Colby Cosh: The next great Canadian is out there, we just haven't met them yet

Somewhere across this great land, someone or something great is just getting started. This country is built on game-changing people, ideas and initiatives: Wayne Gretzky redefined a game; oil sands innovations helped us prosper; Frederick Banting transformed millions of lives; Loblaws changed how we live. Today, we launch a new National Post series that celebrates Canadian greatness, in whatever form we find it.

My editor informs me, between snaps of the whip, that our series on Canadian greatness will be asking readers to imagine the heroes-to-be that may be attending kindergarten now — including the “next Wayne Gretzky.” Imagination isn’t one of my strongest qualities: I wonder what a “next Wayne Gretzky” would even look like, what kind of phenomenon that would be.

We’ve seen some of his records come under attack since he retired a quarter-century ago, while others remain at inaccessible interstellar distances. We’ve seen players with more ostentatious abilities — players whom some general managers might even choose over 99 in an all-time All-Star game in which everyone showed up as the magically restored prime versions of themselves. There are a lot of folks out there who would take Lemieux over Gretzky, and they’re not fools.

All the same, there’s been nothing quite like Gretzky in any sport. You almost have to reach outside sports for names like Mozart or John von Neumann to define his uncanny nature. Yes, everyone still understands the colossal scale of his individual statistical achievements. Numbers, being abstractions, endure, but they’re abstractions. It’s a cruel law with few exceptions: you had to be there.

The young Gretzky, who was none of big, ultra-fast, or strong, was mentally destabilizing for opponents in a way that’s hard to appreciate. His ability to score from anywhere and his weird prescience made him a waking nightmare. You would swear sometimes in one-on-one situations that he would just hold the puck and wait for the defenceman or a goalie to develop spontaneous vertigo and fall down. Everyone knows how he elevated players who were awesome in their own right, your Kurris and your Messiers, but only the happy few remember how he could randomly anoint ordinary NHLers.

Blair “B.J.” MacDonald, who had a special rapport with 99, rattled off 94 points on his wing in the Oilers’ first NHL season — but he was organizational depth for the Canucks by 1982, bereft without the top banana. Dave Lumley, an NCAA alumnus flung onto Gretzky’s line in desperation during a late 1981 injury crisis, pulled off a 12-game goalscoring-streak that is still the fifth longest in league history. Only Lemieux has matched it since. Gretzky’s own top career mark is nine.

True prime Gretzky, pre-Stanley Cup Gretzky, is unfortunately not at all well documented on video. My very favourite early Gretzky video is from a late-season game at Maple Leaf Gardens, March 29, 1980. Wayne, aged 19, is locked in single combat with Marcel Dionne for the league scoring title, and the Ontario crowd is electrified by the return of the prodigal son. Old Oilers fans still know this as the Don Ashby game. Ashby, a former Leafs draftee playing on Gretzky’s line as a favour, came away with three goals and three assists, but died in a car crash about a year later. The Oilers got outshot that night by the Leafs 46-28 — and won the game 8-5.

You can watch a on YouTube if you’d like to be disabused of the idiot notion that 1980s hockey was all lazy slapshots against primitive goalies. (The goals in the video, all Oilers markers, are out of sequence.) In the first minute of the video, we see Gretzky turn Borje Salming inside-out in the corner — no big deal! Borje who? — and fire a pass to a streaking Ashby for a 3-2 lead. In minute two Gretzky circles behind the Leaf net, gets a step outside of Ian Turnbull, and puts a backhand past Mike Palmateer in net. To the short side, with exactly one second left on the clock in the first period. The commentators cackle in astonishment.

In the third minute of the video, Gretzky and MacDonald have a dangerous two-on-two rush after a bad Leaf giveaway. Gretzky has a chance to beat Salming down the wing — again, this is probably the single greatest player the Leafs had in the 20th century — but 99 makes a swooping turn at the last minute, lets the scrambling Leafs pile up with MacDonald on the boards, and finds a trailing Ashby in the open. (As often happened, what looks like a binary pass/shoot choice was, for Gretzky, a gnarly tree of complexity.) At 3:30 there’s an incredible Oilers goal that has nothing to do with Gretzky, though he collected an assist: it’s just MacDonald beating Turnbull, in a manner that Connor McDavid wouldn’t sneeze at, and feeding Ashby in the open.

It’s minute six that elevates this antique low-resolution drama to the status of epic. We’re late in the third with the Oilers up 6-5. Ashby, on the edge of a hometown hat trick, feeds Gretzky behind the Leafs net and goes to the goalmouth. This is a part of the Gretzky legend that has survived the fall of that beautiful civilization intact. Even a Canadian born after the Great One retired hears the ominous chord accompanying the words “Gretzky behind the net.”

Gretzky holds the puck for a second, two seconds, three. The Leafs wobble with collective uncertainty, knowing better than to follow the kid back there into hell. Dave Burrows plants himself at the left post. Ron Wilson, at the other post, tries a pokecheck. Sure, buddy. Five seconds pass, six, seven. Palmateer’s soul is probably leaving his body. (He’ll have a little tantrum later in the game; that’s on the video. One day his last-ever NHL appearance will be a 1985 preseason tryout with the Oilers.) Gretzky shuffles back and forth, hypnotizing the Leafs like a cobra. The amplitude of the crowd swells, but the sound is impossible to interpret. Alarm? Despair? Delight? Could any of the 16,000 people who sold bodily organs or cars to be at this game even say? At second twelve, or thereabouts, Gretzky finally finds the geodesic path to Ashby’s tape, and the kid pulls the trigger — only to have the puck go through Palmateer’s five-hole off Ron Wilson’s stick. Did Gretzky envision that?

No one possibly could, and yet.

National Post