Wayne Gretzky: Anti-Christ?

Memo from the Sports Desk:

With the NHL (Remember them?: the National Hockey League?) a week away from opening training camps for the upcoming season, now seems like a good time to discuss why Wayne Gretzky may be the Anti-Christ. Hockey purists will understand right away what we’re getting at here. Hockey’s history in North America can be traced to Canada. Canada is cold in the winter. Canada has winter. The sport’s migration into the United States came through cold weather cities like Chicago, Boston Detroit and Philadelphia. They call hockey jerseys “sweaters” for a reason.

Wayne Gretzky came into the league with Edmonton (that’s in Canada for all you Freedom Fries lovers out there). He played there nine seasons from 1979 to 1988. During that time he appeared in five Stanley Cup finals series, winning four. He is arguably the greatest hockey player of all time. He holds 61 NHL records.

And yet … and yet the Indignant Citizen can’t shake the nagging suspicion that Wayne Gretzky has turned into a sellout. Worse than a sellout, really. You see, Gretzky has taken the head coaching job for the Phoenix Coyotes. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, Wayne Gretzky, the greatest-ever representative of that cold-weather sport played on ice called hockey has signed on to coach a hockey team located in a city where the average daily high temperatures in December, January and February are 66.2, 65.9 and 70.7 degrees, respectively.

Phoenix shouldn’t even have a hockey team. Neither should Tampa Bay, Atlanta, Raleigh, Miami, Nashville, San Jose, Dallas, Los Angeles or Anaheim. They’re not cold-weather cities. Hockey does not belong in those places. Neither does Wayne Gretzky, who of course left Edmonton for … where else? … Los Angeles for the 1988-89 season. He played there until he left for St. Louis about three-fourths of the way through the 1995-96 season. While in L.A., he played in one Stanley Cup finals series, losing, appropriately enough, to a cold weather team: the Montreal Canadiens. Although he returned to a relatively cold weather climate in New York to finish his career, his hockey mojo had been purged in the City of Angels and he never returned to the Stanley Cup finals.

Now he’s coaching a team that was stolen from a cold weather city, Winnipeg, and moved to a Sun Belt Sprawl Capital where ice is a non-naturally occurring state for water. What’s he thinking? Where’s his sense of history? Tossed in the back of some gas-guzzling SUV, no doubt, next to an obsolete road map of the Phoenix-Scottsdale-Tempe metroplex and a set of golf clubs.

Get rid of the aforementioned teams, the Indignant Citizen says. In the process, of course, we throw out the entire Pacific Division and four-fifths of the Southeast Division. Which may be the best thing for hockey. A little downsizing would be good for the sport. In hindsight, hockey’s impending crisis should have been obvious to everyone after back-to-back-to-back seasons featuring southern teams in the Stanley Cup Finals. Carolina and Anaheim both mercifully lost to cold-weather teams in 2002 and 2003. But in 2004, Tampa Bay broke through, and angered the hockey gods. Hence the lockout noticed by almost no one.

It will take an all-cold weather Finals this season to revive interest. Chicago-Philadelphia, for example. Or Chicago-Montreal. Anything less will risk total dissolution of the sport.

Hockey should consider itself warned.