Wayne Gretzky's Ghost Read Online Free Page B

today’s concerns over headhunting and the threat to the careers of the likes of Sidney Crosby would not be an issue.
    Rather prescient and powerful, Columnist Gretzky, if I do say so myself.

TWO
THE NATIONAL GAME
“THE DANCE OF LIFE” —
THE OPENING OF A NEW SEASON
(
The Globe and Mail
, October 7, 2010)
    H ockey has no founding father or mother or identifiable moment of birth. It was invented in the imagination and is reinvented every day from early fall on in the backyards and—where still permitted—side streets of this hockey-mad country.
    As the National Hockey League returns to the ice on Thursday, this much is undeniable: Hockey is Canada’s game. There is nothing to be gained by pointing out that a Mesopotamian tablet dating from the third millennium BC makes reference to men using wickedly curved sticks—apparently not illegal in those days—to propel a wooden ring over the dirt. There is no ear here for the argument that Pieter Bruegel’s
Hunters in the Snow
, painted in 1565, appears to contain a game of shinny in the background. Nor do we really much care about the more localized claims that the game was first played in the Far North by the men on the Franklin expedition, and if not there then on a pond near Windsor, Nova Scotia, or if not there then at Kingston, Ontario, or even that there are newspaperclips to prove that the first organized game took place in Montreal.
    Soccer might claim more numbers, but hockey leads, as it always has, in nightly dreams and daily conversation. The grip this “national drama”—Morley Callaghan’s phrase—has on people is difficult to explain to those who did not grow up in its grasp or, as happens increasingly these days, came to embrace the game as they and, in particular, their children came to terms with a new climate.
    Lester Pearson tried to convey this sense in 1939 when the future prime minister of Canada told an audience in London, England: “It is perhaps fitting that this fastest of all games has become almost as much of a national symbol as the maple leaf or the beaver. Most young Canadians, in fact, are born with skates on their feet rather than with silver spoons in their mouths.”
    Hockey had to be Canada’s game. Had Canada invented baseball instead, players would have frozen to death between pitches. “In a land so inescapably and inhospitably cold,” Bruce Kidd and John Macfarlane wrote many years ago, “hockey is the dance of life, an affirmation that despite the deathly chill of winter we are alive.”
    Very soon after Kidd and Macfarlane published their book on hockey, however, something happened to the national game. It was called the 1972 Summit Series.
    The famous series is generally hailed as Canada’s greatest victory on ice—Paul Henderson’s dramatic goal surely the “singular moment in time” for generations of Canadians who can recall not only where they were but what they were wearing. The remarkable comeback in Moscow by the spunky Canadians launched a celebration that had as much, if not more, to do with relief as it did with triumph. Heading into the eight-game series—supposedly a friendly exhibition—the Soviets had not been given a chance. They had no goaltending. They had no shots. They had no coaching. Canada would probably sweep the series because hockey is Canada’s game. When Henderson scored that final goal, it meant that Canadahad won by the narrowest of margins imaginable—a single goal scored with only thirty-four seconds left in the final game.
    â€œWhen the country’s celebration ended,” Ken Dryden and I wrote in
Home Game: Hockey and Life in Canada
back in 1989, “the new day looked different. A lot had happened in the twenty-seven days since the first game in Montreal. A symbol, something about us, that we had always taken as self-evident, had been rocked. Our innocence, our confidence and