Wayne Gretzky

Wayne Douglas Gretzky CC (/ˈɡrɛtski/ GRET-skee; born January 26, 1961) is a Canadian former professional ice hockey player and former head coach. He played 20 seasons in the National Hockey League (NHL) for four teams from 1979 to 1999. Nicknamed "the Great One", he has been called the greatest ice hockey player ever by the NHL based on surveys of hockey writers, ex-players, general managers and coaches. Gretzky is the leading career point scorer and assist producer in NHL history and has more assists than any other player has total career points. He is the only NHL player to total over 200 points in one season, a feat he accomplished four times. In addition, Gretzky scored more than 100 points in 15 professional seasons. At the time of his retirement in 1999, he held 61 NHL records: 40 regular season records, 15 playoff records, and six All-Star records.

Born and raised in Brantford, Ontario, Gretzky honed his skills on a backyard rink and regularly played minor ice hockey at a level far above his peers. Despite his unimpressive size and strength, Gretzky's intelligence, stamina, and reading of the game were unrivaled. He was adept at dodging checks from opposing players, consistently anticipated where the puck was going to be, and executed the right move at the right time. Gretzky became known for setting up behind his opponent's net, an area that was nicknamed "Gretzky's office".

Gretzky was the top scorer in the 1978 World Junior Championships, then signed with the Indianapolis Racers of the World Hockey Association (WHA), where he briefly played before being traded to the Edmonton Oilers. After the NHL-WHA merger, he set many scoring records in ten seasons with the Oilers, and led them to four Stanley Cup championships. Traded to the Los Angeles Kings where he played eight seasons, he led them to the 1993 Stanley Cup Finals, and he is credited with popularizing hockey in California. He played briefly for the St. Louis Blues before finishing his career with the New York Rangers. He won nine Hart Trophies as the most valuable player, 10 Art Ross Trophies for most points in a season, two Conn Smythe Trophies as playoff MVP and five Lester B. Pearson Awards as the most outstanding player as judged by his peers. He led the league in goal-scoring five times and assists 16 times. He also won the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy for sportsmanship and performance five times and often spoke against fighting in hockey.

After his retirement in 1999, Gretzky was immediately inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame, making him the most recent player to have the waiting period waived. The NHL retired his jersey number 99 league-wide. Gretzky was one of six players voted to the International Ice Hockey Federation's (IIHF) Centennial All-Star Team. He was inducted into the IIHF Hall of Fame in 2000, and received the Order of Hockey in Canada in 2012. Gretzky became executive director for the Canadian national men's hockey team during the 2002 Winter Olympics, in which the team won a gold medal. In 2000, he became part-owner of the Phoenix Coyotes, and following the 2004–05 NHL lock-out, he became the team's head coach. In 2004, Gretzky was inducted into the Ontario Sports Hall of Fame. In September 2009, following the Phoenix Coyotes' bankruptcy, Gretzky resigned as head coach and relinquished his ownership share. In October 2016, he returned to the Oilers as a minority partner and vice-chairman of their parent company, Oilers Entertainment Group. He left in 2021 to become an analyst on Turner Sports' NHL coverage.

Wayne Douglas Gretzky was born on January 26, 1961, in Brantford, Ontario, the son of Phyllis Leone (Hockin) and Walter Gretzky. The couple married in 1960, and lived in an apartment in Brantford, where Walter worked for Bell Telephone Canada. The family moved into a house on Varadi Avenue in Brantford seven months after Wayne was born, chosen partly because its yard was flat enough to make an ice rink. Wayne had a sister, Kim (born 1963), and brothers Keith, Glen and Brent. The family regularly visited the farm of Wayne's grandparents, Tony and Mary, and watched Hockey Night in Canada together. By age two, Wayne was trying to score goals against Mary using a souvenir stick. The farm was where Wayne skated on ice for the first time, aged two years, 10 months.

Walter taught Wayne, Keith, Brent, Glen, and their friends hockey on a rink he made in the backyard of the family home, nicknamed the "Wally Coliseum". Drills included skating around bleach bottles and tin cans and flipping pucks over scattered hockey sticks to be able to pick up the puck again in full flight. Walter gave the advice to "skate where the puck's going, not where it's been". Wayne was a classic prodigy whose extraordinary skills made him the target of other children's jealous parents.

The team Gretzky played on at age six was otherwise composed of ten-year-olds. His first coach, Dick Martin, remarked that he handled the puck better than the ten-year-olds. According to Martin, "Wayne was so good that you could have a boy of your own who was a tremendous hockey player, and he'd get overlooked because of what the Gretzky kid was doing." The sweaters for ten-year-olds were far too large for Gretzky, who coped by tucking the sweater into his pants on the right side. Gretzky continued doing this throughout his NHL career.

By age ten, Gretzky had scored an astonishing 378 goals and 139 assists in just one season with the Brantford Nadrofsky Steelers. His play attracted media attention beyond Brantford, including a profile by John Iaboni in the Toronto Telegram in October 1971. In the 1974 Quebec International Pee-Wee Hockey Tournament, Gretzky scored 26 points playing for Brantford. By age 13, he had scored over 1,000 goals.