All last week, they remembered his 50th. Hockey commentators waxed eloquent. His on-ice peers remembered their brushes with him as teammates or opponents. Most columnists had at plenty of anecdotes about his goal-scoring prowess, his record number of records and his so-called sixth sense on skates. Well, I was there for his 50th too. Not his 50th birthday. I was there to witness the final seconds of the game of games:
“Anderson gets it to Gretzky. He’s got the open net!” shouted Rod Phillips, the Oilers’ play-by-play announcer that night. “Will he shoot? He does. He scores! He has broken the record. Wayne Gretzky’s 50th goal in 39 games. Gretzky has done the unbelievable.”
I was one of those going wild that night – Dec. 30, 1981 – in Edmonton. Only I happened to be up in the catwalk of the (then) Northlands Coliseum. I was right next to Rod Phillips’s broadcast booth. I was filling in for the regular CBC Radio sports reporter covering the game. In fact, I was also there for American Public Radio. Nobody – in Canada or the U.S. – expected Gretzky to get his 50th that game. During his 38th game against the Los Angeles Kings, he had scored four times bringing his season total to 45; he was still five goals out. But I was dispatched to be there just in case.
That season, the Great One collected 224 points (the existing record was 185 points which Gretzky had set the previous year). He eclipsed Phil Esposito’s one-season record of 76 goals, scoring an incredible 92 times. He was awarded the Art Ross scoring trophy, and for the third season in a row, the Hart trophy for Most Valuable Player. But I remember Gretzky’s five-goal night – his 50th in 39 games – in Edmonton and I remember his telling us after such a miraculous game that he’d immediately telephoned his father in Brantford, Ont.
“Dad, it’s Wayne,” Gretzky said.
“How’d you guys make out tonight?” Walter Gretzky asked.
“I did it, Dad. Fifty in 39.” And there was a short pause on the phone.
“What took you so long?” he said. And father and son laughed with delight.
The next year – the one the Edmonton Oilers were expected to win the Stanley Cup – I co-authored a book with Edmonton broadcaster John Short. He would offer readers every one of the Oilers’ (and Gretzky’s) phenomenal stats from the franchise’s first three years in the NHL. I would contribute a section called “Positive Power,” the story of the team’s adherence to Peter Pocklington’s “power of positive thinking” regimen. Short and I would scoop everybody with an overnight book about the new kids on the block on the eve of the Oilers’ first Stanley Cup. Except that it didn’t happen that way. Gretzky and the Oilers lost in the play-offs to the Kings, a team that had finished 48 points behind them in the standings that year.
I came down from that media catwalk and met Gretzky the next year. I was then the co-writer of a weekly CBC TV variety show – Tommy Banks Live – based in Edmonton. Unlike so many professional athletes who can’t wait to leave town, Gretzky loved Edmonton. He did everything he could for Edmontonians. The next season – 1982 – we convinced him to come on one of our regular Wednesday night shows. We even got him to do a black-out, a kind of quick comedy sketch at the beginning of the show.
The black-out showed Tommy Banks, my co-writer Colin MacLean and I standing in front of a curtain with a fourth unidentified guy – all of us with our heads buried in newspapers. We all lamented the fact Gretzky was on another scoring tear, upstaging our Wednesday night broadcasts.
“He did it again last Wednesday night,” Tommy Banks moaned.
“It’s been like this all year,” MacLean echoed.
“Yeah,” I sneered, “the so-called Great One.”
“I’ll get back at him for upstaging us every Wednesday night, that darned Wayne Gretzky,” Banks said finally.
We all turned to the last guy with his head behind a newspaper. Of course, it was Gretzky, who smiled to camera and said, “Somebody mention my name?”
It would take the upstart Oilers another two years to win the Cup. But it didn’t matter to me. I had seen (and reported on) Wayne Gretzky beat the record held previously by Maurice Richard (50 goals in 50 games in 1944-45) and Mike Bossy (50 goals in 50 games 1980-81). Gretzky scored 61 goals in 50 games that 1981-82 season; he did it again in the 1983-84 season and scored 53 in 50 games in 1984-85. His Dec. 30, 1981, record still stands.
“Fifty in 39 may be my best record,” Wayne Gretzky commented later in an NHL video. “I think it’ll be the hardest record for someone to beat…”
That’s the way his fans look at it too.