Wayne Gretzky's Ghost by Roy Macgregor

Dionne’s 126 points with nine games remaining may have established him as the premier player of the game.
    Dionne even brags he could score two hundred points if only he played for a decent team, but he also claims, unconvincingly, that this is not what matters most to him. “He’s always saying how phony those awards are, the trophies, the all-star teams,” says Dave Taylor. “But I’d bet on him wanting to win it badly.”
    Victory, should it come, would finally stop its nearly two decades of teasing. In 1971, their first year as professionals, Lafleur was drafted first, Dionne second; and Dionne’s phenomenal first year (a record 77 points compared to Lafleur’s 64) was soured when Montreal goaltender Ken Dryden won rookie of the year honours. Until this year, Marcel Dionne was known for but a single first—the five-year, $1.5-million contract he signed with Los Angeles in June of 1975.
    â€œMarcel Dionne can be our Moses,” Jack Kent Cooke announced on that occasion. “Marcel Dionne is no Moses,” retorted Ned Harkness, the Detroit Red Wings manager who had just lost Dionne. “The only tablets he should bring down are Aspirin tablets because with him around Cooke and the Kings are going to need plenty of them.”
    But now it is 1980 and the game of hockey is beginning to emerge from a prolonged mid-life crisis. In the year since the North American game discovered it could no longer get it up for the Soviets, merger between the NHL and the World Hockey Association has come about and the gutted house is showing signs of falling back in order. Though ten of the new league’s twenty-one teams are projected to lose money this year, attendance is up 5 percent thanks to sellout crowds in such new NHL cities as Edmonton. Because of the Soviet example, the guerrilla hockey of the 1970s may be forced to switch to a creative hockey for the ’80s. And as for the sport’s main bugaboo, violence, an outcry against it is just now beginning to come from a few of the truly talented players, led by Marcel Dionne and echoed by the likes of Guy Lafleur, Phil Esposito and Mike Bossy.
    â€œIf I had my way,” says Dionne, who now serves as vice-president of the NHL Players’ Association, “we would have a full debate of violence.”
    But Jerry Buss is naturally less concerned with the violence than he is with financial loss. “Other people think in words,” he likes to say. “I think in numbers.” That being so, he might well consider the following points: his Kings will lose him $900,000 this year, attendance at Forum hockey games has declined steadily since Dionne’s arrival five years ago, and Dionne is currently looking for a new five-year contract in the area of $3 million.
    But J.B., as he likes to be called, is hardly a fool. He does, after all, have a PhD in physical chemistry and his idea of fun is to play Monopoly from memory. If he heard Team Canada’s Dr. Derek Mackesey say that, over the past few years, “Marcel Dionne has been the heart and soul of the teams we have sent to Europe,” Buss would acknowledge that this is also true of Dionne in Los Angeles, where his popularity and respect have finally risen to match his ability. The headaches have not come from Dionne, as Harkness predicted, but from those who are supposed to help him. Buss would also acknowledge the truth of what MarcelDionne has to say about his own team, though he would be well advised to grit his teeth while listening.
    â€œI can’t do everything,” Dionne said one afternoon. “My hockey’s suffering. When you have a lot of people who are inferior and they don’t think like you do, then a lot of people suffer. They look for leadership but it isn’t going to come, because there’s not enough people to back it up.”
    Buss believes he can remedy that in a mere four years. “I’m a quick study,” he