Wayne Gretzky - Influences and Skills

Influences and Skills

Gretzky's size, strength, and basic athletic abilities were not considered impressive. As an 18-year-old NHL rookie in 1979, he was conspicuously underweight at just 160 pounds (73 kg). Many critics opined at that time that Gretzky was "too small, too wiry, and too slow to be a force in the NHL". Although he managed to increase his weight to 185 pounds (84 kg) by the end of his career in 1999, that was still much less than the NHL average. During his years with the Oilers, the team conducted individual strength and stamina tests twice per year. According to Gretzky himself, he always finished dead last in peripheral vision, flexibility and strength, and could only bench press 140 pounds (64 kg). On the other hand, his intelligence and reading of the game was unrivaled, and he could consistently anticipate where the puck was going to be and execute the right move at the right time. Hall of Fame defenceman Bobby Orr said of Gretzky, "He passes better than anybody I've ever seen. And he thinks so far ahead."

He was considered one of the most creative players in hockey. "You never knew what he was going to do," said hockey Hall of Famer Igor Larionov. "He was improvising all the time. Every time he took the ice, there was some spontaneous decision he would make. That’s what made him such a phenomenal player." Gretzky’s ability to improvise came into the spotlight at the 1998 Olympics in Japan. Then an older player in the sunset of his career, he had been passed over for the captaincy of the team. But as the series continued, his unique skills made him the team’s real leader.

"The Canadians had trouble with the big ice. They had trouble with the European patterns and the lateral play and the endless, inventive cycling. . . . . Slowly, as game after game went by and the concern continued to rise, Wayne Gretzky began climbing through the lineup. He, almost alone among the Canadians, seemed to take to the larger ice surface as if it offered more opportunity instead of obligation . . . . His playing time soared, as he was being sent on not just for power plays but double shifts and even penalty kills. By the final round . . . it was Wayne Gretzky who assumed the leadership both on and off the ice.

Gretzky had such an uncanny ability to judge the position of the other players on the ice that many suspected he enjoyed some kind of extrasensory perception. Sports commentators said that he played like he had "eyes in the back of his head." Gretzky said he sensed other players more than he actually saw them. "I get a feeling about where a teammate is going to be," he said. "A lot of times, I can turn and pass without even looking." One author said, "He could envision the whole rink in his mind and how players were moving within it." Because of this "vision," Gretzky was sometimes called the "Einstein of Hockey."

Veteran Canadian journalist Peter Gzowski says that Gretzky also seemed to be able to, in effect, slow down time. Gzowski explains that the most elite athletes have "more room in the flow of time" than ordinary athletes. Of Gretzky he said, "There is an unhurried grace to everything Gretzky does on the ice. Winding up for the slapshot, he will stop for an almost imperceptible moment at the top of his arc, like a golfer with a rhythmic swing." "Gretzky uses this room to insert an extra beat into his actions. In front of the net, eyeball to eyeball with the goaltender . . . he will . . . hold the puck one . . . extra instant, upsetting the anticipated rhythm of the game, extending the moment. . . He distorts time, and not only by slowing it down. Sometimes he will release the puck before he appears to be ready, threading the pass through a maze of players precisely to the blade of a teammate’s stick, or finding a chink in a goaltender’s armour and slipping the puck into it . . . before the goaltender is ready to react."

However, Gretzky denied that he had any exotic innate abilities. He said that many of his advantages were a result of his father's brilliant coaching.

Some say I have a 'sixth sense' . . . Baloney. I've just learned to guess what's going to happen next. its anticipation. It's not God-given, its Wally-given. He used to stand on the blue line and say to me, 'Watch, this is how everybody else does it.' Then he'd shoot a puck along the boards and into the corner and then go chasing after it. Then he'd come back and say, 'Now, this is how the smart player does it.' He'd shoot it into the corner again, only this time he cut across to the other side and picked it up over there. Who says anticipation can't be taught?

Gretzky learned his skills from his father on a backyard rink at his home. Walter Gretzky had played Junior B hockey, but was slowed by chicken pox and failed in a tryout for the Junior A Toronto Marlboros, ending his playing career. Walter cultivated a love of hockey in his sons and provided them with a backyard rink and drills to enhance their skills. On the backyard rink, nicknamed the "Wally Coliseum", winter was total hockey immersion with Walter as mentor-teacher as well as teammate. According to Brent Gretzky, "It was definitely pressed on us, but we loved the game. Without the direction of the father, I don't know where I'd be."

The rink itself was built so that Walter could keep an eye on his boys from the warmth of his kitchen, instead of watching them outdoors on a neighbourhood rink, as Wayne put in long hours on skates. Walter's drills were his own invention, but were ahead of their time in Canada. Gretzky would later remark that the Soviet National Team's practice drills, which impressed Canada in 1972, had nothing to offer him: "I'd been doing these drills since I was three. My Dad was very smart."

In his autobiography, Gretzky describes how at practices, his Dad would drill him on the fundamentals of smart hockey:

Him: ‘Where's the last place a guy looks before he passes it?’

Me: ‘The guy he's passing to.’

Him: ‘Which means...’

Me: ‘Get over there and intercept it.’

Him: ‘Where do you skate?’

Me: ‘To where the puck is going, not where it's been.’

Him: ‘If you get cut off, what are you gonna do?’

Me: ‘Peel.’

Him: ‘Which way?’

Me: ‘Away from the guy, not towards him.’

Much has been written about Gretzky’s highly developed hockey instincts, but he once explained that what appeared to be instinct was, in large part, the effect of his relentless study of the game. As a result, he developed a deep understanding of its shifting patterns and dynamics. Peter Gzowski says that elite athletes in all sports understand the game so well, and in such detail, that they can instantly recognize and capitalize upon emerging patterns of play. Analyzing Gretzky’s hockey skills, he says, "What we take to be creative genius is in fact a reaction to a situation that he has stored in his brain as deeply and firmly as his own phone number." Gzowski presented this theory to Gretzky, and he fully agreed. "Absolutely," Gretzky said. "That’s a hundred percent right. It’s all practice. I got it from my Dad. Nine out of ten people think it’s instinct, and it isn’t. Nobody would ever say a doctor had learned his profession by instinct; yet in my own way I’ve put in almost as much time studying hockey as a medical student puts in studying medicine."

But Gretzky’s skill as an athlete was not all mental. Like Gordie Howe, he possessed "an exceptional capacity to renew his energy resources quickly." In 1980, an exercise physiologist tested all of the Edmonton Oilers, and when he saw the results of Gretzky’s test of recuperative abilities, he said "he thought the machine had broken." He was, in fact, an exceptional all-around athlete. Growing up, he was a competitive runner and also batted .492 for the Junior Intercounty Baseball League's Brantford CKCP Braves in the summer of 1980. As a result, he was offered a contract by the Toronto Blue Jays. History repeated itself in June 2011, when Gretzky’s 17-year-old son, Trevor, was drafted by the Chicago Cubs. Trevor signed with the Cubs the next month.

Where Gretzky differed from others in his development was in the extraordinary commitment of time on the ice. In his autobiography, he wrote:

All I wanted to do in the winters was be on the ice. I'd get up in the morning, skate from 7:00 to 8:30, go to school, come home at 3:30, stay on the ice until my mom insisted I come in for dinner, eat in my skates, then go back out until 9:00. On Saturdays and Sundays we'd have huge games, but nighttime became my time. It was a sort of unwritten rule around the neighbourhood that I was to be out there myself or with my dad.

Gretzky would prod next-door neighbour Brian Rizzetto to play in goal after sundown in order to practice his backhand. He not only enthusiastically practised long hours every day, but he also started working on his skills at an extraordinarily young age. When asked how he managed, at age ten, to score 378 goals in a single season, Gretzky explained,

See, kids usually don’t start playing hockey until they’re six or seven. Ice isn’t grass. It’s a whole new surface and everybody starts from ground zero. . . . By the time I was ten, I had eight years on skates instead of four, and a few seasons’ worth of ice time against ten-year-olds. So I had a long head start on everyone else.

Gretzky also excelled at baseball and box lacrosse, which he played during the summer. At age ten, after scoring 196 goals in his hockey league, he scored 158 goals in lacrosse. According to him, lacrosse was where he learned to protect himself from hard checks: "In those days you could be hit from behind in lacrosse, as well as cross-checked, so you had to learn how to roll body checks for self-protection." Gretzky, who weighed far less than the NHL average, adroitly applied this technique as a professional player, avoiding checks with such skill that a rumour circulated that there was an unwritten rule not to hit him. But Gretzky himself dispelled the rumor at the end of one grueling season with the Edmonton Oilers, in which he had suffered a mild concussion as a result of what writer Michael Benson called a "cheap shot" from Winnipeg Jets star centre Dale Hawerchuk. "People say there is an unwritten rule that you can’t hit Gretzky," he said, "but that is not true."

Still, Gretzky was a most elusive target. Fellow Hockey Hall of Famer Denis Potvin compared attempting to hit Gretzky to "wrapping your arms around fog. You saw him but when you reached out to grab him your hands felt nothing, maybe just a chill." The 205-pound (93 kg) Potvin, a three-time winner of the Norris Trophy for best defenseman, added that part of the problem in hitting Gretzky hard was that he was "a tough guy to dislike... what was there to hate about Gretzky? It was like running Gandhi into a corner."

Gretzky became known for setting up with the puck behind the net, an area that was nicknamed "Gretzky's Office" because of his great prowess there. He could pass to an open teammate, jump out for his own shot on a wraparound, or even try to shoot the puck over the goal to bounce it off the goaltender's back and into the net. Gretzky became accustomed to the position after watching and studying Bobby Clarke play in that zone. In honour of his abilities, a large "99" was painted on the ice behind the goal at each end of the rink for his final game.