As Parting Gift, Let’s Dub Gretzky the Greatest One

You may not appreciate opera, but you appreciate Placido Domingo.

You may not get architecture, but you get Frank Lloyd Wright.

Such is the measure of Wayne Gretzky, who will smartly step off the ice Sunday, just ahead of an angry, onrushing mortality.

You didn’t need to understand hockey to understand that Gretzky was the Great One.

You didn’t need to understand icing, or slashing, or face-offs to know that Gretzky iced the United States, slashed every stereotype about modern sports superstars and took the toothless face off hockey players forever.

As a parting gift, this man who has sports’ most fitting nickname should be given a new one.

The Greatest One.

In the history of athletics, no player has dominated his or her sport the way Gretzky dominated his.

Imagine Michael Jordan holding NBA records for scoring and rebounding.

Imagine Dan Marino leading the NFL in single-season touchdown passes and touchdown runs.

In each player’s biography in the the NHL guide, there is a tiny star denoting league-leading statistics.

Gretzky’s 19-year ledger looks like a night at the Griffith Park Observatory.

And his best numbers weren’t even his most popular.

Forget those 894 goals, even though it is a record along the lines of 894 home runs.

If the most revealing thing about people is whether they make others around them better, then all you need to understand about Gretzky are his assists.

In the category of single-season assists, he ranks first. And second. And third. And fourth. And fifth. And sixth. And seventh. And tied for eighth. And 10th. And tied for 12th.

Is there any other record in any other sport with one player holding at least one piece of each of the top 10 numbers?

Now, for one last bit of outrageous fantasy, imagine this:

That player is a good guy.

Never arrested, never in trouble, two decades in the spotlight and never a misstep.

When Wayne Gretzky came into the league, hockey players were aliens to most people in the United States--hulking guys with flattened noses.

We never saw Gretzky with a black eye, or splattered in blood, or swinging at a fan. And, goodness, we always saw him with his teeth.

Today, because Gretzky was so normal, even after eight years as a superstar in star-struck Los Angeles, we treat hockey players as normal.

Perpetually smiling and polite and professional, Gretzky lifted the mask on other hockey players and gave them a chance to be celebrated for themselves.

Which, for the most part, to the surprise of many, means pleasant small-town guys with small-town values.

Arrogant?

There is the story of how a friend visiting Gretzky in Los Angeles was pining for dinner at Spago. When Gretzky phoned, he was told there were no available reservations for that night, so he hung up and apologized.

“But,” said his amazed friend, “you didn’t tell them you were Wayne Gretzky!”

“Oh,” he said, “I would never do that.”

Goons?

On his way to the elevator in an Ottawa hotel on the night before his final game in Canada this week, Gretzky paused in front of wide-eyed reporters and players to sign an autograph for a father and his son.

He was known for his ability to carry on lengthy conversations with interviewers--and never losing eye contact--while signing dozens of autographs.

Was there anybody in Los Angeles who was ever disappointed in Gretzky during his nearly eight full seasons here?

Heck, he even gave us another hockey team,

It was Gretzky’s migration to the Kings in 1988 that created the interest that eventually led to the Mighty Ducks.

We saw him and we marveled and we thought, so this is a hockey player.

The notion that we could use more neighbors who looked and acted like Wayne Gretzky helped the sport also emerge in such unlikely spots as Phoenix, Dallas, Tampa, Nashville and Greensboro, N.C.

When he left the Kings briefly after his father took ill, we realized superstars also had families.

When stories emerged that he often visited fallen owner Bruce McNall in prison, we realized superstars can also forgive.

But for Southern Californians and other Sun Belt innocents to completely accept hockey, we also had to believe that even Wayne Gretzky could get mad, and get even.

And so he did.

Remember how he led the Kings to a Game 7 victory over the Toronto Maple Leafs in the Campbell Conference finals in 1993 after a Toronto scribe had written that he was skating as if he had a piano on his back?

Before the game, he calmly told his uncertain team they would win. Then he scored a hat trick to back it up.

The next week against Montreal in the Stanley Cup finals, if Marty McSorley had not bent his doggone stick, there is no doubt here that Gretzky would have brought us a championship.

The following year, Tony Tavares, president of the fledgling Ducks, stirred up Gretzky before a cross-town meeting by saying, “He cries all the time. . . . He has influenced more calls than any other player probably in the history of sports.”

Gretzky scored two goals and had three assists in the 5-3 King victory. And, despite having played better than the Kings in ensuing years, the Ducks have still never overcome the Kings’ popularity dominance.

“You know, I guess people just never learn that these kind of things kind of push me,” Gretzky said.

In the end, there was nothing left to push him, and he was starting to get hit.

Before his final weekend with the New York Rangers, he had only nine goals, and will finish with the fewest for any season in his major league career. He has been slowed by age, 38, and injuries, which meant that the most chased man in NHL history was finally being caught.

The man who uncannily knew where to find everybody else on the ice was finally able to locate himself. And he knew it was time to go.

He hasn’t played on a Stanley Cup champion in 12 years but Wayne Gretzky leaves as a winner.

And the NHL, which has never quite developed anyone else like him, is the loser.

The number of active hockey players that the majority of folks in the United States have heard about will drop dramatically after Gretzky’s final Sunday in New York.

From one, to zero.

The Greatest One, indeed.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com

* GRETZKY BOWS OUT: Hockey’s greatest player announces his retirement with customary style and grace. D1