Tough Sh*t: Life Advice From a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good by Kevin Smith

unprepared, you’re gonna lose teeth. Actually, with age, you’re gonna lose teeth regardless; might as well lose ’em fighting
for
something. It’s a fun game, a brutal game, a beautiful game, the fastest game.
    But as with all discussions of hockey anywhere, sooner or later, all talk turns to the greatest hockey player who ever lived—an athlete who dominates the top stats of his sport by larger margins than the leaders in all the other sports dominate
their
respective leagues. And as the Wayne Gretzky story unfolded, I was transfixed. Transformed, even. I’d listen to stories told by his father about a boy who would go out of his way to help lesser teammates score goals. I marveled at the symmetry of his seemingly storybook career: how hemet his hero Gordie Howe when he was just a boy, and how he’d later skate beside the living legend in the World Hockey Association. My heart would swoon every time they talked about how giving he was with the fans and the press. And my brain exploded when I read the numbers and realized that the greatest hockey player who ever lived—a scoring genius like no other—had more assists on his record than goals. He didn’t need to score every time he was near the net with the puck; if you were on the ice with him, Wayne Douglas Gretzky would rather pass the puck to
you
—so
you
could score.
    So even though I’d only ever net-minded in street hockey games on the tennis courts of the Highlands Recreation Center and was not (by any reports) the Great One at
anything
, there was something
familiar
about this star center from the fabled Edmonton Oilers—the last dynasty team the NHL has ever known.
    He didn’t look like a hockey player. He was an average skater, and his slap shot wasn’t very powerful. Nobody expected anything much from him, at first glance … and that’s when he’d hit ’em with
his
game, a game that took folks awhile to understand, because Gretzky saw hockey differently than anybody else. And that was because of a little piece of advice his father gave him.
    The story of Wayne Douglas Gretzky reads like the Great Canadian Novel. The firstborn child of Walter and Phyllis Gretzky of Brantford, Ontario, the boy laced up his first pair of skates at age two and scored his first goal by age three, sticking that shit squarely in the five-hole of his beloved Grandma Gretzky as she tended goal in her reclinerin the basement between periods of
Hockey Night in Canada.
The boy took to hockey so passionately, his father flooded the backyard, creating a small personal skating rink, where Wayne played and practiced for months each year, augmenting his virtuoso natural ability by aggregating endless hours of ice time.
    It was a simple lesson the boy’s father taught him, the first rule of hockey, so far as Walter Gretzky was concerned: “Don’t go where the puck’s been; go where it’s
gonna
be.”
    Puck-chasing was the domain of those who couldn’t figure out where the puck would wind up. If you’re chasing the puck, you’re always a step behind; but if the unpredictable nature of frozen, vulcanized rubber could somehow be counted on to do what
you
thought it might in any given moment during a game, then you wouldn’t care what it was doing, you’d only care about what it’d likely do
next
. You’d see the puck where it was but know where the puck was
going
to be in the immediate future. If you know where the puck’s gonna be, you’re a few strides closer than anybody else on the ice to scooping up the biscuit and putting it in the basket. Knowing where the puck’s gonna be doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll win the game or even score a goal, really … but it will certainly give you an edge in a game of tough competitors.
    Getting baked and watching these DVDs, I suddenly found a role model in this athlete from Canada whom I began focusing on as a higher power. He was an inspiration, even though he was long retired from the game. This boy from Brantford and