. Orr rode in my arms contentedly, acceptingly, neither angry, nor afraid, nor surprised. We moved slowly, deliberately, together. I could see the goal judge leaping, open-mouthed, back from the boards, bouncing off his cage like a gorilla being attacked by another with a chain. I saw his coffee burst through the air as we hit, the grey-brown circles slowly rising up and away and straight into his khaki coat. The boards gave; they seemed to give forever, folding back toward the goal judge, then groaning, then snapping us out and down in a heap as the referee's whistle shrieked in praise.

I landed happy, my knee rising into his leg as hard as I could manage, the soft grunt of expelled air telling me I had finally made contact with the only person in the building who would truly understand.

This excerpt from
The Last Season,
my 1983 novel on hockey, was based on several true incidents. I had played against Bobby Orr, so knew firsthand that experience on the ice—though at a younger age than junior hockey. And the “Billings” incident was drawn from an actual experience when I was playing juvenile hockey and a bench-clearing brawl broke out in Bracebridge, Ontario requiring an ambulance to deal with an injured player and a police escort to get our team out of town. As much of the book is set in Finland, I was fortunate enough to travel to that
country in 1981 as a member of the Toronto Maple Leaves, a recreational team that played several exhibition matches against rec teams in various Finnish centres
. The Last Season
has had a curious life. It was published to wonderful reviews but did not sell well. It may be that the publisher, Macmillan, brought it out on the same day as their other big hockey book of the year, Ken Dryden's
The Game,
which set an all-time bestselling record well in excess of 100,000 copies
. The Last Season,
which was paired with the Dryden book in Macmillan publicity, sold about 1 per cent that amount. It was republished in paperback several times and, in 1987, was made into a three-hour made-for-television movie by CBC. The film was directed by Alan King and starred Booth Savage as Felix Batterinski. Savage won the Gemini that year as the country's best actor. Professional hockey players who have read it love it to a point where at least two have claimed that I modelled Felix on them, and several critics have called it the best novel ever written on the game. Whether it is or not will always be debatable, but it's a great honour even to be considered
.

STARS

DETROIT, MICHIGAN

H
e finished hurt, but he finished what he set out to do. What some would even say he had to do. This morning, the scraggly playoff beard will mercifully go. It's time to show equal mercy to the nickname. “Sid the Kid” no longer makes much sense.

He is only twenty-one, but Sidney Crosby, as of the lifting of the 2009 Stanley Cup following his Pittsburgh Penguins' 2–1 victory over the defending champion Detroit Red Wings, is no longer much of a “kid.” He stands, instead, as the best North American, by far, in the National Hockey League and Canada's only sensible choice to lead the country back to the gold medal as captain of the Olympic team.

He is not only a player of enormous top-speed skill but one of those rare players who has no need of that number, 87, to be recognized on the ice. When not forced to conceal an injury—he was hurt last night by a second-period check from Detroit's
Johan Franzen—he moves about the rink, as nearby Windsor poet Marty Gervais once wrote,

“I don't recommend anyone trying to watch the Stanley Cup final from the bench,” Crosby said after his left knee was hurt.

Two years in a row Crosby has led his young teammates to the Stanley Cup final. In his fourth year in the league, he made it all the way. It took Wayne Gretzky five seasons to reach his first Cup. “That's how I want to be measured,” the native of Cole Harbour, Nova Scotia, said. “The Stanley Cup. That's how you measure everyone.”

If Detroit can fairly be called a “dynasty” of sorts for its four Cups since 1997, then it is fair to suggest that a new reign, or semi-reign, may be under way with the Penguins. With Crosby and lesser stars bound to long-term contracts, Pittsburgh is likely to compete seriously for some time to come. Sidney Crosby, after all, could still be a half-dozen years away from what is usually a superior player's peak. Same goes for Evgeni Malkin, Crosby's twenty-two-year-old Russian teammate, the NHL's regular-season scoring leader, the leading playoff scorer, and one of the three finalists for the Hart Trophy that goes to the league's most valuable player.

Detroit coach Mike Babcock was quoting his general manager, Ken Holland, the other day when he said Holland's “big theory is you knock on the door, you knock on the door, you knock on the door every year and eventually they open the door.”

That door opened wide last night thanks to Maxime Talbot's two goals and a breathtaking night by Pittsburgh goaltender Marc-André Fleury. While it must bother Crosby that for possibly the first time in his life he has not been his team's top scorer, there
is no indication that Malkin is anything but content to play second fiddle and “A” to the younger Crosby's “C.” All Malkin wanted, he said this week, was to have an equivalent photograph taken to that one back in Pittsburgh's Mellon Arena that shows Mario Lemieux and Jaromir Jagr holding up the 1992 Stanley Cup.

“It's my dream,” Malkin said in his halting English. “Me and Sid, just like that.”

Malkin and Crosby were brilliant in Pittsburgh's conference final against Alexander Ovechkin and the Washington Capitals, a series so highly skilled and dramatic that, in many ways, it is unfortunate that it could not be a final, something that cannot happen under the current east–west division of the league.

That is not, however, to diminish the Red Wings. Thanks to the merciless checking of Henrik Zetterberg, Crosby had been held to just two assists in five Stanley Cup games at the Joe Louis Arena this year and last when the puck dropped. He should have had another during Pittsburgh's first power play, when he set up Malkin at the side of the net, only to have the puck bounce badly. He never had another chance, leaving after the Franzen check and returning in the third only to sit, grimacing, at the end of the bench.

When healthy, however, he has the gift and it is obvious in every game he plays, score or not. “I wonder about it,” the poet Gervais asked,