Renowned sportswriter Stephen Brunt reveals how “the Great One,” who was bought and sold more than once, decided that the comfortable Canadian city where hockey ruled couldn’t compete with the slushy ice of a California franchise.

Bobby Orr’s career ended prematurely, with tears. Wayne Gretzky’s tears, unlike Orr’s, announced not an ending but another beginning. Gretzky’s Edmonton Oilers had four Stanley Cup victories, but Gretzky may then have had other goals in mind.

Beginning with his dad, Walter, and continuing with Nelson Skalbania, Peter Pocklington, Bruce McNall, Jerry Buss — and with the CBC’s Peter Gzowski as chronicler for the eager masses — the enormity of Gretzky’s talent attracted all sorts of people who were after a variety of vicarious thrills.

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Gretzky, though, would sail through all of the obvious barriers. As a hockey player, he would never take even a sideways step, beginning with that season as a novice, when it seemed as though, all at once, the entire hockey world, the entire country, focused on the miracle of Brantford. The newspaper guys, the television and radio reporters who made the pilgrimage were drawn to the same homey biographical details. As a toddler, Wayne had made a game of shooting a tennis ball at his grandmother's legs as she sat in a comfy chair, happy to provide his first goalposts. He was skating by age three; by age five he was ready to play organized hockey, except that they wouldn't take kids that young. His old man had to all but drag him away from the rink. A year later, he was already playing on a travelling team with ten-year-olds, tucking the too-large jersey in on his stick side because it flapped in the breeze and got in the way. And there was Walter, the archetypal hockey dad, who had built the backyard ice sheet, who created all of those homemade skating and stickhandling drills, who had Wayne watch games on television and, without looking down, trace the movements of the puck with a piece of paper and pen. Gretzky's genius would, at least in part, be the result of a series of learned responses.

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Praise for the #1 National bestseller Searching for Bobby Orr:
“[N]ot only one of the best hockey books ever, but a book that transcends hockey.”
— Edmonton Journal

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1. The Next One
2. The Prodigy Business
3. A Golden Age of Hustlers
4. Hockey Hollywood
5. Bruce's Big Idea
6. The Last Perfect Moment (I) May 26, 1988
7. A Star in Star-Ville
8. The Art of the Deal
9. Gretzky's Tears
10. Breach of Faith
11. The Miracles of Los Angeles
12. A Long Goodbye
13. The Last Perfect Moment (II) May 9, 1993
14. Mirage

Epilogue 

Acknowledgments

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Stephen Brunt, a columnist at the Globe and Mail, is Canada’s premier sportswriter and commentator. In addition to Searching for Bobby Orr, he is also the author of Facing Ali: The Opposition Weighs In, and of The Way It Looks from Here: Contemporary Canadian Writing on Sports. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, and in Winterhouse Brook, Newfoundland.

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