Rangers' Wayne Gretzky remains among NHL's elite players

“Boy, I got vision, and the rest of the world wears bifocals.” – Butch Cassidy

By MIKE VACCARO Stew Writer

RYE, N.Y. — The kid defenseman doesn't have a prayer. And knows it. Eric Cairns is his name, he's 22 years old, and he has played a total of 40 games in the National Hockey League for the New York Rangers This was supposed to be a simple drill. He and a forward. One on one, across the length of the rink at the Rye Ice Casino in upstate New York.

But it is more than that now.

Because Wayne Gretzky is the forward sprinting toward Cairns.

And the puck is on Gretzky's stick.

Not to worry, kid. Somebody just slipped a trumpet into Louis Armstrong's fingertips Andy Warhol's spying a stack of soup cans. Miles Davis is turning his back on a small audience, inventing an impossible riff out of the smoky air. Artists, all of them. Magicians Visionaries.

And here is Wayne Gretzky, alone on the ice, a puck on his stick and one man to beat. In a violent, heavy-metal game, Gretzky is a Gershwin tune, gliding along the ice, seeing and doing things that have never been seen and done before.

“You watch him sometimes just here, every day in practice, and you sometimes have to shake yourself,” Cairns says after practice, shaking his head. “That's Wayne Gretzky, man. The best ever. And you have to keep him away from the net. Yeah, right.”

There are no crowds here, nobody to impress Just Gretzky and Cairns Gretzky spinning left, then right, then left, then right. Juking. Dancing. Making it up as he goes along, for nobody's benefit but his own.

And he's smiling as he loses Cairns for good, just inside the blue line.

“For me,” Gretzky says “there is nothing in the world more enjoyable than that. Playing hockey for a living is the only thing I've ever wanted to do. It's fun. A lot of fun. Still.”

And not just for him.

“Imagine getting to see that every day,” Rangers winger Adam Graves says “Imagine getting to sec the best hockey player who ever lived, up close, day after day, dressing in the same locker room with him. Seeing the stuff he does in practice. Just because he can. Just because he's Wayne Gretzky.”

Graves stops laughs closes his eyes Thinking about Gretzky.

Thinking what the rest of the hockey world has thought since Gretzky crashed through the gates at age 18 in 1979:

He's got vision.

The rest of us wear bifocals.

For the records

Gretzky holds the NHL record for holding records, 61 of them at last count. Which is a good place to start.

“He's so good, even now. that there are times I catch myself getting lost looking at him, watching him play in a game or in practice,” Rangers coach Colin Campbell said earlier this year. “I have to remind myself, hey, you have to coach this guy. But if you respect this game and all he has done for it, you can't help yourself. You want to see him do this before he's gone and he takes his kind of hockey with him.”

How good? Start with his nickname. He has been The Great One for as long as anybody can recall, which means at least as far back as the 1979-80 season. That was his first full year with the Edmonton Oilers, when he won the first of eight straight Hart Trophies, recognizing the NHL's most valuable player.

Eight full seasons, eight MVPs. And he had barely turned 26.

“There was always something about Wayne, even when he was very young,” said Rangers captain Mark Messier, who goes all the way back to that first year in Edmonton with Gretzky. Messier won four Stanley Cups with him in the 1980s and chases another one now, all these years later, in New York.

“When you see somebody with so much talent, so much ability, it makes you want to play that much better, Messier said. “I know it made me better.”

More testimony? There are the numbers: Gretzky has scored more goals than anyone in NHL history, 862. He has more assists, 1,843. His 2,705 career points are 855 more than the man in second place, Gordie Howe, whom Gretzky grew up worshipping in Brantford, Ontario.

How good is that? If Ken Griffey wants to bury Hank Aaron's record of 755 career home runs as deeply as Gretzky has interred Howe's old scoring mark, Junior would have to swat 993 of them before he's through. That's how good.

And he's still at it. Still has one more year to go on a Rangers contract that will pay him $6 million next year. Perhaps you can argue that money keeps Gretzky on the ice at age 36, but that would prove you haven't been paying attention to the NHL playoffs the last five weeks.

And that's a pity.

This is what you've missed from Gretzky: 10 goals and 18 points in his first 14 playoff games. A stunningly refreshed arsenal of moves that has energized an aging, banged-up team, powering it into the conference finals And a super-star in the autumn of his career playing as if he just woke up on New Year's Day.

“Does this surprise me?” Gretzky asked. “No. I thought I could have this kind of an impact on the playoffs Everybody plays more desperately at this time of the year, and I guess having some experience helps. But I felt good going into the playoffs. There's no reason in my mind why I shouldn't be able to sustain this kind of pace.”

Silencing the whispers

Still, there were whispers. There were worries In the regular season, he went 21 games and nearly two months without scoring a goal. It is never easy to sec Willie Mays falling down in the outfield or Joe Namath skittering around the pocket on ruined knees. It is never easy to see the great ones grow old.
Especially The Great One.

“What people never bothered to see,” Messier said, “is that Wayne kept playing well even though he wasn't scoring himself. He got his assists (23 of them during the goal drought) and kept helping us win hockey games.”

He kept producing better than most players on the planet, finishing tied for fourth in the points race with 97,25 behind Mario Lemieux.

But it took a night like April 23 to make the doubts disappear at last, maybe forever. The Rangers led the Florida Panthers 2-1 m their best-of-seven, opening-round series. Entering the second period of game four, Florida led 1-0. Exiting it, they trailed 3-1.

All because of The Great One. The Hurry lasted only 6 minutes, 27 seconds. But those who saw it will never forget. Three times Gretzky fired at Florida goalie John Vanbiesbrouck. Three times he found the back of the net, the last after spinning around in his own Private waltz for several seconds before flushing the puck and prompting a shower of hats to tumble from every comer of Madison Square Garden.

“I felt like it was time I earned my living a little bit,” Gretzky joked that night.

But he was greatly relieved. He said so and looked the part. It had been, amazingly, 1,425 days since his last hat trick. He liked the way that felt so much, he decided to wait only 25 days to get his next one, last Sunday against Philadelphia, igniting a 5-4 Rangers win in game two of the conference finals.
He looked like Willie Mays, all right, but it was the young Willie, chasing down Vic Wertz's deep fly ball in the Polo Grounds.

“I never thought of myself as playing poorly, Gretzky says “But when the pucks are going in the net, you sure look a lot better.”

Quest for another Cup

Gretzky has won four Stanley Cups all with Edmonton, all between 1984 and 1988, when he was dealt to the Los Angeles Kings in a move that saved hockey in Southern California and nearly caused a coup in Edmonton.

There is little else Gretzky has left to shoot for, except another title. Another ring. One for the thumb.
His old teammate, Messier, has that, and one more. People forget that the Oilers won a Cup the year after Gretzky was traded. That was Messier's crowning achievement until he led the Rangers to the 1994 Cup, a championship that ended a 54-year dry spell.

“I've gotten a lot of rewards out of my career,” Gretzky said last July on the day the Rangers signed him as a free agent. “But it's been a long time since 1 felt what it's like to win one. I envy Mark for that. And I want it badly.”

He came close in 1993, dragging the Kings to the cup finals alloy himself before the Montreal Canadiens intervened. This may be his last, best shot. He knows it.

Win or lose, it will make little difference on his body of work. He will be The Great One for eternity.

As a kid. Gretzky would skate on the frozen Nith River, which passed through his grandfather's farm, pretending he was Howe, seeing the future develop in his imagination. Somewhere, a child does the same thing now, a No. 99 on his back'. Maybe that child will grow up to be the best hockey player who ever lived. Until he does, the title belongs to Gretzky.

“No question,” Messier said, “that's what Wayne is.”

“Not even close,” said Barry Melrose, the ESPN analyst and Gretzky's former coach with LA. “Not even close.”

“He sees things..said Cairns, the kid defenseman, not bothering to finish his thought. “You wonder how he sees them sometimes.”

It's simple, really. He's got vision.

You know the rest by now.