Wayne Gretzky's Ghost Read Online Free Page A

an editor who might guide him. Newman agreed, and Ken and I set to work on what would become his first-ever published work.
    We became great friends during the experience and, once it was done with, I talked to Ken about one day turning his attention toa book on hockey. We spoke on and off about the idea for years, and Ken kept up his note taking as he and his Montreal team seemed to win Stanley Cup after Stanley Cup. I was eventually able to connect him and Douglas Gibson, the young publisher of Macmillan, with whom I was discussing a work of fiction. More years and many more discussions passed until 1983, when Doug simultaneously published my work of hockey fiction,
The Last Season
, and Ken’s non-fiction epic,
The Game
, possibly the best book on sport ever written by an athlete. Ken’s book absolutely swamped mine in sales and attention, but I was proud then, and remain so, to have been a small contributor to what stands as a major work in sports literature. The ghost who wasn’t required.
    Halfway through my year of working with Wayne Gretzky, the
American Journalism Review
even took notice and published a short piece entitled “Ghostwriting for The Great One.” The
National Post
column had been picked up by United Feature Syndicate and was appearing increasingly around the United States. When I first heard about the piece, I figured it would be another attack. But it was nothing.
    Writer Sean Mussenden fingered the ghostwriter by name but rather surprisingly added that
The Washington Post
had also tagged me “the closest thing there is to a poet laureate of Canadian hockey.” The article quoted one journalism professor saying he believed any ghostwritten article should “disclose” the ghostwriter with a credit at the end, but
National Post
sports editor Graham Parley said this was hardly necessary, as it was quite well known that I was the ghost. In fact, Gretzky himself often joked about it and would call me his “ghost” on the few occasions we bumped into each other that 1999–2000 season in which the column ran. “The Great One,” Mussenden concluded in his very mild piece, “whom
National Post
columnist Cam Cole recently described as being harder ‘to get an audience with [than] the Dalai Lama,’ could not be reached for comment.”
    â€”
    At the end of the 2000 Stanley Cup finals—New Jersey Devils defeating the Dallas Stars in six games—the Wayne Gretzky column “retired” for the summer, never to appear again.
    He was getting increasingly involved in the game again—first as executive director of Team Canada heading into the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games, where Canada won its first gold medal in men’s hockey in half a century, then as coach of the Phoenix Coyotes.
    I still have that last column. He was talking about the devastating check laid on Eric Lindros by Scott Stevens during an earlier playoff round between Stevens’ Devils and Lindros’s Philadelphia Flyers. Lindros was left with a concussion that, ultimately, would play a role in his early retirement from the game he had, for a very short while, dominated.
    He argued that “clean” hits or “dirty” hits were not the issue here, that all that matters is the health of the players. He advised changes in equipment and called for better testing and evaluation to understand just how severe the concussion threat is to the game. “My fear, my real concern,” Gretzky wrote, “is that we are just scratching the surface. We’re still a long way from getting a good handle on what concussion is and how it can be prevented, and yet we also have to be moving as quickly as possible to find a remedy for this very real threat to the game.”
    Sounds like a strong stance to me.
    Just think, if the NHL and NHL Players’ Association had only moved on this issue “as quickly as possible to find a remedy,” perhaps