Wayne Gretzky's Ghost (46 page)

There are two players instantly noticed on the ice any time the Americans and Canadians play—and they are expected to meet again here in Nagano for the all-important championship game in the first-ever women's hockey final. Both players are remarkable for their youth, their size, their hard shots and their passion for extremely physical, passionate play.

The Canadian, of course, is Hayley Wickenheiser, the big, nineteen-year-old forward from Calgary upon whose shoulders so much of the rising pressure to win is starting to fall. The American is Angela Ruggiero. Slightly larger and slightly younger, having just turned eighteen, the big American defender is the one player who most rattles the Canadians, the one the Americans look to to change the flow, to block momentum, to make the statement that this is not just another hockey game, it will be a battle for Olympic supremacy.

Both young women know they are endlessly compared. Wickenheiser was asked this week which of the two is “tougher,” and she diplomatically sidestepped the issue. People debate their
shots—both slapshots wildly beyond the weak flips of most of the other players—and referees pay particular attention to both for very good reason.

In a game that is, so far, supposed to be non-contact, the two strongest teenage players in the world have spoken out this week in favour of playing full body contact, just like the men. “I wouldn't mind seeing it,” says Ruggiero. “I have a size advantage—why not use it?”

She already does, says Wickenheiser. “She's physical,” the Canadian star says of her American alter ego, “and she definitely takes the body.”

Ruggiero grew up in California, where her first hockey role model was, of all people, then Los Angeles Kings enforcer Marty McSorley. Unusually for women's hockey, she calls herself a “role player.” She gives better than she gets, and if someone dares try and get her, she smiles and says, “I'll get a number.”

The smile is enchanting, slightly mischievous, and says nothing about Ruggiero being perhaps the only woman hockey player who has lost a tooth to the game—mind you, she did it running into a door last summer while filming a Visa commercial on the U.S. women's team at Lake Placid. There is also a scar on her chin where she took three stitches after colliding full force with another player when she was the only girl playing in Conejo Valley, California.

She began playing the game almost by accident. Her father, Bill, then a glass worker, had grown up in Connecticut and wanted his boy, Billy, to play the game, and when he took six-year-old Billy down to the local rink to sign him up, the organizer complained that there might not be enough kids interested to make a team.

To help out, Bill Ruggiero also signed up Billy's sisters, Angela, then seven, and Pamela, then eight. Pamela soon quit, but Angela liked the game and stayed with it. She was bigger than any of the boys. She eventually became the protector for the entire team.

This is a truly remarkable athlete. She has starred in soccer, lacrosse and basketball, as well. She holds junior state records
in javelin, discus and shot put. And she has her choice of Ivy League colleges offering her any number of athletic scholarships. “Lucky for us,” says U.S. coach Ben Smith, “somebody gave her a pair of skates.”

She hated it when they made her switch over to play with women. “The first women's game I ever saw,” she says, “I played in.” But gradually her size and skills began to pay off. At fifteen she received an invitation to try out for the women's national junior team.

Her father took a dollar bill out of his wallet—“a lucky dollar”—and taped it to the inside of her helmet. It will help you win, he told her. It is still there, she hopes still working.

Only just turned eighteen, she feels a pioneer in something very, very special. “In Canada,” she says, “hockey already is their national sport. But if we could walk away with the gold here, the game would explode in the States.” Besides, she adds, “We're the only team sport in these Olympics that America can really grab onto.”

Her father now runs a small rink in Grosse Point, Michigan, just outside Detroit, and last June she went home for the first time, pulling into downtown Detroit on a train just as the parade was getting under way for the Stanley Cup champion Red Wings. She got a sense there of what winning can mean, and what it will feel like if the Americans can triumph over the powerful, and favourite, Canadians.

But she also knows that such sweet victories are meant to be shared, and that her father cannot be here for the simple reason that he cannot afford to come. Unlike their NHL counterparts, the women players have no league, or players' association, or personal wealth to take care of such matters. Which only makes Bill Ruggiero's lucky dollar bill all the more valuable—and, perhaps, all the more powerful.

Angela Ruggiero was only eighteen when she led her Team USA to an upset victory in the 1998 Winter Games. She is now
thirty-one and still a fixture on the American defence as well as a member of the Boston Blades of the Canadian Women's Hockey League. In 2003, the
Hockey News
named her the best women's hockey player in the world. She graduated cum laude from Harvard University and has written a memoir of her incredible athletic career
.

I
t is a story that, in time, may enter the sacred mythology of the game. They will tell of Hayley Wickenheiser's midnight skate as they tell the story of the neighbour dropping off a pair of old skates in the poor Floral, Saskatchewan, home where Gordie Howe was growing up.

It will become women's hockey equivalent of Pierrette Lemieux packing snow onto her living room carpet in Montreal so her child, Mario, could play indoors, of Walter Gretzky taking his son, Wayne, out onto the backyard rink in Brantford, Ontario, and teaching him to carry a puck around Javex bottles, of Réjean Lafleur going into his son's bedroom in Thurso, Quebec, and finding ten-year-old Guy sleeping is his hockey gear, fully dressed for the weekend.

Hayley Wickenheiser's story takes place in Shaunavon, Saskatchewan, on a clear, cold December night in 1985. Tom and Marilyn Wickenheiser are lying in bed when they hear a mysterious noise. It is not the baby, Jane. They know it cannot be the four-year-old, Ross, nor seven-year-old Hayley, both of whom went to bed earlier, exhausted, from a long day of playing on the neighbour's rink.

Tom Wickenheiser hears the noise again. They have just had
the kitchen redone, so perhaps it is just new wood settling. He gets up and goes downstairs: nothing. He goes to the sink for a drink and stands there, staring out at the night. A clear sky, probably twenty below and still only a little past midnight. The sound again. He leans into the window, staring, and across the yard and across the alley, he sees something moving. A small shadow moving up and down the rink in the dark. And the sound again, of course: the sound of a puck on a stick.

“I knew there would only be one person who'd be out there,” he laughs.

His seven-year-old daughter had been out for more than an hour. She had slept, awakened and slipped out with her equipment after she knew her parents were asleep. “It didn't matter about the light,” Hayley Wickenheiser remembers, “I could feel the puck.”

Perhaps no one in women's hockey feels it better these days. Only eighteen years old, Hayley Wickenheiser is referred to as “the franchise” by officials in Canadian hockey. She is the inspiration for tomorrow's players; she is the hope for today.

When this country emerged triumphant in the Women's Hockey World Championship in Kitchener, Ontario, on Sunday much of it depended on the way the puck felt on the stick of Hayley Wickenheiser. “I'm very excited,” she says.

And with good reason, for consider for a moment how Hayley's comet has shone: most valuable player in the gold medal game, 1991 Canada Winter Games, named to the national team while still a fifteen-year-old bantam, gold medal winner in the 1994 world championships in Lake Placid, New York, and earlier this month chosen player of the game as she led the Edmonton Chimos to the national championship.

In theory, she could be nineteen years old next year with two world championships and an Olympic gold medal to her credit and still with her best playing days ahead of her. The first-year general sciences student at the University of Alberta is one of the
larger players (five foot eight, 163 pounds) in the game, but also one of the most skilled. A fine puck carrier with an excellent shot and extraordinary strength, she models herself on her childhood hero, NHL star Mark Messier, though she has often been referred to as “the Wayne Gretzky of women's hockey.”

Messier, and to a lesser extent, Gretzky became her role models when she was that seven-year-old in Shaunavon, and it never occurred to her there was anything to prevent her from one day joining their team, the Edmonton Oilers, and playing alongside her male hockey heroes.

“I hadn't even heard of women's hockey until I was about thirteen,” she says. “My aspirations were to make the NHL, just like any other kid. I was given that freedom to dream.”

Since she was barely able to walk, she had pestered her father, a science teacher, to let her play the game he played for fun and the neighbourhood kids seemed to play obsessively. She was only four years old when, at the end of one of his recreational games, Tom Wickenheiser brought her out onto the ice and, for the first time, let her try skating with a stick and a puck. “I was pretty bad,” she says. But she also knew that she had found her calling.

Shaunavon may have been a small town, but it was enlightened. Ken Billington and Jerry Mitchell were minor hockey coaches more than willing to welcome and encourage the youngster. Tom Wickenheiser also coached her, and her mother, Marilyn, became the team's chief fundraiser. The other kids on the team, all boys, were glad to have her. “I don't think they treated me any different,” she says. But, in fact, they did. She was, after all, the best player, the leader. “Really,” she says. “I had to be, being a girl. It was easier that way.”

“They were very good about her being a girl,” says Tom Wickenheiser. “Actually, the parents gave us a harder time than the kids did.” The Wickenheisers are uncomfortable talking about it, but there were often scenes when the Shaunavon team travelled to other small towns. Parents would scream and swear from the
stands; once three boys on an opposing team chased a frightened Hayley through the rink lobby. “Sometimes parents have a difficult time if a girl scores four or five goals and beats their team,” says Tom Wickenheiser.

It is a parent's tale Walter Gretzky would identify with. His own superstar child, Wayne, used to have to switch jackets with teammates before making the run from the visitors' dressing room to the parking lot. “No one writes about how bitter parents are,” Walter Gretzky once said. “I have been on both sides of the fence and the saddest part is they don't realize they have the best gift of all, a normal healthy boy. They are so busy resenting others who they think are better. They cannot accept that some boys are twice, three or four times as good as their son.”

Or worse, that a girl could be twice, three or four times as good. “She's very quick,” says Marilyn Wickenheiser of her daughter. “Her strong ability is to read the play so well, that's helped her avoid any bad hits.”

A few years ago the family moved to Calgary so Marilyn could return to teaching and Hayley could find more competitive teams. She has played both women's and young men's hockey, though the games are dramatically different. Women's hockey, she believes, is far more “European” in its approach, with much more passing and far more emphasis on team play. Men's hockey, with its hitting, is far more physical, far more concerned with scoring goals. Two years ago she was a late cut from a superior midget male AAA team, but she still likes to play the male game because of its high competitiveness.

“It's a different game,” she says of women's hockey. “People are surprised at how fast it is. They can't believe how much passing we do. There's more to women's hockey than scoring.

“There's respect out there.”

Hayley Wickenheiser is now thirty-two. She is captain of the Canadian women's team that won the Olympic gold in Salt
Lake City (2002), Turin (2006) and Vancouver (2010). Twice she was named the tournament MVP. An accomplished softball player, she represented Canada in the 2000 Summer Olympics. She has played professional hockey against men in both Finland and Sweden. In search of competitive hockey, she returned to university in 2010 and played the 2010–11 season with the University of Calgary Dinos and was named Canada West Player of the Year
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THE WORLD'S GAME