Glitter of gold takes on added hues
By ERIC DUHATSCHEK- Globe and Mail Update

It was early February. Wayne Gretzky was playing the AT&T Pebble Beach
National Pro-Am golf tournament alongside his friend and fellow Canadian
Mike Weir when it gradually became evident to him just how much a common one-dollar coin — aka the loonie — had become part of our Canadian folklore.

A year earlier, Gretzky was immersed in a completely different sporting
venture, acting as general manager for Canada’s men’s hockey team at the
2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City. After the Canadian men’s team, handpicked by Great One, won the gold medal for the first time in 50 years, Gretzky produced the perfect postscript for a tournament that captivated a nation and established television viewing records that may never be duplicated. There, from the left-hand pocket of a stitched Roots commemorative jacket, Gretzky removed a loonie coin and told the world how it came to be buried under the centre-ice faceoff circle by an Edmonton icemaker named Trent Evans. Evans figured the loonie would act as a good-luck charm for Canada’s men’s and women’s teams and when the results were in (gold medals for both teams), even those who scoff at superstition found the story so utterly charming that it evolved into a talisman of sorts for Canadian athletes competing on the international stage.

In October, when Canada defeated Chile in a Davis Cup try in Calgary, the
crew which put down the court at the Stampede Corral slipped a loonie under the carpet. Fans have tried burying loonies at Commonwealth Stadium (prior to the Grey Cup) and at the Vancouver Canucks’ practice ice (prior to the playoffs against Detroit) in order to keep the streak going. Even
SportSelect, the lottery company, co-opted the idea of the lucky loonie for
one of its advertising spots. So there was Gretzky, a couple of weeks ago, teeing it up in California with Weir . . . “Mike always has this huge Canadian following wherever he plays,” began Gretzky, “and that week, just about every third person I saw gave me a Canadian loonie to use as a ballmarker. So it’s become something symbolic, a Canadian trademark. I mean, it [burying the Loonie] was so minimal in terms of winning and losing the tournament, but it was a symbol of how proud we are of hockey in our country. That’s what made the loonie story so unbelievable.”

Monday represents the one-year anniversary of Canada’s stirring gold-medal victory in men’s Olympic hockey and for all the principals involved - from Gretzky, the general manager, to Kevin Lowe, his No. 1 assistant, to coach Pat Quinn and the 23 players on the Canadian roster — the victory
represented a seminal moment in their distinguished hockey lives. Canada went into the tournament facing an ungodly amount of pressure, thanks
to its 50-year absence from the Olympic winner’s circle. To come up short in
other sports was perhaps understandable, even expected, but in hockey? The sport which Canada invented and then exported to the rest of the world? Not acceptable.

The 2002 Winter Games represented the second time the National Hockey League permitted its top professionals to compete in the Olympics. Canada finished out of the medals in 1998, after losing to the Czech Republic in a
semi-final shootout and then coming up flat against Finland in the
bronze-medal game. Gretzky played for the 1998 Olympic team and soon after he retired, received an invitation from Canadian Hockey president Bob
Nicholson to oversee Canada’s 2002 men’s team. It was a daunting task, not so much because the player selections were especially difficult. Apart from a handful of alternatives at the bottom end of the roster, the choices were mostly clear-cut. But Canada needed a strong and decisive hand to lead the team, minimize the pressure, deflect the criticism and otherwise keep the players focused on the task at hand.

On that level, Gretzky did his job exceptionally well. “Years from now, what I’ll remember most about the Olympics is getting together with Gretz and the crew at Denny’s for early-morning coffees,” said Lowe, his longtime friend and confidante. “We were totally 100 per cent consumed by hockey, which we generally are anyway. But this time, we were really locked in — and it wasn’t fun, it was work. “I was really concerned about our hockey team [the Oilers] going down to Salt Lake City and I didn’t have my head in the thing. I thought, ‘I have to switch that off and tap into this.’ Then we lose the first game to Sweden and I’m thinking, ‘do I need this?’ It wasn’t a good feeling there for awhile.”

No, it wasn’t. Canada’s 5-2 loss to Sweden in the tournament opener raised
predictable concerns about the state of the game in Canada and the players’ collective ability to adapt, in a short time frame, to the larger
international-sized ice surface and the different rules involved in the
Olympic format. Canada followed up with a so-so performance in a 3-2 win
over Germany, but was better in a 3-3 tie against the Czech Republic, a game which prompted Gretzky’s famous rant against all the powers conspiring against Canada’s quest for gold. Gretzky’s outburst, so uncharacteristic for an icon known for mostly bland, whitebread observations as a player, galvanized the nation. More importantly, it took the spotlight off the players and put it squarely on Gretzky himself. As the rest of Canada debated the merits of his words — and the motivation behind them — the players calmly defeated Finland, Belarus and then the United States in the gold-medal game to cap an amazing run to the championship.

As the final seconds ticked off the clock and the San Jose Sharks’ Owen
Nolan left the bench to haul out his video camera from the dressing room,
the crowd — unprompted — began to sing O Canada in anticipation of the
victory. “That’s one of the memories that made it so special,” said Lowe, “that spontaneous singing of O Canada. To me, that was an exclamation point — game, set and match.”

henever Gretzky returns to Canada now, somebody somewhere inevitably approaches him to offer congratulations on the gold-medal victory. “To be able to walk down the streets in Canada and have people say, ‘we’re so proud of the team that won the gold medal, thank you very much,’ makes you understand how much it meant to Canadians,” said Gretzky. “I get a little embarrassed when people thank me because I didn’t play. I know I was part of it, but the reality is, the players won the gold medal — guys like Mario [Lemieux] and Steve [Yzerman] and [Joe] Sakic. They were tremendous leaders. These players, they met the pressure head on. They took that team on their shoulders. Stevie played on one leg, Mario played on one leg. “As a hockey player and as a sports fan, it was great to see these guys, who could hardly move, saying, ‘I’m going to play and we’re going to win’ and then going out there and accomplishing the job. I was really proud to say I was part of it, but the team deserves the credit.”

The Anaheim Mighty Ducks’ Paul Kariya, who scored the pivotal opening goal
against the United States, is constantly reminded of how much the Olympic
gold medal is on the minds of Canadians, even a year after the fact. “Every time we go back to Canada, it’s all anybody talks about,” said Kariya. “It’s still going on. It was great for Canadian hockey. I’ve talked to the people at Canadian Hockey. Attendance is up, more kids are playing hockey now. It just made a big impact and that’s what the game needed. It needed a boost and it was great we could provide it.”

Gretzky possesses a keen sense of hockey history, a characteristic not
necessarily shared by all elite players. Recently, he watched the videotapes
of Canada’s win over the Soviet Union in the 1972 Summit Series and when he bumped into Phil Esposito at the All-Star Game, praised him again for his
play in that history-making tournament. Asked how the Olympic medal of ‘02 compared to the Summit Series of ‘72 in the grand scheme of things, Gretzky replied: “I think ‘72 will never be knocked off its perch and it shouldn’t be. We expected to win eight straight, so when they got beat in the first game, 7-3, then when they left Canada behind in the series, that made it really interesting. These guys battled back to win. At the time, we went from winning eight straight to, ‘can we win this thing?’ So when they won, that became a piece of our Canadian history, something that no one can ever take away. “But ‘02 was special because we pride ourselves on being the best in the world and yet we hadn’t won a gold medal since 1952. So we knew going in that the pressure was enormous. It became an unwritten rule, we gotta win a gold.”

Which they did.