Free Wayne Gretzky's Ghost by Roy Macgregor

to raise the Stanley Cup that spring. He was the first player captain Joe Sakic handed the prize off to. He then retired, having played 1,612 games and recorded 1,579 points—and another 180 in 214 playoff games. The Hall-of-Famer’s two sons, Christopher and Ryan, have both been drafted by NHL teams. He returned to Boston to live and work for the Bruins
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THE QUIET PERFECTION OF PAUL KARIYA
(
Ottawa Citizen
, April 30, 1996)
    T here is a curious off-ice game being played here at the world championships between Canadian goaltender Curtis Joseph and Canadian sharpshooter Paul Kariya. They take the overnight summaries from the NHL playoff games—who scored, when they scored, and how they scored—and the one holding the summary will ask the other to describe, without knowing, exactly how the goal was scored. The only information the other is given is who shot and who was in the net. Nothing else.
    â€œJoe Sakic.”
    â€œLow to the stick side.”
    â€œRight!”
    It is not unusual for a goaltender to know so much of players’ habits and styles, but most unusual for a player—especially a twenty-one-year-old in only his second NHL season. Most unusual. But then, Paul Kariya is a most unusual young man. To improve his eye-hand co-ordination, he taught himself to juggle. He used to spend so much time sitting quietly before a game “envisioning” exactly what would happen this night that he would actually “get all screwed up” when games did not goprecisely as imagined. He has read every word that has to do with Wayne Gretzky, and the way a player should prepare and behave. He has studied the films of Bobby Orr, who retired when Paul Kariya was two years old, to understand better the values of surprise acceleration. He will spend his summer sitting alone, quietly thinking about others playing their game—Joe Sakic, low to the stick side—and how he might take from them and give more to himself.
    â€œI’ve never seen a player so focused,” says Team Canada general manager Pierre Gauthier, who three years ago drafted the Vancouver youngster when Gauthier was still with the Mighty Ducks of Anaheim. Gauthier, like everyone else, respected Kariya’s fanatical devotion to bettering himself. Unlike many others—several of them NHL general managers—Gauthier did not think Kariya lacked the size or the strength to play in the NHL. Three general managers went before Anaheim and took, in order, Alexandre Daigle (Ottawa), Chris Pronger (Hartford, now with St. Louis) and Chris Gratton (Tampa Bay).
    Kariya has quickly emerged as the crown jewel in what was supposed to be the richest draft in years. In only his second year, he scored fifty goals for the Mighty Ducks. He has already scored four times for Canada at the world championships and is, head and shoulders, the best Canadian on the ice—even if he only comes up to some of the other players’ shoulders.
    He never played junior. He went from British Columbia to the University of Maine on a scholarship and, in his freshman year, was given the Hobey Baker Award as the best player in college hockey—but still he never imagined he would one day be an NHL star. “I never thought about the NHL,” he says. “I was perfectly prepared to be a businessman or a teacher.”
    He stayed away from the NHL for a year and played, brilliantly, for the Canadian national team—he missed the shot in 1994 that gave Olympic gold to the Swedes; he won a world championship two months later—and then signed a huge contract withthe Ducks that pays him $3 million a year. Disney, obviously, saw a future star in the making.
    On the ice, it has worked out beyond even Disney’s dreams. Paired with Finnish forward Teemu Selanne, Kariya is now half of the most exciting pair of wingers in the game. With Wayne Gretzky thirty-five and fading, the spotlight is shifting, and Paul Kariya can feel it coming. Off