Wayne Gretzky's Ghost by Roy Macgregor Page B

sitting sobbing as he dressed and then finally standing up and, in a cracking voice, telling his teammates: “I’m sorry. I get confused. I make mistakes.” Then he went out and scored two goals, leading the team to victory.
    Leaving Detroit was less a problem than where to go. Montreal wanted him. And Toronto. “You bring that young man out here,” Edmonton’s Wild Bill Hunter told Eagleson associate Bill Watters, “and we’ll put his name on the licence plates: Alberta—Home of Marcel Dionne.” Los Angeles, however, offered both the best money and the farthest escape. “It was the easiest way to go,” Dionne says. With the accusations trailing him—“He can rip a team apart,” Johnny Wilson, one former coach offered—he came to a team that had just had its best season, standing fourth overall, and was offering defensive, disciplined hockey under coach Bobby Pulford.
    He was suspect from the beginning. Pulford hadn’t even been told about Cooke’s deal and was so distraught at first sight of his stocky little star that he assigned him immediately to the team’s “Fat Squad,” forcing him to skate extra laps at practice with plastic sheets wrapped around his swollen stomach. But this time Dionne did not walk out on practice, as he had done in Detroit. And instead of sulking, as he might once have done, he worked and listened.
    â€œPully thought I was a zipper-head,” Dionne now says. “If he could’ve made me crawl, he would have. I wouldn’t crawl. I respect him for what he did because after a while he knew I was not what he had heard.”
    Pulford discovered, as so many others have, that the tallest part of Dionne is his pride. “I don’t want to kiss anyone’s ass,” he had decided just before turning professional and, though he has certainly suffered for his refreshing frankness, hockey’s own belated maturing over recent years has meant that Detroit’s “bigbaby” is now seen as Los Angeles’s leader and highly articulate spokesman—without Dionne himself having changed much. He once said, “There seems to be a tiny part of me I can’t control.” But his railing against archaic management and gang-warfare hockey has in truth been extremely calculated. “If I had to do it again,” he says, “I’d do it. And I’ll tell you why—because I know I can play for any team in this league.”
    Before Dionne, the outspoken hockey player was a rarity—Ted Lindsay in the ’50s, Bobby Hull to a lesser extent later—but today, with Darryl Sittler fighting management in Toronto and Guy Lafleur attacking lazy, wealthy hockey players in Montreal, the cures for the ill health of hockey are coming, as they should, from the game’s healthier cells.
    â€œI had to say to hell with it,” says Dionne. “If that’s what hockey’s all about, I’ll say it depends on how much guts you have and how much you believe in yourself.”
    This game is over, thankfully. Washington has come from behind to win 4–2, the contest as interesting as seeing which brand of paper towel will give away first under the faucet. Dionne, the singular example of grace and caring among so many of those he contemptuously refers to as “slackers,” dresses quickly and alone in a far corner of the dressing room. His teammates know better than to speak to him following a loss, as do the local reporters. Hair still dripping from the shower, he buttons up his jacket and walks away from the disgrace, momentarily pausing in the clutch of Jerry Buss and Gordon Lightfoot. A quick handshake and Dionne leaves, silently.
    Outside, in the accelerating rain, he climbs into his Mercedes and pulls away, the weight of his anger falling on the gas pedal. It is a time for avoiding thought. There is little concern for making more than $500,000 a year or even for