Seventeen years ago, Walter Gretzky (aka The Great One, Sr.) was a shy, chainsmoking worrywart. Then a stroke nearly took his life.
By David Menzies

Walter Gretzky bolts into the Brantford, Ont., sports complex named after his ubiquitous son, Wayne. He bounds up the stairs so fast that his much younger traveling companion can barely keep pace. Gretzky’s face is beaming, his head is moving back and forth to an inaudible beat, and then, without warning, he starts singing at the top of his lungs.

“You ain’t nothing but a hound dog!” Gretzky bellows as he does an impromptu jig. “Cryin’ all the time!”
While Canada’s most famous hockey father continues his unique renition of the Elvis Presley classic, I chuckle nervously. But perhaps I should’ve known better. Just prior to his arrival at the Wayne Gretzky Sports Centre, I had asked an employee if Gretzky was already in the building. “Let’s put it this way,” she answered. “You will hear him before you see him.” At the time, I hadn’t the foggiest idea what she was talking about. But as Gretzky continues belting out golden oldies, I am newly enlightened.

Soon, any nervous laughter has given way to genuine laughter—not at Gretzky, but with him. In a world that can be equal parts cold, cruel and cynical, it is so refreshing to come across someone connected to professional sports who is not belligerent, but rather, stuck in a perpetual state of bliss.
Yet, it wasn’t always this way. A decade ago, Walter Gretzky was far more reserved and serious—even a tad dour at times.

“Dad (used to be) stressed to the point of no return,” recalls Wayne in his father’s best-selling autobiography, Walter Gretzky: On Family, Hockey and Healing. “He lived on buttermilk to coat his stomach. His smoking was fierce. I’ll never forget the Canada Cup championships from ’87 to ’91. It was great, because (the tournaments) were in Hamilton, so I could stay at home. But my dad was more intense about it than I was. He was so nervous, he could not even drive himself to the games. Someone else had to do it. I’d drive with him to try and get him to calm down.”

But it all changed on October 13, 1991. Gretzky had just celebrated his 53rd birthday and was five months into his retirement from Bell Canada. It was a sunny autumn day and he was whitewashing the cellar of his late mother’s farm in Paris, Ont. “I have no memory of this,” Gretzky softly whispers. “But people tell me this is what happened.” It started with a debilitating headache, followed by slurred speech, dizziness and blurred vision—telltale symptoms that he was having a stroke. Within minutes, he was having trouble walking.

Gretzky had indeed experienced a kind of stroke called a subarachnoid hemorrhage. That means there was bleeding on the surface of the brain, between the brain and the skull. Such a hemorrhage is usually caused by an aneurysm, which is a weak spot on a blood vessel. When the blood vessel breaks, it causes a hemorrhage, and that, in turn, injures brain cells. Says Gretzky: “My world stopped that day in October. Just stopped.”

It might well have stopped forever, if not for Laurie Ham, a family friend who happened to be in the farmhouse at the time. As Gretzky was writhing in pain and asking for some Aspirin, Ham instantly realized he was enduring something far more serious than a headache. She rushed Gretzky to the Willett Hospital in nearby Paris.

Experts say Ham likely saved his life that day.
A few days after his arrival at the hospital, Gretzky underwent a complex six-hour operation to repair a damaged vessel that caused the hemorrhage in his brain. During the operation, the surgeon discovered old scar tissue, indicating that Gretzky had experienced “mini-strokes” throughout his life. (Gretzky long complained of debilitating headaches, which he originally thought was either due to an accident he suffered at work or from lack of sleep.) “The doctor called me a walking time bomb,” he says.

When Gretzky finally woke up, he was inexplicably speaking in his native tongue, Ukrainian. Even more oddly, he was going on at length about feeding the chickens. “I was extremely agitated,” he recalls of that day. “I’d say something in Ukrainian and be very frustrated when the person I was speaking to didn’t understand.”
By mid-November of that year, Gretzky was transferred to Chedoke Hospital in Hamilton for the long road back to recovery. It was not easy. “I remember crying because I couldn’t even raise my legs,” he says. “When you can’t walk anymore, that’s when you realize how precious it is to be able to walk.”
The road to recovery meant radical lifestyle changes. For starters, Gretzky began golfing in order to glean the benefits of exercise (he had gained 26 pounds) and hone his coordination. A chainsmoker until the day of his stroke, Gretzky also had to give up cigarettes. (Gretzky recalls when he turned 18, his mother told him, “All men smoke, you should take it up.” It wasn’t long before Gretzky was putting away two packs a day. Today, it is known that smoking is a major factor contributing to stroke.)

Equally frustrating was that two decades of his life has virtually been erased from his memory: Gretzky can barely recall anything about the period spanning from the late ’70s to the late ’90s—sadly, a time frame that paralleled Wayne’s illustrious rise in pro hockey. “I asked Dr. [Rocco] de Villiers [his surgeon] why it is that I can remember some things but not others? He said I’d remember the important things.” The first memory to return was, ironically, an image that is also etched in the minds of millions of Canadians. “I remembered that pass Wayne made to Mario,” he says.

“That pass” was Wayne’s famous feed to Mario Lemieux during the dying minutes of the final game of the 1987 Canada Cup tournament against the Soviet Union. Team Canada had fallen behind 3-0 and 4-2, but fought back to tie the score 5-5 in the third period. With just over a minute to go and sudden-death overtime looming, Wayne—a blur of red and white—carried the puck into the Soviets’ zone and without so much as a glance over his shoulder, dropped a perfect back pass onto the blade of Lemieux. Super Mario immediately wired the puck over the Soviet goaltender’s shoulder. Canada went on to win a match that many label as the greatest hockey game ever played.

Gretzky says he also remembers some details about his parents’ funerals. And he remembers Wayne breaking Gordie Howe’s all-time points record…sort of. “I remember sitting with Gordie Howe in Edmonton at the Northlands Coliseum and I remember Gordie tapping me on the shoulder and saying, ‘Come on, Gretzky, let’s go.’ [Mr. Hockey was on hand to be part of the formal ceremonies marking the occasion.] And I remember Gordie being sincerely happy that Wayne broke his record. He was genuinely enthusiastic and happy about losing the record.”

I ask Gretzky which team Wayne scored the record-breaking point against. He shakes his head and shrugs his shoulders. “Before (the stroke) I could’ve told you the team Wayne was playing, who was in net, the exact time of the goal, everything…now I only remember Gordie tapping me on the shoulder and saying, ‘Gretzky, let’s go.’ Isn’t that funny?”

It’s more like a cruel joke. To get an idea of what someone’s recollections are like after a stroke, consider this analogy: suppose your life’s memories are the pages of a book in progress. Having a stroke is like tearing clumps of pages from that book and feeding them into a paper shredder. If you were to examine the shreds of ripped text on the floor, you might find snippets here and there, maybe a complete sentence or two. But entire paragraphs and chapters would be all but obliterated. “There are more than 20 years’ worth of memories that are gone and they will never come back, I’ve been told,” says Gretzky.

Gretzky still faces daily challenges thanks to an unreliable short-term memory. “I can go to the mall to buy a loaf of bread, and then when I get there, I can’t remember what I’m supposed to get, so I just buy a whole bunch of other things and hope that I picked up the right thing,” he says. “And sometimes I’ll be in a parking lot with all these bags and I can’t remember where I parked the car.”

Yet, if there is a silver lining to Gretzky’s brush with death—aside from his new lease on life—it is the fact that since Gretzky has gone public, the issue of stroke has never been so much in the news. Though it took some coaxing from the Heart and Stroke Foundation, Gretzky eventually agreed to write his autobiography. “I thought, ‘Why the hell would anyone want to read about me?’ ” says Gretzky. “But I’ve met a couple of people who are alive because of the book. I can’t describe the feeling.”

“The awareness of stroke since publication of the book [October 2001] has been outstanding,” adds Frank Rubini, Gretzky’s representative with the Heart and Stroke Foundation, copublisher of his book. “Without his participation, we wouldn’t have been able to generate nearly as much awareness that we have.”
Later that morning, Gretzky poses for photographs while belting out a spirited rendition of “That’s Amore” followed by a chorus of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” I remark that Gretzky seems to be in love with life itself. Rubini concurs. “He has so much energy,” says Rubini. “He is literally living every second of every day.”
“Wayne thinks the stroke has added years to my life,” adds Gretzky. “I have no memory of this, but I used to be on the phone all the time, talking to agents, being really serious about everything.” Aside from a new appreciation of life, other things are different. His personality has morphed from introvert to extrovert (not uncommon with stroke victims, says Rubini, noting it works the other way around too). “This personality change took some major readjustment for his family,” he says. Indeed, during the ascension of Wayne’s hockey career throughout the ’80s, Gretzky says most people remember him as a “chainsmoking worrywart with headaches and ulcers.”

Those days are long gone. Gretzky knows he cheated death, and while it may sound somewhat cliché, he insists that he really does have a new outlook on life. “They say I was not the same person back then as I am now, that I was never this…happy,” he says. “But you know what? I feel so sorry for people who don’t enjoy their lives. I really do. I realize that now that I’m still alive, how every second of life is really so precious.”