Interview With “Facing Wayne Gretzky” Author Brian Kennedy

By Jeff Duarte
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Updated: August 31, 2015

It is no secret that I was and still am a huge Wayne Gretzky fan. As a youth I was a boy with no team to follow as I knew I didn’t want to be a Toronto Maple Leaf fan (I live about an hour away from Toronto) so I just followed my favorite player “The Great One”Wayne Gretzky instead (though not the Edmonton Oilers who he was playing for at the time) simply because he blew my mind with his out of this world skill, clutch dominating record-breaking play, humble and friendly personality, passionate love for the sport of hockey and the fact he was born and raised in nearby Brantford, ON which was and still is only a 15 minute drive away from my house!

Gretzky and his Oilers ended up facing off against the Los Angeles Kings in the first round of the 1987 Stanley Cup playoffs and won that tough series in 5 games (and then went on to win their 3rd Cup in 4 years) but what came out of that series for me was the beginning of an obsessed fanatic love for the LA Kings. Thanks to the impressive skill and stubborn toughness of the Kings’ Luc Robitaille, Dave Taylor, Bernie Nicholls, Jimmy Carson and Steve Duchesne in that series against the mighty Gretzky and Oilers, I had finally found my team to follow and it was a perfect fit! Still Gretzky was my favorite player so when Gretzky found his way to the Los Angeles Kings in August of 1988, I was doing cartwheels of joy for weeks! My favorite player of all time is now playing for my favortie team of all time! It was fate!

Recently I came across the book titled “Facing Wayne Gretzky,” that was edited by author Brian Kennedy. Any book on the subject of the “Great One” is always going to get my attention. Now of course this doesn’t mean that I find every Gretzky book to be great (pardon the pun) but once I started reading this one, I just couldn’t put it down. What makes this book different from from any other hockey or sports book that I have ever read is that Brian decided to edit and piece together the opinions, personal experiences and strategies from some of the who’s who of professional hockey (from players, coaches, general managers, owners and even referees) that played with or against or were involved with Wayne Gretzky in any way during his whole playing career and these opinions are raw and uninterrupted. There’s no sugar-coating here.

I found it fascinating to read about what current Ottawa General Manager and former Coach Bryan Murray, Legendary Hall of Fame defenseman Denis Potvin, Hall of Fame defenseman Mark Howe (Gordie Howe‘s son), Former power forward and current executive for the Boston Bruins Hall of Famer Cam Neely, Hall of Famer Phil Housley, crafty Steve Thomas, former wild and vicious goaltender and current Philadelphia Flyers GM Ron Hextall and a lot more had to say about Gretzky when Mr. Kennedy interviewed them. Reading “Facing Wayne Gretzky” made me feel as if I was also in the same room with these guys, listening to their war stories and personal experiences with or against “The Great One.” Sometimes it felt as if I was sucked into a time machine and experiencing these moments with them!

Through these stories, we learn about Gretzky and how these players, coaches etc handled (or tried to handle) Gretzky as an opponent or a teammate from his junior years and his stint with the World Hockey Association in the 1970s to his entire NHL career with the Oilers, Kings, St. Louis Blues and New York Rangers, as well as his international career with Team Canada in the 80’s and right to Gretzky’s final year as a player in 1999. The discussions also range from their personal opinion about Wayne and what they felt made him so special or in some (very) rare cases overrated, to whether Gretzky was truly the greatest player of all time. Some even talked about the strategies they used or tried to use to stop Gretzky (and mostly failed every time) or to the strategies on how to play with Wayne if they were on the same team. Some talk about their experiences with Wayne away from the ice as well and how he is in person when away from all the limelight and cameras. They give us a first hand and on ice view of being on the same ice, team or place as Wayne Gretzky and how that must have felt like. This was brilliant.

Gretzky’s Los Angeles Kings chapters were the ones the popped for me (no surprise) as Kennedy also added the opinions and experiences of the Kingdom’s former Los Angeles Kings’ owner Bruce McNall, former teammate and legendary LA King Dave Taylor , former teammate and LA King goaltender (and now current broadcaster for Sportsnet’s Hockey Night in Canada) Kelly Hrudey , former LA King and Team Canada teammate Hall of Famer Rob Blake, Former Kings’ teammate and opponent Jay Wells, legendary LA Kings’ goaltender and former general manager of the Kings (at the time Gretzky was traded to Los Angeles) Rogie Vachon, former teammate and current LA Kings’ color commentator Jim Fox and even the legendary and long time LA King’s play by play commentator Hockey Hall of Famer Bob Miller himself, plus many, many more. This section was so entertaining and informing that I read it twice more immediately not just so I could catch everything that they were saying but because it was just so much fun. The topics here range about Gretzky’s trade to LA from Edmonton and the adjustment he had to make to play for the Kings after leaving the Stanley Cup winning Edmonton Oilers, the impact he had on the Los Angeles Kings team and organization as well as hockey in California and the playoff runs they all shared with him including the 1993 run that led to the King’s first ever Stanley Cup final. No LA Kings fan (or Gretzky/hockey fan in general) should miss these stories. This book is highly recommended.

I was lucky enough to sit down with Mr. Kennedy and discuss his book “Facing Wayne Gretzky as well as his own writing career and about his own personal opinions on “The Great One” and his time as a Los Angeles King.

First of all, thank you Brian for granting me the opportunity to interview you for CaliSportsNews.com

Thanks for doing this. I’m glad you took the time to read “Facing Wayne Gretzky.”

Let’s start at the beginning. What was it about hockey that inspired and motivated you to become a fan and then later to write about it as an author and editor?

I grew up in Montreal, and I’ve played and watched hockey my whole life. I told that story in my first hockey book, “Growing Up Hockey”, including the magical way that I ended up “in” (that is, writing about) the NHL. It’s all been an amazing ride, from a kid who idolized Ken Dryden and Guy Lafleur to an adult who got to go on the ice the night the Ducks, and later the Kings, won the Stanley Cup. I suppose that it’s also natural to write about the game since I’m an English professor. Writing is kind of my life.

Why did you decide to create the book “Facing Wayne Gretzky,” and have it be about the experiences, opinions and vast strategies that various players, coaches and referees had about Wayne Gretzky?

Actually, the idea was not mine. The publisher had the idea, and they contacted Mr. Bob Miller, known to us all as the voice of the Kings. He suggested that they call me, because he knew about my previous hockey books. They called, and we chatted. “Facing Wayne Gretzky” seemed like a clever idea. The notion was to write what I later came to call an oral history of Gretzky on the ice and some stories, actually quite a few, about him off the ice. I wanted to capture what made him great by listening to the voices of people who would know best–those closest to him as opponents, and teammates, on the ice. I am proud to say that these memories I’ve recorded will be preserved, whereas had I not done the book, they might well have been lost to history. I hope the book continues to have meaning in that way for a long time, and for future fans.

The trick, of course, was in getting the interviewees to talk and not just say the same couple of things that we all remember about Gretzky on the ice. So there’s a whole lot of research into specifics that you don’t see on the surface of the book, but it’s what enabled me to form the questions, which were specific to each person I spoke with.

I’m happy that I covered many, many of the key moments in Gretzky’s career by talking to the people who were there on those big nights. Nothing in the book is second-hand, and almost all of his big moments are there in one place or another.

In your own opinion, just how good was Wayne Gretzky on that ice? Was he the greatest player to ever play the game?

I asked a lot of people this, and the answer I kept getting was, “Well, how do you discount, Bobby Hull, or Bobby Orr, or Jean Beliveau?” The players themselves thought Gretzky was great, but they generally refused to use the word “greatest,” because, as many told me, it’s also a matter of the era. Each era has a player who redefines the game, and is thus in a pantheon of greatness with the other greats.

Having said that, I think Gretzky was by far the greatest offensive player ever. He probably had the greatest hockey mind and vision we’ll ever see. Everything he could do with the puck was magical, and the proof of that is that even people who knew exactly what he was going to try to do could not stop him from doing it. He surprised players every time he touched the puck. He could thread it places it shouldn’t go, and he would think of places to put it that nobody else would think of, including his teammates. At least two of them that I can think of said to me, “You just better have your stick on the ice, because the puck’s coming.”

What truly was the impact that Gretzky had with the Los Angele Kings and in general for hockey in California and in the southern belt of the United States?

It wasn’t just that the Kings got a good, new player. They got a magician, and so people who had only a few great players to cheer for, for years (Vachon, who should be in the Hockey Hall of Fame; Dionne, Taylor, and a few others) now had someone to marvel at, someone who literally redefined the game. In fact, I would say he was so dominating and so mystifying that anyone, no matter who, and no matter how much or little hockey knowledge that person might have had, would see him play and know that he was a supreme talent.

Gretzky brought a kind of fame and glamor with him that made the whole hockey world in LA into a celebrity scene, and people I interviewed often emphasized that. That’s true. But as a HOCKEY player, Gretzky redefined the game, and I think fans in California pretty quickly realized that the chance to watch him was once in a century, and it wasn’t about glamor. It was about hockey. You thus had a lot of people turned onto the game who hadn’t noticed it much before.

You often hear Gretzky credited for hockey coming to places where it hadn’t been before–the southwest, Florida. I still say that’s a chancy proposition. Half the clubs in these areas (Florida, Phoenix, Carolina) are on dodgy ground. Half (LA, Anaheim, Tampa Bay) are on solid footing. You can do that math on the wisdom of that. As a Canadian, I still say put teams where there’s a ready market. That just seems like good business sense to me. But then again, LA didn’t need hockey in the fall of 1967, and hockey’s alive and well here nearly 50 years later, so I guess there’s no convincing answer to this dilemma.

Let’s just say it this way: you can offer something to the fans, but they have to accept it. Luckily for SoCal (which is where I live now, I suppose you have figured out), there’s a group of diehard fans who embraced the game even back before Gretzky, and they’ve done a good job in bringing their friends into the fold. Having Gretkzy here helped, of course. The result is a very good hockey team in LA and another in Anaheim, and, in LA at least, a full building every game.

How well do you think Wayne Gretzky would do if he was playing in today’s NHL?

As a lot of guys told me, he would be great. Now, would he play that same game he did in the 80s and 90s? A lot of them think that he would not. But his mind, his vision, and his skills would adapt to today’s game to put him above everyone else. It’s a game of quickness and puck movement, and those were his great strengths. His shot, too, and this is something often not talked about with him, was amazingly accurate and deceptive. That is what it would take to fool today’s goalies. He could put the puck a sliver under the crossbar at will from anywhere on the ice. And that’s about the only open spot nowadays.

Who do you think are the top players playing today in the NHL and can they or should they be fairly compared to Gretzky?

The obvious ones would be [Sidney] Crosby, [Alexander] Ovechkin, [Anze] Kopitar, [John] Tavares, [Jonathan] Toews and others. They could all be compared to Gretzky in certain aspects of their game, but none has this singular quality which Gretzky had: the opposition has to plan their game around that one guy. When Gretzky came to town, the home team had to think about him first, and only him. And most didn’t hold out much hope of defeating him. As a couple of guys said to me, “You’d just let him get his two points and hope you could hold it to that; you weren’t going to keep him off the board.” Of course, sometimes they would, but he was as likely to get five points in a game as zero on a given night. None of the great players of today are that dominating, though that could also be the result of lineups being generally much deeper as well as more balanced than they were in the past.

How well do you think the LA Kings and the Anaheim Ducks are going to do this season?

I hope very well, because as a credentialed NHL reporter, I want to see as many games, especially in the playoffs, as I can. I think in specific terms, each team has added a key piece, the names [Kevin] Bieksa and [Milan] Lucic coming to mind as keys to renewal in each case. Of course, there’s also the Ducks’ addition of [Carl] Hagelin, which makes them dangerous. Each team has to overcome its coach’s blind spot to do well. For the Ducks, that’s Boudreau’s inability to get his team up for the biggest of their games. For the Kings, it’s Sutter’s chokedown style, which can work, but only when you’ve got a few guys who can bust out at the right moment. A couple of those, as we know, have departed this summer. It’s going to be a matter, for LA, of some newer, younger faces stepping up to make the team really dangerous.

Can you tell us about your next project?

I just finished a 400-page book on contemporary fiction of the Great War, an academic project which has taken me ten years to research and write and has consumed every moment of my time since I turned in the Gretzky manuscript about a year and a half ago. It’s called Mixing Memory and Desire: The Great War in Contemporary Commonwealth Fiction. That comes out next year. I’ve written or edited nine books in the past ten years, and I’ve woken up every morning during that time with a deadline over my head. So for now, I’m on break. Of course, if someone who reads this has a project to propose, I’m always willing to listen.

Thank you for time Brian.

No problem. I appreciate your interest in my work.

You can order Brian Kennedy’s “Facing Wayne Gretzky” and his other books, “Growing Up Hockey,” “Living the Hockey Dream,” “My Country is Hockey,” “How to Speak Hockey,” “Pond Hockey (fiction)'” and “Coming Down the Mountain : Rethinking the 1972 Summit Series” on Amazon.com or through the publisher,

Follow him on Twitter: @GrowingUpHockey

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All photograph’s of Brian Kennedy are credited to Gabriela Moya.

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