Just when it seemed Canadians couldn`t possibly grow any fonder of nice-guy hockey idol Wayne Gretzky, he went and got a crew cut.
This radical shearing last spring-Gretzky had long been instantly recognizable by his flowing, dirty-blond locks-set off an overnight rush by legions of Canadian boys to their local barbers for look-alike brush cuts.
And so millions of Canadian parents, who already looked to the clean-cut, clean-living, clean-playing champion as the ideal role model for their children, found yet another reason to like this unassuming national hero.
If he should one day come out in favor of homework and cleaning of bedrooms, the guy will likely be beatified.
On Saturday, Gretzky will do yet another right thing: He will get married. It will be the Stanley Cup of wedding ceremonies, and the country is clucking with approval.
The bride, Janet Jones, is a Hollywood starlet. The list of 700 invited guests included one prime minister, several hockey immortals, assorted sports and entertainment celebrities and Vanna White. (Investigative efforts by several newspapers have determined that National Hockey League legend Gordie Howe will show up but that Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and Vanna White sent their regrets.)
So momentous is the occasion that one Canadian television network sought to broadcast the wedding live from coast to coast, before Gretzky checked the idea because it threatened to spoil the intimacy of the ceremony.
The whole affair has been billed as Canada`s version of a royal wedding. But what`s really going to happen here Saturday in this friendly oil boom town in Alberta, situated so far north that it stays light in summer until 11 p.m. and snow has been known to fall in June, is simply the latest chapter in a quintessentially Canadian storybook tale. It might be called, ”Our Wayne Grows Up.”
”I think it`s safe to say that every Canadian father would want his son to grow up like Wayne Gretzky,” suggested Barrie Davis, president of a youth hockey association in the nation`s capital, Ottawa. ”He epitomizes the game of hockey. He epitomizes speed and ability. He epitomizes sportsmanship. And he`s not full of himself.”
Canadians have been watching this polite prodigy grow up for more than half of his 27 years now, ever since the gangly boy from rural Brantford, Ontario, started attracting attention by smashing scoring records in the junior hockey leagues.
He learned to skate the way Canadian hockey legends are supposed to, in a backyard rink lovingly created each winter by his dad.
At 9, the young hockey phenomenon was getting advice from Howe; by 14, he was being courted on the Canadian radio- and TV-interview circuit. At 17, he signed with a team from the defunct World Hockey Association, becoming the youngest professional athlete in North America.
And for the last nine years, the world has known Gretzky as the supple, graceful star of the Edmonton Oilers, a team he has led to four Stanley Cups in the last five years.
He holds more hockey records, it seems, than Canada has trees: all-time scoring leader in the Stanley Cup playoffs; fifth on all-time goals list;
third on all-time points list; first in all-time assists; eight consecutive years as the NHL`s most valuable player (a failure to win this year broke his streak); 26 NHL trophies. He has neither suffered a broken nose nor lost any teeth while playing in the NHL, a feat that doesn`t qualify him for any official trophies but ought to.
In any case, Gretzky has won more honors and achieved more records than any other hockey player in history, overshadowing such monumental names as Howe, Bobby Hull, Phil Esposito and Marcel Dionne. And he still has a few good seasons left in him.
All that, however, is merely the stuff of the sports pages. Gretzky means much more to Canada.
In a country where hockey metaphors pervade the national dialect, where politicians are commonly said to ”stickhandle” difficult legislation through Parliament and the ”power play” is the rule in the singles bars, Gretzky is a uniquely Canadian hero.
He embodies most every attribute that`s respected in this polite, conservative land, where it is considered exceedingly bad form to flaunt one`s success.
Gretzky is strong. He is competent. He is generous, donating his time and his name to numerous charities and to antidrug crusades. He is very rich, thought to earn at least $1 million a year playing hockey and half again as much through endorsements. He has his own breakfast cereal.
And-this is important-he`s still here. Canadians long ago grew resigned to watching many of their best and brightest writers, actors, scientists, musicians and sports stars migrate southward to mine the celebrity riches of America. Gretzky is a proud exception.
Not only has he elected to stay in Canada, he`s made it clear that he`s happy in Edmonton, this pleasant but unspectacular city of about 700,000 that is best known, after the Oilers, for the West Edmonton Mall, the world`s largest shopping center. He has forsaken the glamor of Montreal or Toronto or Vancouver and settled into a penthouse apartment west of downtown, an address everyone seems to know.
”Wayne`s place? It`s right over there,” any passerby will point out happily.
There appears to be no one in all of Canada, let alone Edmonton, who has anything bad to say about the man commonly referred to as Wayne, No. 99 or, matter-of-factly, the Great One.
”Most of us in the media long ago exhausted ourselves trying to find flaws with the guy,” said Terry Jones, a sports columnist with the Edmonton Sun who last January scored one of the year`s big scoops: He was the first to report the Gretzky-Jones engagement, only hours after Gretzky let the word slip in a local restaurant. The news was on front pages across the country the next day, and Maclean`s magazine, Canada`s national news weekly, made it the week`s cover story.
”Other than a bit of whining now and then on the ice, there really are no flaws,” Jones continued. ”Look at his charity work. It`s sincere, low profile and low key. He does a tremendous amount of visiting hospitals, terminally ill children, that nobody ever hears about.”
Gretzky chooses to live in Edmonton because it is simply ”a comfortable place for him to be,” according to his agent and friend, Michael Barnett.
(Gretzky himself was out of town earlier in the week and unavailable for an interview.) ”People here tend to treat him as one of their own. He`s seen so frequently in restaurants and stores that people just let him live his life.” Well, usually. The wedding is proving to be quite an exception.
For weeks, the local and national media have been full of breathless wedding reports, of both the true and ought-to-be variety. Thousands have phoned one Edmonton newspaper to be included on its special wedding card, and hundreds of gifts have poured in from across the country. The Edmonton police are readying for a huge crowd of gapers, but they do not anticipate pulling out the water cannons that have been used to disperse unruly mobs of Stanley Cup celebrants in the past.
While many of the wedding details are being kept secret, it is known that the ceremony will be held in St. Joseph`s Basilica, the only church large enough to accommodate the wedding and which last hosted a celebrity in 1984, when the Pope passed through town. Gretzky is Anglican, and Jones is a Baptist, but special permission was obtained so the wedding could be held in a Catholic church.
The bride`s designer wedding dress, contrary to earlier reports, will not be flown in from Los Angeles on a chartered jet; it will come in with its designer on a scheduled flight.
Other tidbits: It is true that Gretzky presented Jones with a new $200,000 Rolls-Royce as a wedding gift and a 3-carat shiner as an engagement ring.
It is not true that a fleet of Rollses will ferry the wedding guests 13 blocks from the church to the Westin Hotel for the reception. There will be
”only one Rolls,” Barnett said. ”The rest will be normal limousines.”
It is also not true that guests will be plied with $80-a-bottle Dom Perignon. ”The hotel has been permitted to pick a nice champagne, and we will make do with that,” Barnett said.
The prospect of a media zoo prompted wedding organizers to designate a small pool of photographers and reporters-a la international summit meetings and U.S. military invasions-who will be allowed inside to watch the 45-minute ceremony and gala reception.
Such was the demand among Canada`s three national TV networks for an immediate video broadcast of the late-afternoon wedding that a special editing suite has been installed in the basement of the church. A five-minute highlights tape will be spliced together and released within 30 minutes of the ”I do`s,” Barnett promises.
Maclean`s magazine once again will weigh in with ”some major coverage,” said managing editor Robert Lewis, although he wouldn`t reveal whether another cover is planned.
”He`s a national icon, and we don`t have too many of them. The story is a natural.”
And what of the future Mrs. Great One, who first met Gretzky on the set of the TV show ”Dance Fever,” when she was a dancer and he was a guest judge?
Jones, who has appeared in several movies, including ”The Flamingo Kid” and ”Police Academy 5,” and who counts tennis star Vitas Gerulaitis and actor Bruce Willis among her old boyfriends, seems at first blush something of a fast-lane choice for the all-Canadian Gretzky.
Jones, in fact, did blush for Playboy magazine in March, 1987, a potentially scandalous act in a country that still occasionally censors the men`s magazine at the border.
But Canadians, having stripped the nation`s used-book stores of that particular back issue when news of Gretzky`s engagement broke, appear to have delivered their verdict: no big deal.
”I don`t think anybody cares about the Playboy thing,” said Neil Downs, director of Ontario Youth Hockey Development Center and a man obviously concerned about the image Gretzky projects to kids. ”We Canadians can be pretty progressive about life.”
Besides, he added, it wasn`t clean-cut Wayne who took his clothes off. That, of course, would never do.
