Free Wayne Gretzky's Ghost by Roy Macgregor Page B

the Colorado Avalanche, Nashville Predators and St. Louis Blues. Kariya was supposed to be the key to Canada’s 1998 entry in the Nagano Olympics but had his hopes crushed by a vicious cross-check to the head when Chicago’s Gary Suter reacted to a Kariya goal. Kariya missed the Olympics and the rest of the season with post-concussion syndrome. He was concussed again when hit by New Jersey Devils defenceman Scott Stevens during the 2003 Stanley Cup finals, which the Devils won. He sat out the entire 2010–11 season with post-concussion syndrome. With 989 points in 989 games, his record remains remarkable, despite the harsh realities of head injuries
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A FLOWER FOR ALL SEASONS: GUY LAFLEUR
(
Maclean’s
, October 16, 1978)
    I retired in 1971, the same year Guy arrived, and he came to me and asked me what I thought about him taking my sweater number. “If you want it, take it,” I told him. “But don’t you think you already have enough on you? Why don’t you pick another number and make it famous yourself?”
—Jean Béliveau
    T he new smell of Quebec is known by its trademark: No. 10. The odour may be appropriately described as
flowery
as it rises this fall out of pre-shave, after-shave, cologne, deodorant and the true saviour of Christmas, soap-on-a-rope. The same number can be found pushing automobiles, skates, sticks and yogourt. No. 10 surfaces on the binders, pencil cases and exercise books the children carry to school. Even the company is called Number 10 Promotions Inc., and the president—for those without programs—is Guy Lafleur.
    The company Guy Lafleur keeps as a hockey player, however, has narrowed down year by year until today there is only himself. While the National Hockey League launches its sixty-second season this week, there are only the long-shot mutterings of the insane left. Will Lafleur’s team, the Montreal Canadiens, which has already won more than one-third of all NHL championships, somehow fail to win yet another? Will Lafleur himself—most valuable player over the past two seasons, scoring champion over the past three—outdo even his last year’s feat of sixty goals? The answer is already with us, lying in a sealed envelope in a suburban office outside Montreal. Inside is written Guy Lafleur’s annual prediction for his coming season, and the hint is that—despite a broken nose suffered at the end of the exhibition schedule—he will indeed do better.
    It is Lafleur’s enormous gift that makes him special, certainly not his walk—the steps too long—nor his face: greaser soft, it is more the look of someone who should be topping up your battery. The eyes, however, brown and shimmering, seem to ransack the immediate area about him. Not in fear—though that was once the case when undercover detectives took every step he took—but in simple anticipation. Everywhere, even in the USSR, where customs agents asked for his autograph, they know the man who, like Bambi’s skunk, is proud to be called “Flower.” Crossing Maisonneuve Boulevard, the eyes intercept a sultry woman who steps sideways just long enough to kiss Lafleur on the lips. Out of a hydro manhole two workers rise and call his name. A woman brings her son forward for a laying on of his hands. Those who don’t want just to touch would like to give. A man promises a new suit, a girl a present. An unnamed European country this summer offered a butler, a housekeeper, a villa on the water, a new luxury car and a hockey lord’s ransom, all tax-free. To collect it, he only had to change his sweater.
    The man an entire province prayed for when Jean Béliveau moved on has arrived at his full bloom. It is hardly possible tobelieve today that those same hands that ruffle children as if their imaginations were crops he himself had planted once struggled to put down his desperate feelings in poetry. It is harder still to realize these