Many Canadians have soured on Wayne Gretzky, who rose to fame as an Edmonton Oiler and now works as an NHL analyst on TNT.Nick Wass/The Associated Press
This should be Wayne Gretzky’s harvest time.
He’s 64, the age when people presume wisdom in you, even if you have none. He’s got the top perch on hockey’s most talked-about broadcast. The team he built into an international concern is thriving. He’s here in Florida, amongst his chosen family. You couldn’t script this more in his favour.
But Gretzky doesn’t look like someone enjoying the view. Most nights, he plays the straight man to TNT colleague Paul Bissonnette, who’s fun, but in a “where am I again?” sort of way. It’s decent banter, but it’s weird to see the greatest of all time deferring to someone who was just barely employed at the top level.
Gretzky’s insights are so banal that his panel mates feel the need to congratulate him on them (the surest sign that you’re losing your grip). If nothing else, his broadcast career demonstrates why his coaching career never worked out.
Even the sweater sets he favours make him seem like a man out of time and place. He has the look of someone who would rather be home, and I’m not talking about his living room.
You watch a bit and you wonder: Is Gretzky the saddest man in hockey?
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However much he may wish it so, you cannot separate the person from the country. We invested too much mythology in him for that to work. It would require going back and making the last two decades of Canada’s 20th century about something else, and we didn’t do anything worth talking about. It’s just beer ads and regrets about not buying a cottage when they cost less than a pickup truck.
Every fight in a romantic relationship – and that’s what Canada is in with Gretzky – is exactly as vicious as it is dumb. This one is especially dumb. It’s a national emergency about a guy wearing the wrong clothes, and then giving the wrong bunch of other guys a thumbs up.
That’s not to say it’s not Gretzky’s fault. It’s 100 per cent his fault. He started it, and then he let it spin out, but it can still be taken care of in the span of a few sentences. Gretzky hasn’t said anything he can’t take back. Actually, he hasn’t said anything at all.
If he wants to make up with Canada, that’s simple. You segue from “I get that everyone back home is upset” to “I’m sorry” to “I miss you guys.” You don’t even have to mean it. Just apologize and move on. Then stop wearing hats. Most of the same people who hate him at the moment would eat it up, and everyone would feel a little lighter.
Oilers fans gather around a statue of Wayne Gretzky outside of Rogers Place in Edmonton on April 11.Kaeden Dupre/The Globe and Mail
If he’s feeling ambitious, he could invite Mark Carney onto the show. Carney’s so desperate to prove his average-joe bonafides that it’s a wonder he doesn’t come to Parliament wearing goalie pads. If he thinks Mike Myers is a big star, Gretzky will really blow his hair back.
They could talk about the glory days. Maybe get Donald Trump on speaker, and sort out the trade war. That’s how diplomacy works now.
Gretzky could do more useful work in 90 seconds of air time than the Liberal caucus has managed in 10 years. He’d be a hero all over again.
Instead, we will continue on with this charade where TNT promotes Gretzky as the voice of hockey’s birthplace, while hockey’s birthplace pretends he went off to sea and never came back. The Oilers are in the Cup final, Gretzky is on the air for hours every other night and yet he is functionally invisible in Canada.
They can’t even stick him up on a big screen for fear that someone in the arena might boo. In the Canadian way, nobody wants any bad feelings to interrupt our seething.
Imagine Lionel Messi showing up to a football game anywhere in Argentina and not being feted from the moment he walked in until he got back to the parking lot. Not just wouldn’t happen, but couldn’t.
First, because Messi isn’t thick enough to think he can pick a fight with a whole country and emerge intact, and second, because some responsible third party would have stepped in to fix it. However silly, it would still be treated as a cultural priority.
What’s the Governor-General doing this week? She could skip a gala dinner, pick up a phone and get Wayne Gretzky back on the team. It’s never going to be the way it was, but anything’s better than this.
If not that, then what’s the plan here? Is Gretzky going to spend the rest of his life hiding in whatever swamp mansion he lives in now? Just poke his head out to watch hockey on live TV a hundred nights a year, but don’t ention-may anada-Cay? It’s already preposterous and we’ve only been at it for a few months.
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What happens during the Olympics? Does Gretzky get done up in a wig and sunglasses so he can sneak into games without causing a national meltdown? Or is the greatest player ever now persona non grata at the game’s greatest showcase?
If this thing can’t be squashed, you start to understand why we have such a hard time getting things that actually matter done in this country. The people in charge don’t have productive disagreements. They talk past each other, and then they sulk.
Give America this much – if its athletic crush did something that enraged most of the population, he or she would not be allowed to go straight to the smouldering-silence stage. They’d have to address it, or it would be addressed for them, loudly and unceasingly, until it was solved or had turned into a fistfight. Either way, it would end.
Instead, both sides in this low-stakes cold war have chosen to highlight one of Canada’s own national traditions – the calm, quiet, never-to-be-addressed holding of a grudge.